They lift your spirits, prompt you to think, make you feel grateful and inspire you to do more. They connect you to our community, shining a spotlight on what's good about our city. They're stories that are Uniquely Milwaukee.
Sometimes, returning to one’s roots means an actual return to nature — a homecoming of the mind, body and spirit to where it’s always belonged.
“I do a lot of work putting Black people back in nature,” Tyrone Randle said. “I feel like since slavery happened, we escaped through nature and have not returned to it. There’s this stigma about being outside, about camping, about swimming, stuff like that. But we come from nature.”
Randle was one of six visual artists competing in True Skool’s live mural contest at Milwaukee’s 55th annual Juneteenth celebration. Their assignment was to interpret this year’s theme: “Honoring The Past. Empowering The Future.”
It wasn’t a stretch for Randle, who channels Black history through his art. The piece he painted featured the brown face of a woman with large, inviting eyes peering through a canopy of green leaves. He named it “Mother.”
“The closest I feel to God is when I’m putting Black people in green spaces and reminding us of the garden that, essentially, we should have come from and the fact that we’re supposed to be taking care of the planet,” he explained.
The mural competition was yet another example of True Skool’s mission to blend art and hip-hop in an effort to uplift and educate young people. On this particular Juneteenth, the nonprofit’s leaders hoped everyone on the scene felt a sense of pride fueled by history and culture.
“We really count on these artists to tell a story, because there’s a gap in education,” True Skool co-executive director Shalina Ali said. “A lot of people understand that this is historically about freedom, but there’s a layer of text and information that I think is really beneficial to people being proud of this celebration and understanding why Juneteenth is a celebration for America. This year is the 250th year. What would this country be without a turning point like Juneteenth?”
The organization’s other co-executive director, Fidel Verdin, built on his colleague’s message with a focus on art as a bookmark of time.
“History will best reward us in all of our studies, in all of our endeavors, in all of our professional practices,” Verdin said. “Learning what can happen before us, how things got to be the way that they are now and then, where we take it into the future.”
That holistic timeline of past, present and future is what inspired Leah Cashaw’s painting. Like Randle, she chose to center a woman, but hers adopted the shape of a tree sitting in the middle of the frame as the present, with her roots — or the nighttime — firmly behind her as she looks ahead to the day.
Having all aspects of time linked together in her piece tied back to Cashaw’s belief in art as a means of connection through conversation.
“I think, at the end of the day, we’d get a lot further if we’re doing stuff together instead of separately,” she said. “Instead of having that ‘crab in the barrel’ mentality, it’s like we can all be lifted up. We don’t have to push people down, because everyone has something to add to the greater picture.”
