My name is Kevin Miyazaki and I’m a Milwaukee-born artist, photographer and educator. I am among a group of artists chosen to create new artwork to be placed in the expansion of the Wisconsin Center building in Milwaukee. The Wisconsin Center, formerly known as the Midwest Express Center, is the large convention and exhibition center downtown. The new addition will add 300,000 square feet of exhibition space and meeting rooms. The project broke ground in October 2021 and is expected to open in May 2024.
The process of selecting artists for the project was based on an application process that included examples of past work, artist statements and references. Artists who were selected were not asked to provide their specific ideas for the new artwork, it would be later conveyed in a proposal to the art selection committee. My proposal is to make a series of portraits from Milwaukee’s Native American community, creating in effect a visual land acknowledgment within the new building. After speaking with Siobahn Marks and Dr. Mark Powless, the creation of the portraits and art installation will be in partnership with the students and families from Indian Community School.
My artwork has two areas of focus. The first is my ancestral and family history. As a 4th generation Japanese American that grew up in the mainly white suburban Midwest, my interest in those who came before me, immigrants and ancestors of color, is of particular interest. Their story - their successes and failures - and the weight that the Japanese American incarceration had on my father’s family are an area of focus. My dad and his 5 family members were held for 3 years in two incarceration camps during WWll, one in California and one in Wyoming.
A second area of focus is community portraiture. For more than a decade, I’ve created large bodies of portraits relating to and representing specific communities. For Perimeter (below), a commissioned exhibition by the Haggerty Museum of Art (and later a book published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press), I photographed nearly 300 people who lived near, worked on, or played upon the shores of Lake Michigan. Made during a single 1600-mile drive around the lake and spanning four states, the images represented people who were invested in the health and well-being of the Great Lake.
Another commissioned series, Summer People (below) was made for an exhibition about the Wisconsin Dells at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. I was able to use the original 1876 studio of photographer H.H. Bennett — whose photographs brought tourists to the region in the late 1800’s — to make portraits of contemporary tourists and residents in the Dells, a group far more ethnically and economically diverse than in Bennett’s day.
For This is Milwaukee (below), a project I created with journalist Mary Louise Schumacher, I made portraits of over 100 diverse Milwaukeeans to accompany Schumacher’s audio interviews, addressing the state of democracy and citizenship leading up to the Democratic National Convention.
The Project
It is this approach, creating portraits that represent both individuals and place, that I want to bring to the Wisconsin Center. In speaking with Siobahn Marks and Dr. Mark Powless, the subjects of the photographs will be current and past students from Indian Community School. I will be photographing a smaller number of subjects before the end of the 2023 school year, and then the main group of portraits during the Fall 2023 semester. We would love for you to be one of the first subjects photographed, which will set the tone of the project, and serve as examples for future subjects.
The Portraits
As you can see from my previous work, the pictures are very straightforward. The idea is to visually treat every subject equally, so the background and lighting is always the same. And the pictures are as simple as possible, allowing the viewer to really see the subject of the photograph. In effect, the subjects of the photographs and the viewers can meet a shared gaze. This approach, in my experience, creates the greatest possible connection between subject and viewer.
The Process
The actual photograph will only take about 10 minutes to make, in the Place of Nations at Indian Community School. I’ll be set up on Saturdays in February: February 3, 10, 17 and 24, from 9am-3pm. Each person who is photographed will receive a print of their picture, along with a booklet which contains all the portraits made for the project. The Native American poet Kimberly M. Blaeser will create a poem for the booklet. In addition, a portion of the project budget is dedicated to subject sitting fees, which means each subject will receive a gift certificate for participating. The prints, booklets and compensation would be distributed likely in May 2024.
The Public Art Installation
The artwork will be installed in the Wisconsin Center in May 2024. Viewers of the photographs in the Wisconsin Center will be both visitors from out of town, as well as local Milwaukeeans. This will be a piece of public art, and while most public artwork is not “permanent,” as an example, there are art pieces from the original building that still exist on view 25 years later. Below is an illustration (using photographs from previous projects) which simulates the final installation at the Wisconsin Center. You can see that it’s quite substantial in size, the photographs will be approximately 20 feet wide on the wall, accompanied by a text land acknowledgement.
Questions?
You can reach me with any questions at 414-218-9516 or kjmiyazaki@gmail.com