These are challenging times for the Great Lakes as climate change threatens their ecosystems. One local organization has been using art and “celebration” to increase public awareness and engagement.
This Sunday will mark Milwaukee Water Commons’ 10th annual We Are Water celebration, this year at the newly restored McKinley Beach.
Melanie Ariens is busy drilling small holes in many, many plastic bottle caps. “I can’t even count. This is my box. (She shakes it.) My mom and dad and neighbors all collected bottle caps, they cleaned them off,” Ariens says.
The bottle caps will be part of homemade instruments for the We Are Water event. “They’ll have made their little instruments — making pizza box drums and these little recycled bottle cap rattles,” she says.
Ariens came on as Milwaukee Water Commons creative arts manager last year, but she’s lent her talents to We Are Water since its inception.
“I always wanted to get a whole bunch of votive candles and make the shape of the Great Lakes right at the shoreline and so we went with it for our first We Are Water event and here we are 10 years later,” Ariens says.
This year, We Are Water is again creating a Great Lakes art piece on the beach — with a lot more candles.
New this year is a life-size Lake Sturgeon — its core is cardboard — in celebration of the restoration of the ancient and long-threatened fish in Milwaukee’s waters.
“We’re making a model of the state-record sturgeon. So, you can hold it and take your picture with like what would it look like if I was holding the state-record sturgeon. ,” Ariens says.
Brenda Coley says art has always been central to Milwaukee Water Commons outreach.
Coley is co-executive director. “We know that in order to engage people around these issues, we have to engage them in several different ways. And art is a huge way to get people thinking about nature and about water in a different way,” Coley says.
She knows from her own experience.
Before being recruited, Coley had long focused on equity and health disparities. “ I didn’t know them, they knew me from my other work. So, I had no idea what water was about,” she says.
But Coley found it doesn’t take much to figure out its importance. “You know really the first time you put somebody in front of water, they get it — that this is something that we need to steward. It didn't take me long. After two or three months I was fully in,” she says.
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Coley says people of color bring something important to the environmental movement. “You can’t be talking about the fish having clean water and people don’t have clean drinking water. And that’s the kind of things we were advocating inside the movement and outside the movement. And that’s what our presence did — clean drinking water is an environmental issue and an environmental justice issue,” Coley says.
Co-executive director Kirsten Shead says Milwaukee Water Commons is part of a movement. “We have partners in the city that are doing great work around recreation and education and getting people back to the waters. So, it’s not just us and I think this movement in Milwaukee is strong and growing,” Shead says.
But Brenda Coley quickly interjects, “I would say we are the catalyst." She says Milwaukee Water Commons was formed around community input. “And I think that’s where our power lies is in our community engagement, and I think our partners and institutions see that,” Coley adds.
More than a dozen partners will be pitching in at Sunday’s celebration, which in addition to music and art, will feature local dance companies Ko-Thi and Panadanza. They will be performing and leading attendees in dance.
Kirsten Shead says the goal is to focus on the “We” in We Are Water. “So that people just have lots of space to come and play on the beach with us, to be part of the art project and to be part of making this, the festival environment that this is really going to be,” she says.
If you’re intrigued, We Are Water begins at 5 p.m. Sunday at McKinley Beach.
