Summer in Milwaukee means that you don’t have to look too far to find local art. Printmakers, painters and crafts people of all kinds are showing their work at festivals, pop-ups and in the city’s many different galleries and museums.
But there’s another story when it comes to Milwaukee’s art scene that we've seen recently, and that’s the issue of censorship. Are Milwaukee artists being censored? And if so, why?
“We decided that you need to censor your own work”
On a Friday night last August, Mitchell Street Arts, also called MiSA, opened their doors at 710 W Historic Mitchell St. with a proper grand opening. There were DJs spinning music, food and drink, and a collection of emerging and established artists that were chosen as the inaugural batch of artists in residence for the space.
That night, the artists greeted the public and welcomed them into their maker spaces talking about their craft and some of their works. But one of the artists wasn’t there. That’s because, as he says, he was asked to censor his work the day before.
“The grand opening is largely an event to court future investors and we don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable with anything they see here," artist Bill Walker says he was told by Founder and MiSA Director, Rew Gordon.
A lot of Walker’s work is about queerness and transness, and how queer and trans people are often seen as dangerous or exotic, which he says he's experienced as a transgender person himself. But he says he understood the assignment and thought everything he was sharing was appropriate.
“I [was] looking at my pieces like are there words that are sensitive or are there images,” Walker recalls asking. “A lot of my work is about subjection instead of explicitly showing anything, whether that’s a message or a body and that’s just how my work has always been. Ambiguity to let people see themselves in the work.”
Walker says that night he called friends to process and then tried to center himself. Then he wrote an email. In it, he tells MiSA that this show, and the ability to take part in this residency isn’t for him. Not if it comes at the cost of self-censorship.
“My parting email was thank you, but no thank you, I understand what your goal is, and your goal is to serve your investors,” Walker says. “That does not align with my ethics and how I like to practice my work. As someone who’s community minded, funders and investors are not my community.”
MiSA, in an email to Walker, said that they weren’t sure about what works Walker was planning to include in the opening and that they were concerned with some of his more explicit pieces. They said they understood Walker’s position and invited them to have a conversation after the grand opening. Walker says he declined.
He also didn’t publicly share his story until almost a year later when he says more artists were also censored in MiSA. Part of the reason for him not sharing is that he says he was gaslit about the situation into a sort of silence. He says he was told the center could lose a lot of funding if they did show his work. And that loss, would mean the community losing the space altogether.
“I mean literally the people who live on Mitchell street,” Walker says. “The people who grew up there, the people in that neighborhood who were seeming so joyous and so excited to have an arts space for them. It was a very clear message to me that my actions would hurt many people.”
Mitchell Street Arts didn’t respond to WUWM’s questions.
A number of local artists pointed to an underlying problem that connects Walker’s story to arts funding. Wisconsin is dead last in public arts funding, which means for decades, it’s relied on philanthropic donors to step up. Which they say looking at Walker’s story can be messy if you don’t know who those funders are, if they agree or not with your work, and how much power they might have in deciding what art gets displayed.
“Basically suggesting that my autonomy isn’t mine”
Even if you’re an established artist in the area, you’re more than likely stringing work together, or working a part time job or two, just to pay your bills. LaNia Sproles is an artist who’s won some of the biggest grants and fellowships in the state and says they still hustle to make ends meet.
“There’s also no such thing as making it,” Sproles says. “It’s not enough and it’s never gonna last. I also think there’s not enough diverse options for opportunities and grants in Milwaukee.”
Around the same time MiSA opened its doors, Sproles was working on a solo show in collaboration with the Museum of Wisconsin Art, or MOWA, and the St. Kate hotel in downtown Milwaukee.
The show was meant to display new works from Sproles, mostly their well-known portrait styled pieces. And for the first six months into production, things were going slow but smooth. Then things diverged when Sproles asked about including work with nudity. St. Kate has a no-nudity clause in their public gallery, and MOWA doesn’t display “sexualized nudity,” but will generally show more traditional, western art nudity, such as images from behind, or without genitalia.
But Sproles says that a friend had just displayed work in the St. Kate gallery that included nudity. They also say that they talked with a member of MOWA’s staff who assured them that the no-nudity clause was pretty relaxed and hardly enforced. Then, Sproles says St Kate went through their Instagram and shortly after gets an email stating that they had “questions about my work.”
To Sproles this showed that St Kate was unfamiliar with their work even six months into creating an entire exhibition that would live in their gallery. It also signaled a lack of communication between the two organizations, and that's where Sproles says the censorship comes in.
