Queering the Cream City is a public art exhibition in Milwaukee, Wisconsin organized by Vaughan Larsen as an extension of That Way, an Instagram account and printed zine, featuring weekly takeovers of LGBTQ+ artists. This outdoor exhibition replaces ads on billboards with art, adding contemporary LGBTQ+ art to the streets of Milwaukee.

This is Wisconsin’s first ever billboard art exhibition featuring work exclusively made by LGBTQ+ artists! Queering the Cream City is presented as an exhibit mounted simultaneously on the urban streets of Milwaukee and, in cooperation with the contemporary art gallery The Alice Wilds, from July 23rd through August 23rd, 2021.

The Queering the Cream City selected artists for billboards are Noah Tesmer, Lois Bielefeld, Alejandro Jūnyáo Zhāng, Jova Lynne, Matt Gold, AJ Morley, Skyler Pham, Lidia Sharapova, Isla P Gordon, Anje Thomas, Ashley Kaye and Va-Bene Elikem K. Fiatsi, and Salgu Wissmath.

The selected artists for The Alice Wilds gallery are Marval A Rex, Jamie Ho, Ben Herbert, Angela Piehl, Bo Hubbard, Daniel Roa, Kostis Fokas, Dustin Steuck, Cai Quirk, Libby Oliver, Liz Albert and Shane VanOosterhout, Cloudy Moroni, Roy Larmour, and Anwar Mahdi.

Curated by Vaughan Larsen, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris, and Laurence Philomene.

During the week of July 19, SaveArtSpace launched public art installations for each selected billboard artist on billboard ad spaces throughout Milwaukee. An exhibition with selected artists for the gallery portion will mount at The Alice Wilds, 900 S 5th St #102, Milwaukee, WI 53204 from July 23 - August 23, 2021, with an opening reception on Friday July 23, time TBA.

Curators

Vaughan Larsen is a Milwaukee-based artist whose work is used as a vehicle to explore their queer identity through photographic self-portraiture. Larsen grew up in small-town Wisconsin and received their BFA with an emphasis in Photography from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in May 2019. Later that same year, they earned first place in the 2019 Getty Images Creative Bursary Award, first prize in the Unique competition of the Amsterdam Pride Photo Award, and was named a 2019 Emerging Fellow by the Milwaukee Foundation Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. Exhibited throughout Milwaukee, their work has also been shown in Brooklyn, New Orleans, and with The Reclaim Kollektiv in Cologne, Germany. Larsen’s work has been written about in publications such as Urban Milwaukee, Photo Emphasis, and Humble Arts Foundation. They are the founder and curator of That Way, an online platform started in 2018, highlighting the work of LGBTQ+ artists from around the globe.

Connect on Instagram: @the.vaughan.show

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris fka Tameka Jenean Norris is a painter, sculptor, and performance artist creating work about racial identity and the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of blackness through cultural appropriation in modern society. They were born in Guam and received their undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Dedeaux-Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; Prospect.3 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Walker Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Performa 13; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam,Netherlands; Sundance Film Festival, New York, NY; Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA among many others. Dedeaux-Norris has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fountainhead Residency, Grant Wood Colony Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. They are the 2017 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a 2018 National Endowment for the arts fellowship, a 2019-2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee and is currently tenure track Assistant Professor at University of Iowa.

Connect on Instagram: @tj_dedeaux_norris

Laurence Philomene is a non-binary artist from Montreal, Canada.They create colourful photographs that centre queer and trans experiences, often through long-form and autobiographical projects. Philomene is an honouree of The 30 (“PDN 30” - 2020), recipient of the Getty Images Creatives In Quarantine Bursary (2020), the Lucie Foundation emerging artist scholarship (2019), and the 2020 Women Photograph mentorship program. Since signing with production powerhouse Adolescent in 2016, Philomene has created commissioned work in their signature style for Netflix, BEATS, Converse, VSCO, AirBnb, and more.They were named as part of Adweek’s creative 100 list in 2018, presented their work at the 2019 Cannes Lyons festival, and served as a judge for the 2019 Getty Images Creative Bursary.

