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Not far from Lake Winnebago, this mid-century motel on Highway 55 still operates

with a restaurant and deck to view sunsets.

What was once obvious becomes an enigma over time. Could "The Great White Way" caption on this lithographed postcard refer to the first electric Christmas lightsinstalled on College Avenue in 1908 illuminating the December snow? Appleton is the home of a several electrical firsts. It's the site of the first hydro-electric station in 1882, the first electric streetcar in 1886, and the first electric street lights outside the east coast replacing the earlier gaslights in 1912. The postcard illustrates the culmination and evolution of these technologies in one graphic shot.

Chanting the Mantra Peace on Earth in Wayside, Wisconsin 2013. Do they believe it? Do they live it?

The abandoned Tinker Tot Drive-In survived the Ladysmith tornado of 2002.

Many places in the town did not. We always admired its "ruins" standing
along Highway 8 across from the Hi-Way 8 Motel.

In his 2003 essay Simulating Culture: Being Indian for Tourists in Lac du Flambeau's Wa-Swa-Gon Indian Bowl, anthropologist Larry Nesper wrote that "After the Second World War, increasing numbers of tourists traveled to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to recreate. Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Indians encouraged this process by availing themselves as fishing guides and by building in 1951 the Indian Bowl, within which they staged Indian dances and related cultural performances." Nesper goes on to argue that a simulacrum of Indian culture in the Northwoods was produced. Today this roadside attraction, illustrated with a photograph from the road showing a brand spanking new 1951 Cadillac parked out front, is now in peril and needs support. Organizers of a restoration effort no longer criticize crass tourism, but acknowledge its importance and that tourism dollars are key to preserving the historic Indian Bowl and outdoor amphitheater. The Indian Bowl facility hosted Pow Wows, Ojibwe dance, and cultural events for decades. The plan it to create a unified multicultural native arts center to be known as the Lac du Flambeau Cultural and Performing Arts Center with a mission to preserve and showcase native culture and heritage.

The Boys' & Girls' Brigade established Camp Onaway near Waupaca in 1910 with a goal of "building leadership" through providing an isolated place for kids to "rough it" hence learning survival and leadership skills. Perhaps the aftermath of French explorer Jean Nicolet's romanticized mission and the legendary fortitude of subsequent wilderness explorers in the pursuit of freedom.  Board member Don Weber in Native American costume presides over a smoking fire at the camp on this postcard.

The "Landing of Nicolet" postcard interpretation of a 1910 mural painting by Milwaukee-based panorama painter Franz Edward Rohrbeck illustrates the mythic landing of the young French woodland explorer Jean Nicolet in 1634 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Nicolet had been living with the Alqonquin tribes (his guides are shown in the canoe behind him) in the wilderness as part of his hot pursuit of fur (mainly beaver) and an ocean trade passageway to China. Native Ho-Chunk people are shown as exotic and cowering while offering the ceremonial calumet while rock star Nicolet, clad in ostentatious silk robe (said to be Chinese damask) accesorized by glistening pistols, asserts his authority. Another artist in another time may have illustrated the spectacle as more peaceable and cooperative, but this performative show of domination apparently resonated culturally in the early 20th century in Northeastern Wisconsin. Based on a mural painting (restored by Conrad Schmitt Studios in 2010) at the Brown County Courthouse (100 South Jefferson Street, Green Bay), this postcard reflects an American social milieu where Native peoples were marginalized and colonialism was rationalized. So culturally canonical was this scene, that a version was used on a U.S. postage stamp in 1934 celebrating the Wisconsin Trecentenary of Nicolet's landing at "Red Banks".  The stamp version was based on an earlier circa 1907 mural at the State Capitol in Madison by Edward Willard Deming who is said to have associated throughout his life with Native Americans and hence more clearly articulated the humanity of the natives in his mural. Note the phrase "The first white man"used in the postcard caption with no white guilt. The Wisconsin Trecentenary was also marked by ceremonies and a speech by FDR. The image can be read as evidence of the American power and identity struggles that enabled "the white man" to separate native peoples from their homelands.

Found: Wisconsin Trecenenary (1634-1934) postage stamp

Found: Landfall of Jean Nicolet in Wisconsin (1907)  by Edward Willard Deming on view in the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison

Come autumn, the I-43 corridor heading north can be bumper to bumper with cars and SUVs especially when "fall colors" are peaking in Door County and/or when there's a Packers game at Lambeau. Taking a drive "up north" provides an escape and in fact a tourism slogan once read "Escape to Wisconsin" which locals often modified to read "Escape Wisconsin". Postcards such as this promoted the idea of Sunday drives to view the landscape as seen through the automobile wind shield.

Before the decades long Crandon cooper mine debate between Native American tribes, environmentalists, Exxon, and the State of Wisconsin DNR; Crandon was a vacation retreat. Like this postcard message reads: "We ran away from everything to have a rest." Playing cards and catching panfish seems a peaceful land use far away from the proposals to build a massive mine with potential to contaminate land and water.

