(upbeat music) - A message of conservation using storm drains as a canvas.

On this episode of "The Arts Page" meet a group of Milwaukee teenagers creatively drawing attention to an important environmental issue.

Get an in-depth look at an illuminating installation by a pair of international artists in the heart of downtown.

Hear the modern melodies of a Grammy Award nominated cellist from Milwaukee.

And- - Not Latina enough or not black enough.

- Meet a multimedia Afro-Latina artist, focusing on celebrating her identity.

(bright upbeat music) Welcome to The Arts Page, I'm Sandy Maxx.

ArtWorks for Milwaukee is a local nonprofit organization with the goal of providing transferable job skills to Milwaukee's youth.

Through intensive paid art internships, these teens develop confidence as well as professionalism, creativity, and communication skills.

Over the past year The Arts Page has followed ArtWork's environmental arts program.

Their goal on this project was to bring awareness to fresh water management.

(upbeat music) (whooshing) The first part of the journey for these young professionals began in Milwaukee's Garden Homes neighborhood.

Phase one of their project, storm drain murals, was to get a tour of the north and east stormwater basins in Milwaukee's 30th Street Corridor.

The tour was meant to be educational and inspirational.

The tour was led by Jerome Flogel, Senior Project Manager at Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District.

They learned about how the city manages flooding during storm season and saw some past ArtWorks for Milwaukee intern mural projects.

- So my interns are always there, they're all in high school, so some of them know what they wanna do, some of them don't.

Honestly, they're just a bunch of curious, amazing students and they really just want to learn and help other people learn too.

The program itself is The Environmental Arts Program.

This program is just very inspiring and it serves to be inspiring.

- [Sandy] Also, part of the day was a trip to Green Tech Station just south of the stormwater basins owned and operated by the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation.

Green Tech Station consists of several green infrastructure projects.

Sarah Bregant from the NWSCDC showed the interns around and talked to them about all the good the station does for the environment and the community.

- Pretty much today was just giving a small tour of the inner nature spots in Milwaukee that are built to help the environment.

So that's really what we wanted everyone to learn today.

And outside of that, just be more conscious of why we're doing a public art project on storm drains.

(bright upbeat music) - [Sandy] Phase two of the project was community outreach.

The Pulaski Park neighborhood was chosen to be the site of the storm drain murals.

At the Pulaski Park Pavilion, the ArtWorks interns participated in a gathering for residents together with the 16th Street Community Health Center and MMSD.

Community members were able to paint their own ideas for the storm drain murals.

This gave the interns valuable input on which ideas residents liked best.

- And they were given instruction to just paint whatever they want.

So we're getting a lot of environmental themes, rainbows, clouds, water, birds, that kind of stuff.

It's important aesthetically, definitely because storm drains aren't the most beautiful often checks on the streets.

So just beautifying the community in any way is a benefit, I think to any neighborhood.

We have a very valuable resource in Milwaukee with the rivers and the lake and it's important to remember what it takes from the community to make it clean and keep it clean.

(upbeat music) - [Sandy] Phase three of the project was submitting the various forms and paperwork required to paint on city property.

A long an arduous process for sure.

But in October of 2022, the project was officially approved by the city and the ArtWorks interns could get to work.

(bright music) Over the course of several Saturdays in the fall of 2022 the interns primed, sketched, and painted two storm drains on South 15th Place just off Cleveland Avenue.

(bright music) (interns chattering) Finally after months of hard work here were the final storm drain murals.

The ArtWorks Environmental Arts Program plans to do a sister version of the storm drain project on Milwaukee's north side later this year.

Cathedral Square Park downtown transitioned in January from holiday lights to a different kind of bright display.

Lightfield by HYBYCOZO is a public art installation of lanterns on land and hung from trees creating captivating geometric shapes and patterns with colorful lighting.

Meet the artists behind HYBYCOZO, one Canadian and one Ukrainian, and see what is involved in bringing this artwork to life in our city.

(bright upbeat music) - So what is HYBYCOZO?

What does it mean?

What is your mission?

- HYBYCOZO is our practice that explores and showcases all elements and dimensions of geometry through sculpture.

And the name HYBYCOZO is actually an acronym and it stands for the Hyperspace Bypass Construction Zone.

So our work when we began was really about investigating these regular polyhedral such as the Platonic solids, the Archimedean solids, the Catalan solids, which is types of shapes defined by mathematical equations that were discovered thousands of years ago.

And we really felt like it was important to us to make these shapes larger than life.

- So I guess I was pronouncing it wrong, it's HYBYCOZO not HYBYCOZO.

- We made up a word, there's not really a right way to say it.

- Yelena, Serge, tell me what is Lightfield?

- Lightfield is a selection of some of our original sculptures and some of our newest sculptures.

It's a field of polyhedrons that span from a dodecahedron to a truncated octahedron, an installation of eight sculptures spanning Cathedral Square Park along with a set of 16 diamond shape lanterns scattered throughout the park as well.

- The artworks themselves feel very familiar at times, but at the same time from a distance might feel almost alien.