Connect on Instagram: @laurencephilomene

Selected Artists

Location: 535 S 92nd St, Milwaukee, WI

Noah Tesmer is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the intersections that humans have with the natural world. The work experiments how the human body, as a natural form, can be seen as landscape and, inversely, how a landscape can read as a body, blurring the lines between what can be considered landscape and portraiture. 

These depictions allude to fragments of memories, real or imagined, that find themselves entangled in the personification of organic matter. This signifies how humans have taken over natural environments to the extent that humanity is more so the environment than the environment itself: a metaphor of human behavior, ignorance and ideals, that shape the mind into its own realities.

Connect with Noah on Instagram at @tezmernoni.

Location: 5338 N Hopkins St, Milwaukee, WI

Lois Bielefeld is a queer series-based artist working in photography, audio, video, and installation. Her work continually asks the question of what links routine and ritual to the formation of identity and personhood and the development of meaning-making.

Currently settled in Milwaukee, Lois has lived on both coasts. After her daughter went off to college, Bielefeld decided to pursue her graduate degree and just completed her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Besides photography, she feels passionate about traveling, hiking, eating, swimming and bicycling adventures with her wife.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, The Warehouse Museum and The Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin. Bielefeld has shown at The International Center of Photography in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Charles Allis Art Museum, and Portrait Society Gallery.

its own pristine devices (2019-current)

The United States interstate system is comprised of 46,876 miles of highways, enough to circle Earth almost twice. Within this massive and complex system of roadways, there are exits and entrances giving passage to people, goods, and services while carving many different shapes (clover-leaf, round-about T, parclo, ¾ volley, partial- Y, half-trumpet, diamond, dumbbell, dog-bone, etc.) into the landscape. As I navigate these curvy structures and my beat-up Hyundai’s headlights illuminate the curious spaces, I began to wonder about these freeway “islands.” Appearing as an afterthought or by-product, freeway islands are intentionally designed spaces with a function: they serve as detention ponds for both precipitation and road/vehicle- created pollution. Unintentionally, some of these spaces have become complex mini-habitats, completely surrounded by off-ramps, freeway, roads, and rushing cars. In photographing these locations, I am consciously aestheticizing these forgotten or un-appreciated spaces. Through the act of looking I am asserting value and acknowledgement.

In, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” William Cronon argues for the need to redefine our strong notion of wilderness:

“The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.” (Cronon 69)

Our romanticized notions of the pristine wilderness or virgin land as untouched and uninhabited are incongruent with its fraught history of colonization, the frontier, and the relocation and genocide of indigenous peoples. Cronon breaks down this constructed myth of wilderness and challenges people not only to see the preserved and curated spaces for what they are but to also find wildness in our backyards, abandoned lots, and local parks, to which I would extend to freeway “islands.”

Connect with Lois on Instagram at @loisbielefeld.

Location: 7504 W Appleton Ave, Milwaukee, WI

Alejandro Jūnyáo Zhāng is a Chinese interdisciplinary artist who builds relationships between performance, 3D animation, experimental video, and electronic music. He is highly influenced by Shanghai’s underground electronic music culture and clubs and the queer communities that participate in these spaces, and the localization and decolonization of the westernized definition of queer in Chinese club scenes. With an MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design and double degrees of BBS and BMS from Shanghai Ocean University, Zhāng’s works have exhibited internationally, including in Chicago, Minneapolis, St.Paul, New York, Lima, México, North England, Shanghai, and Yulin.

Connect with Alejandro on Instagram at @alejandro_zhang.

Location: 3669 W Mill Rd, Milwaukee, WI

Jova Lynne is a transdisciplinary artist based out of Detroit, MI. Lynne is interested in the parallels between fictional, historical and personal archives in identity development. Lynne seeks to subvert anthropological practice in utilizing lens, sculpture and performative practices. She is interested in the cognitive dissonance one experiences when navigating material, text and media-based archive specifically as it relates to Black culture.