Less than 40 years after this proud postcard hit the streets, the General Motors plant in Janesville closed. Employing thousands of people over the decades, production at the plant ceased on December 23, 2008. The last Chevy Tahoe that rolled off the production line that day was raffled to raise funds for the United Way. Janesville wasn't the only Wisconsin town to make cars, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Oshkosh, Racine and more did too. From the Kissel Kar, made in Hartford, to the Excalibur designed by Brooks Stevens to the Little Nash Rambler, Wisconsin is known to be home of about three dozen motor vehicle makers. As the 20th century wore on, workers making cars gave way to artists using them as subject matter, medium, and process. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg asked composer John Cage to drive his Model A Ford over 20 sheets of paper to make Automobile Tire Print. Starting in 1959,  John Chamberlain made automobile "collage" sculptures. The Ant Farm buried 10 Cadillac fins-up along Route 66 in 1974 to make Cadillac Ranch, oft referred to as the most famous public art work in America. Artists and entrepreneurs have found that cars transport both the body and the mind making for eerie associations. That same year, performance artist Chris Burden had himself crucified to a VW Beetle for his Trans-Fixed piece. We remember seeing Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow's bullet-riddled 1934 Ford V8 getaway car displayed in a semi-trailer in a shopping mall parking lot in the 1970s. These days it's on display for free at a casino/hotel near Las Vegas. An upcoming gallery exhibition in Miami called Piston Head: Artists Engage the Automobile examines the use of the car in art since 1970. The organizers argue that cars are the symbol of American consumerism and the "quintessential machine of modern life." The show features work by trendy contemporary artists like Richard Prince whose Hood series uses 1960s muscle car hoods to conjure dreams fueled by a desire to escape and the Bruce High Quality Foundation, an enigmatic art collective that deployed an entangled Volkswagon in a recent work.  Displayed in the context of a parking ramp at one of the biggest international art events of the year, the car becomes sacred icon and cathedral (Barthes). Meanwhile in Kenosha, Janesville, and Milwaukee, the car plants have been abandoned or have disappeared altogether. 

Nash Motors Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, was so dedicated to the idea of aerodynamics that it charged $9 extra for the George Petty-designed flying lady hood ornament on its 1949 Ambassador sedan. The plush, post-war "Airflyte" Ambassador featured technological innovations such a single welded "unibody" (frame and body are one), enclosed front wheels, (hydramatic) automatic transmission, and reclining seats that formed a twin bed. Known as the "make-out" auto of choice by the teens of the 1950s, the Ambassador had a streamlined tear-drop shaped back, cockpit-like instrument panel with uniscope instrument grouping, and a spaceous trunk. Referred to as "Miss Upside-Down Bathtub of 1949" by Tom McCahill in Mechanix Illustrated, it sold for about $2,200 and was alternately called the "Kenosha Cadillac" or "Kenosha Duesenberg." Just a little over a half-century later, the former Nash Motors factory on 110 acres near Lake Michigan was considered a blight. After morphing into Nash-Kelvinator then American Motors (AMC) then Chyrsler, the plant closed in 2010 and demolition began in December 2012. Surviving Ambassadors remain as a monument to the idealism of an American ingenuity that believed in the possibility of a faster and sleeker vessel to transport the human body through space and time. We purchased a 1949 Ambassador from a guy named Kurt in Idaho Falls, Idaho in November of 2012 for about the original selling price including shipping. The last time he started the car before sending it on its way to our farm in Wisconsin, Kurt said "she purred like a kitten." And she did. On Thursday, September 26, 2013 John Shimon, accompanied by artist Matt Chung, drove the auto through the Wisconsin countryside passing corn fields, verdant forests, and an aqua Lake Michigan to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. On the trip, it got 25-30 miles per gallon due to its economical 6-cylinder engine, overdrive transmission, and aerodynamic body design. As part of our WE GO FROM WHERE WE KNOW exhibition at the JMKAC, it will be filled with over 1,000 cast concrete corn cobs memorializing a childhood memory of a Nash repurposed as a corn crib while contemplating the contemporary role of corn as food and fuel in the US.  Matt Chung made this video documenting the journey:

John A. Trumble tapped into the fashion sensibilities of the swinging 1960s to depict "Native Winnebago Indians" in Wisconsin Dells. Kicky mini-skirted "Indian Maidens" and groovy long-haired bell-bottom wearing Indian boys predated Cher's glittery-feathered cover of a ballad of Cherokee-strife called "Half-Breed" in 1973 (written by Al Capps and Mary Dean). Trumble's images fueled the Wisconsin "tourism craze" for hiring native Americans as Wisconsin River Guides in the 1960s and 1970s. Selling autopgraphed postcard portraits of the guides for profit was integral and working for the tourism industry provided a livlihood for displaced Ho-Chunk (then known as Winnebago) whose other alternative was working the cranberry bogs. Though there is little evidence of Trumble's work accessible to us today, we note he self-published a 31 page book of his photographs titled The Dells of the Wisconsin River in 1965 and left a legacy of these kitschy Native American chic postcards to ponder.