And they are secular but they give you sort of this spiritual religious feelings sometimes.

So we want people to see the artworks and interpret them however they want.

- Yeah, we really hope that the people of Milwaukee really appreciate having something in the community and I hope that it leads to more installations in the future.

- So during the assembly and installation process, there were students from UWM's architectural school there assisting.

Is that something that's important to you to get students involved in this type of work?

- 100% is.

We've had people help us whether they're students, whether they're volunteers.

These shapes that we're building, these are open shapes to the world and we wanna really share these types of geometries with everyone so they can also use them if you're an architect, if you're an artist, just in your day-to-day life, understanding the benefits and the properties of these polyhedrals is really important.

So everyone knows what a cube is and a pyramid.

What we really want is the dodecahedron to be part of every creator's or artist or architects vocabulary.

- And a huge reason why we love to engage students is because in some ways this like is an architectural project.

This is a project that you would do as maybe a review for an architecture or an architectural class because it is investigating these like basic polyhedral forms.

And they really do make up everything around us from studying the way that an assembly can work to creating habitats and zero gravity.

These shapes are an element of our environment and they can help inform design decisions.

(upbeat music) - So why public spaces?

Why put it in parks?

- We really, I think, found the heart and soul of our practice.

When we started creating artwork for the public, we want the artwork to be accessible by all, we want it to feel accessible.

We don't want there to be kind of a feeling that sometimes you go into an art gallery space and you don't necessarily feel welcome.

We really want people to be able to come around and feel like this is a community-centered project.

- Yeah, as Yelena said art galleries can be a little daunting to people.

There's sometimes an admission charge, they don't always feel comfortable.

So by bringing art into the public, art is now accessible to all and that's extremely important.

We see examples of teachers bringing their students to our installations in the park to understand the forms and the geometries.

We see people just going on a walk stopping and enjoying art.

Bringing art to the public is extremely important to us.

It also gives us spaces that allow us to do very large installations.

- [Yelena] And to kind of add onto that, I think that it's a really great reminder for people to see their public spaces transform into something that is beautiful or interesting.

- [Serge] Public art also becomes a meeting place and so it encourages the growth of community because people interact there, they meet their friends there.

They have this shared experience, the whole city can kind of come together.

And so art is an important part of the vibrant community.

(bright upbeat music) - You can enjoy this public art through May 5th at Cathedral Square Park.

Learn more about HYBYCOZO and Lightfield by going to the website, milwaukeedowntown.com.

Malik Johnson, also known as 99 The Producer began playing cello in elementary school thanks to a Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra outreach program.

Since then he's gone on to perform classical and contemporary music around the world, produce music and even get nominated for a Grammy Award.

Johnson visited with Milwaukee PBS multimedia producer, Lexi Mack.

(cello music) - I would say that the cello is my favorite instrument, maybe I'm biased.

It has a lot of range, It can go super low, it can go super high.

It's very versatile.

You can play classical music, you can play jazz music, you can play R&B, you can play hip hop.

You can literally do anything you want.

(cello playing) Prior to me knowing about the cello or learning classical music, I literally knew nothing about it.

I come from a very gospel family, and my mom is very heavily involved in the church and my dad is a super big hip hop head, like he loves hip hop and rap music.

So before getting introduced to the cello, I literally had no kind of base to go off from about classical music.

I got started with the cello through an afterschool program called MYSO, Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra.

They had a program for third and fourth grade inner city students in Milwaukee.

The program was called the Progressions Program.

The significance of a program like Progressions, it just allows students to have access to resources and to a wide array of musical education by top professionals in the city of Milwaukee and also just all around the world.

So if it weren't for them I wouldn't have been able to have access to those things.

My Progressions Program teacher was... Actually my teacher from Progressions Program until I graduated from high school, Ravenna Helson.

She became like a second mom to me.

- Let's Make sure it's really straight.

(cello music) I think every child should have an opportunity to see if they are musicians.

When Malik plays from the very beginning he had a voice that was clear and authentic.

And so with Malik it was really pulling him along to understand that the tools that he was learning were really gonna be helpful to him later on because he couldn't even dream about it when he was 8 or 9 or 10 or 11.

- She always just challenged me to be a better person, a better musician.

Just express myself in a way that I never have before and really try to connect with my audience or whoever I'm playing for.

There was a lot of times where I wanted to quit especially like playing cello so young at a young age especially as a black kid there wasn't a lot of people who looked like me playing a classical instrument, so she definitely just inspired me to just keep going.

And she knew I had a talent and it was something that I had to share with the world.

(cello music) Some people know me as 99 The Producer.

So yeah, I guess I got turned into him.

(laughs) So yeah, 99 is my alter ego, I guess my performance name.

(cello music) When I'm playing, I kind of envision myself just in my own world, doing my own thing at peace, clear mind.

I imagine myself lifting off, floating somewhere.

I think about the people I love the most, I think about what I'm playing, how it can connect with my audience.