Connect with Jova on Instagram at @jova_lynne.

Location: 564 W Oklahoma Ave, Milwaukee, WI

Matt Gold is based in Brooklyn, NY, where he divides his time between music and photography. As evidence of the democratizing nature of his approach to photography, Gold has no formal training in the visual arts. His first image, a picture of his cat on a Sony Ericsson Z310A flip phone, was taken in 2008, and he has continued to explore the aesthetic possibilities of that instrument. Gold’s work has been featured in numerous publications and journals.

Connect with Matt on Instagram at @mattgoldphoto.

Location: 1633 E Oklahoma Ave, Milwaukee, WI

AJ Morley is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL. AJ Believes all art is about love. A Collective Sweat is a piece that was first thought up in the midst of a sweaty dance floor in a gay bar, covered in sweat and surrounded by love.

Connect with AJ on Instagram at @au_jus_.

Location: 1701 W State St, Milwaukee, WI

Skyler Pham is a queer sculptor and digital artist based in South Louisiana. Their work examines the body in relation to issues of gender dysphoria and queer sexuality. In their recent work, Pham explores these ideas through the distortion of the human form, creating fluid “inhumanoid” figures that lean far into the uncanny valley. It is through this dualism of the familiar and unfamiliar that Pham relates to their own experience of dysphoria.

Connect with Skylar on Instagram at @human_imitation.

Location: 1860 S Kinnickinnic Ave, Milwaukee, WI

Lidia Sharapova is Milwaukee based Russian-American photographer, born in Siberia in 1982. She uses documentary photography to explore issues of social identity, gender, minorities, and small communities. Lidia believes in the power of photography to change and empower people.

I grew up in Russia where being GBTQ is illegal. This community is denied basic human rights, and it is dangerous for them to be openly who they are, let alone to be photographed. And while there has been social progress made in the USA, there is still much room for improvement. And the stories of those I have photographed bear witness to this fact. Photographing LGBTQ people, giving them voice and visibility, I am trying to push back on gender norms that were put on me. I also hope to break the stereotypes and stigmas that have surrounded the community for far too long.

Connect with Lidia on Instagram at @angelion.

Location: 1327 S 70th St, West Allis, WI 

Photography and collecting images is how I orient myself to the world. I photograph compulsively, capturing images of my life and surrounding environment. I believe that hidden within aesthetic impulses are the collected memories of a lifetime.

We retain more memories than we can recall, and need only mechanisms to access them. Like Proust’s madeleine, photography and art can be these mechanisms. This generative process is central to my practice; taking a photograph can stimulate a memory, which can than lead to more involuntary memories and more photographs. One photograph leads to next, just as one moment or one choice leads to another. This gathering process extends from the camera to family album photographs, vintage postcards, found objects, and other ephemera.

This archive serves as raw material for narrative and conceptual projects and inspires new photographs in response to the memories and feelings engendered. Dealing with themes of queerness, trauma, illness, nostalgia and longing, my art interrogates the nature of memory and how the past shapes our future.

Project Statement

In this body of work, I am using summer vacations to my family’s cabin in Delta, Ontario as a conceit to examine the transition from adolescence into adulthood as a transgender woman. The vacations acted as an escape from a tense home life and served as checkpoints during my adolescence. Time at the cottage reinforced typical and traditional gender roles, yet somehow relieved the omnipresent domestic tension. The large scale color photographs utilize found objects and fragmented self-portraiture with printed backdrops made from family album photographs and appropriated images to engage with the hyper-masculine space of the cabin and assert my own experience within the multigenerational collective memory of the space.

Connect with Isla on Instagram at @islapgordon.