After a few calls and emails between Sproles and MOWA, and all this time putting a body of work together, Sproles had a decision to make: from the perspective, self-censor in ways they say other artists didn’t have to, or cancel their own show. And they decide to cancel.
Sproles says the MOWA offered to show the work next year but nothing is planned as of yet. They say after this situation they’re really upset at how things went down and felt censored.
“Specifically, I’m thinking about when I got that email and having various conversations about, maybe we can have one nude portrait, or like maybe if you made your pieces this way,” Sproles says. “So basically suggesting that my autonomy isn’t mine.”
MOWA declined to go on record for this story and St. Kate never responded to WUWM.
Sproles posted about their experience on social media after they said another artist friend was allowed to display highly political art in the same space they were just censored from, in their words.
Speaking out on social media sites, like Instagram, are one of the few ways artists have power in these situations, says Amal Azzam, Fanana Banana co-Founder.
“To experience [censorship] full on was very intense, physically, mentally, emotionally”
Azzam and Nayfa Naji started Fanana Banana in 2019 as a safe space for Muslim and MENA artists. And like Bill Walker, they were also chosen for the artist residency with Mitchell Street Arts. Last month, in early June, they shared their own social media post about their show at MiSA being canceled over censorship.
Unlike Walker, Azzam and Naji shared work at MiSA’s grand opening. And it seemed like things were working well between the organization and the artists. That was until late May 2024, a few weeks before their exhibition, In the shadows of Palestine, was set to open.
Azzam and Naji document the timeline of events on their Instagram about what exactly happened and when. They say they were called to a meeting between MiSA founder, Rew Gordon and the center’s co-Director, Mikey Murry. At this meeting they were told that if their show opens in June as planned, there’s the potential of a big loss of funding from a donor. The following week, they’re called into another meeting where they’re told a second donor has threatened to pull funding if the show isn’t canceled. And a day after that, they find out that that second donor has denied making those claims.
Azzam says that while these meetings are taking place, they’re feeling confused, angry and hurt because they’ve developed a relationship with MiSA staff. She also says that it was at times, ridiculous. Including the meetings that took place in MiSA's meeting room, which she says had “Free Palestine” written on the walls.
Finally, on May 31, 2024 MiSA made a post on Instagram announcing that they were canceling Fanana Banana’s show. The post has since been edited.
Naji says at their final meeting they told MiSA they were planning on sharing their experience over a press release they would release on Instagram, which they did a week after the cancellation. She says that’s when MiSA’s tone changed.
“They were like we can do other programming, we can project your art work all over the building and all over the city — we can give you guys funding,” Naji says. “All of these extravagant things all of a sudden, but it’s like you can’t buy us out in that sense. We are proud to be Palestinians and proud of our work and there’s no way you’re going to diminish that light from us.”
“For the first time in our lives we were really dealing with full censorship full front in our faces,” Azzam says. “As Palestinians, we notice the little nuances of censorship, like being shadow banned on Instagram … but to experience it full on was very intense, physically, mentally, emotionally.”
Azzam says this situation has left her with a lot of questions: What can or can't she say? Will she be censored again? Is Milwaukee a place where she can be supported as an artist?
A number of the city’s more established artist end up leaving the city asking those same questions, including LaNia Sproles, who moved to Chicago last year.
“I also just wanted more opportunities,” Sproles says. “I love the people, I love the city, but everything in the art world feels so insular … I think when it’s already a small, eclectic, niche group of people and then you put it in a smaller city, it gets smaller."
While smaller can mean less funding, less opportunities, fear of retaliation if you do speak out, it can also mean more intimate, tighter bonds. Easier access to other artist’s stories. And from what these artists have said, Milwaukee’s artist community really showed up for them during these times.
“I think more about the people that have shown up for me, [than] about the situation,” says Sproles. “It’s been a really hard year for me so it’s really nice to hear that people are still here for me and still rooting for me. It doesn’t have to be everybody, but that’s a lot of people.”
“I think talking about the hardships can take the focus away from all of the artists that are doing amazing things,” Bill Walker says. “And that it’s sheer willpower and belief in the arts and in themselves that the most incredible things are being made here. And I hope that people really realize that and hear that with more support it can exponentially grow to really shine in every part of Milwaukee.”
Local artists that spoke out about this situation wanted to make sure that the point of private funding isn’t lost in these conversations. They say in terms of censorship it often feels like a mystery who’s actually making these decisions. What are the conversations happening in those “emergency” meetings that artists aren’t invited to as their work is being talked about? What does power and autonomy look like for creatives?
They say a big part of why it’s so important to have these conversations in public isn’t just for equality, but to understand the process.