But part of my mission growing up was like I wanted to kind of do something different with the cello.

I wanted to expand the boundaries of what people have already seen with the cello.

So I do find myself playing a lot of contemporary pieces and more like modern kind of songs.

(cello music) I've been blessed, I really have been blessed.

I was able to travel to Europe with MYSO when I was 14, 15, or I think 15 years old.

Definitely a lot of stuff with the Matt Jones Orchestra.

I've been able to work with Kirk Franklin.

We were on his Grammy Award-winning album "Long Live Love" which also led me to be on Tiny Desk with PJ Morton through NPR.

Record with John Legend on his Christmas album in 2018.

I've been able to produce for Masego.

I produced on his last album "Studying Abroad" which got nominated for a Grammy.

What else?

(laughs) I remember people used to ask me like, "Malik, would you ever teach one day?"

I was like, no.

(laughs) But teaching is so beneficial it's so helpful, it's so transformative.

(cello music) I teach through the Wisconsin Conservatory and I'm placed at the Woodland School here in Milwaukee.

I'm happy that I can share this gift with others and inspire kids to play the cello or violin or viola or whatever they wanna play.

I hope my presence demonstrates that you can do anything that you wanna do.

(cello music) I got started with the cello through classical music but I found myself being able to take my classical training and transform that into something very special.

(cello music) I hope my story represents passion, I hope it represents the fact that if you put your mind at anything you can do it and you can succeed and be great at it.

(cello music) - You met ArtWorks for Milwaukee lead artist Annamarie Edwards in the feature about storm drains earlier in our show.

Get to know more about Edwards and her identity affirming art through our story sharing partnership with CBS58.

- Not Latina enough or not black enough like things like that.

I know when I was younger skin color was a thing.

Like when I would tell people I was Cuban.

- [Daniela] Annamarie Edwards is a young Afro-Latina artist.

The lead teaching artist for the Environmental Arts Internship program at ArtWorks from Milwaukee and the lead photographer at Gaining Visuals.

- We focus on black narratives in Milwaukee and black businesses, entrepreneurs, influencers, and things like that.

- [Daniela] Edwards grew up in Alabama but she's not your average southern girl.

- Different music, like I might listen to like Bachata music and then listen to R&B.

- [Daniela] Raised by a Cuban mother and a black father.

(Spanish music) - That stereotypical loudness was always there and lots of music.

The food was, like one of my favorite foods growing up and still now is empanadas.

On the other side, on the flip side so soul food and like collard greens, fried chicken, mac and cheese.

- [Daniela] She says she's always been proud of the fusion of both cultures.

Though growing up in the South, Edward says she constantly felt like her identity was a show and tell.

- I would get in trouble for taking my hair down at school.

I would take my hair down a lot and show people like look this is what it looks like, this is what it is.

- [Daniela] Now as an adult, Annamarie Edwards says as societal expectations continue, she draws inspiration from that literally.

- Being called unprofessional in multiple situations.

Being asked to like straighten my hair for certain events or feeling like I had to do that for certain events, or you can't listen to certain music in certain places.

- [Daniela] It wasn't until she moved to Milwaukee about five years ago that she began to focus on her artwork what she describes as a direct reflection of her identity and experiences.

- When I hit my 20s and I moved to Milwaukee, a lot of that started to matter.

So me not being fluent in Spanish or me not knowing certain Cuban foods.

In the black community there is colorism and like me being more of a light-skinned girl and claiming to be black sometimes is difficult.

So when I do wear my hair in certain ways it's like, I get certain looks but when people learn more about me they're always like, "Oh okay, I get it, I understand, it fits".

- [Daniela] As a multidisciplinary contemporary artist, she aims to push the envelope.

- A lot of people fall in love with Cuban cars but they don't understand how actually like sad it is because they really can't get access to newer cars so they're forced to drive these really old cars from 18, 1900s and it's like they deserve better transportation.

- [Daniela] Provoking emotions and deeper feelings through photography, paintings, and mixed media.

- I'm transferring old 1950s Newsweek magazines I got from an estate sale.

And they were made and printed in the 1950s so they're like insanely racist.

So I'm like blocking them, blocking certain advertisements and creating mini paintings out of these blocks.

- [Daniela] Edward says she's constantly educating herself to teach others what might not be taught in schools.

(Spanish music) - What does it mean to have a hidden identity and what does it mean to have a history that is hidden in today's educational system?

- [Daniela] Though some people might not agree with it.

- Question, oh, she might spark too much conversation, or she's too political, or this is too much for this type of audience to bear.

So sometimes my art is not admitted into absolutely everything.

- [Daniela] Since the age of 12, she remained true to herself and she hopes to be a role model for other little girls who look like her and see the world through a different lens.

- One could never be too proud of who they are and who they come to be.

My goal is to empower people to be themselves unapologetically - Daniela Cado reporting in partnership with CBS58.

Thank you for watching the Arts Page.

I'm Sandy Maxx, please join us the first Thursday of every month for a half hour full of art on the Arts Page.

(bright upbeat music)