Anje Thomas Pollen & Fluid

Location: 1099 W Howard Ave, Milwaukee, WI

My name is Anje Thomas, and I am a Los Angeles based photographer interested in dissecting the perceived barriers towards authentic self expression within the queer community. My neuroses become the foundation by which I distill and bring to focus that which has been silent and hidden from palatable and public visions of queerness. Through physical distortions of the figure, I turn the queer body and the queer narrative inside out, making space for what we have not been allowed.

Connect with Anje on Instagram at @notfeelingitanymore.

Location: 3702 N Teutonia Ave, Milwaukee, WI

Ashley Kaye is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer and object maker who utilizes advanced 3D technology to explore intersections between gender norms, sexuality and indulgence and religion.

Breaking away from a Mormon upbringing and its strong religious indoctrination, Ashley developed a highly metaphorical body of work of imagery and sculptures critiquing patriarchal systems. In her Madonna series she collaborates with her models to create new female religious icons and idols that truly represent women to admire.
While she received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Arkansas in 2020, she expanded her practice into an on-going queer performance collaboration with her wife, Isla P. Gordon, entitled “Milk and Honey”, a flesh-centric endeavor that lampoons pop culture.

Ashley has exhibited internationally in the USA, Europe, Africa and Asia. Her work has been performed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and at TheatreSquared (AR). She has been featured in Idle Class Magazine (USA), Contemporary Badass (UK), and Paradice Palase (NYC). She is still looking for a reliable source for chicken hearts.

Connect with Ashley on Instagram at @ashkaye8.

Location: 905 W Center St, Milwaukee, WI 

Salgu Wissmath is a nonbinary Korean American photographer based in Sacramento, California. Their personal work explores the intersections of mental health, queer identity, and faith from a conceptual documentary approach. Their ongoing project Documenting Dysphoria explores what gender dysphoria feels like through illustrative portraits. 

Salgu recently completed a Masters of Photography at Ohio University and is currently freelancing for editorial publications and nonprofits in Northern California. Their editorial work has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, HuffPost, and NPR, among others.  Salgu is the Communications Director for Diversify Photo and is proud to be a member of collectives dedicated to diversifying and decolonizing the photo industry such as Women Photograph, Authority Collective, and Native Agency. 

Project Statement

Inspired by the artist’s own journey as a nonbinary person, Documenting Dysphoria is a series of interpretive portraits that explores what gender dysphoria feels like.

Gender dysphoria is a term for the distress a person experiences as a result of the disconnect between their internal gender identity and the gender they were assigned at birth by a doctor. This experience often allows many, though not all, trans people to come to understand their own identity. 

These images are intended to affirm and offer visibility to the trans and nonbinary experience from a queer lens. In this series, each photograph represents that individual’s feelings of gender dysphoria literally or metaphorically. Everyone experiences gender dysphoria differently and to different degrees. Some people may experience more body dysphoria, and others, more social dysphoria. Some trans individuals may not even experience any dysphoria at all. Documenting Dysphoria seeks to show the diversity of experiences around gender dysphoria and across the gender spectrum.

Caption:

“It's like every time I have switched one undergarment I have from a men's undergarment to a women's undergarment, I just feel more secure in myself and more comfortable with myself,” Valerie says. “I think some kinds of gender dysphoria are related to environment, kind of related to how other people interact with me. And then other facets of gender dysphoria are not triggered by anything, but just kind of how I feel about myself in the world. A lot of my dysphoria is very physical to my body. So I really needed to be on hormones because the hormones made me physically change and I can be in my body and really be happy with myself.”

Connect with Salgu on Instagram at @SalguWissmath.

Connect with Valerie on Instagram at @yoniplasty or cash app at $ValerieTheGirl.

Participating Organizations

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

The Alice Wilds is a contemporary art gallery located in the neighborhood of Walker’s Point, Milwaukee. Established in 2017 and founded by John Sobczak and Tina Schinabeck, the gallery represents several mid-career and emerging artists. A borrowed name from a quiet shipwreck off the Lake Michigan shoreline, The Alice Wilds now rests contrary to this event, surviving through romantic lore and recollections of the hardships of her practical utility.