Little blonde girl wearing red coat and saddle shoes points to rock formations on this postcard promoting Cave of the Mounds. A performative photographic ploy to direct viewer attention in a vast dark space. Cave of the Mounds is often referred to as the "jewel box of America's major caves because of the variety, color and delicacy of its formations,"in tourist materials. The Cave was discovered on August 4, 1939 on a Wisconsin farm during a blasting session to mine limestone... eventually becoming a tourist attraction with spaces with names like Painted Waterfall, Gem Room, and Dream River Room. Hosting millions of visitors with a gift shop, hiking trails, and Prairie and Savanna Restoration Gardens, the land formation acts as spectacle like nearby Wisconsin Dells.

Minocqua's website boasts of November being the opening of deer hunting season, which is "practically an official holiday and an important part of our Northwoods heritage." Ike Eisenhower was a "regular Minocqua visitor" due to its wilderness beauty and the town is the birthplace of the Association of Wisconsin Snowmobile clubs. This postcard of young "Deers" grazing shows the creatures inhabiting a landscape of birch and cedar where they became a spectacle for the Minocqua tourist of yore.

The bears of Milwaukee once existed in a simulated natural landscape while spectators,
empowered by a 15 foot moat, ogled them from afar at the Washington Park Zoo. After seeing Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, this scene takes on sinister overtones though the sender of this card saw the barless bear den as visual proof of Milwaukee's dynamism:
"Having a wonderful time here. A big and growing city.
Weather nice and warm. Edith Allard"
Post marked August 24, 1953

Viewing Samson in his baby blue tile display case at the Milwaukee Zoo, with its thick glass smeared from his pounding fists and accented by his pungent odor, remains a vivid childhood memory. Ever a performer, Samson reportedly watched and reacted to people watching him acting outrageously make spectators jump back and gasp. Samson was legendary even to Wisconsin rural kids like us. His death from a heart attack in November 1981 at the age of 32 made the news. This herbivore whose diet included bread and meat for a time suffered five major heart attacks before pounding his chest one last time and falling dead before an audience.

Water and trees surround most places in Wisconsin. These resources have become increasingly mediated in the 21st century meaning more development along shores, signage indicating dangers or attractions, and the ever present Lyme Disease (from deer ticks) in the northwoods and West Nile Virus (from mosquitoes) everywhere else. Postcards from the 1960s depict the pleasures of looking in an "Up North" seemingly free of bugs and hazards while mists of DDT linger (invisibly) in the air.

Brown glass Purex bleach bottle bottoms, red DeSoto tail lights, Rhinelander shorty bottles plus an array of multi-colored glass shards applied to concrete portrait-figures half-century ago still make Fred Smith's sculptures glimmer in the setting sun. The Wisconsin elements chip away at the statues as the Wisconsin Concrete Park staff collect fallen glass fragments then label them in anticipation of future restoration efforts. When we visited WCP on July 11, 2013 to give a replicas workshop as part of our JM Kohler Arts Center residency, the grounds were dense with sculptures and trees compared with the old real photo post cards from the 1950s in our collection (see our "rephotographs" above). The ambition of Smith's project remains remarkable. Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi's 1991 book The Art of Fred Smith describes a man driven by a vision and inspired by "his sense of local or national history." Smith's ongoing project was not ignored by travelers in his time. A Chicago Tribune Magazine article referred to Smith as a "North Woods Picasso" in 1964. According to Stone and Zanzi, Life Magazine called him the "Grandpa Moses of Cement" in 1969. To this day some of WCP's closest neighbors have never taken a stroll through Smith's wonderland. Writes Leslie Umberger in Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), "While some folks in the area were interested in his art project, others believed he was crazy and that his work was just clutter in the landscape. Nevertheless, Smith remained deeply committed to his art and always believed that it was important for people to see it" (178). His project retained the attention of creatives whose combined fascination and efforts have served to preserve WCP. Included on the Kohler Foundation and Kohler Arts Center's Wandering Wisconsin Road Trip Itineray, WCP and other Wisconsin art environments remain mystic places of pilgrimage.

Curator Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi's 1991 book, The Art of Fred Smith, quotes Fred Smith (1886-1976), a self-taught artist, fiddle player, Christmas Tree/Ginseng farmer, and Rock Garden Tavern owner, as saying:"It's gotta be in ya to do it." That says it all and is something we try to convey to students when we teach. Smith worked on his Concrete Museum (see above real photo postcards) from 1948 until 1964 when a stroke hit him just after finishing his Budweiser Clydesdale tableau. Smith landed in a rest home and lived another decade. Stone and Zanzi presented Fred Smith's Wisconsin Concrete Park rationale in the below passage. The WCP remains an attraction in Phillips with active programs and efforts to preserve Smith's creation.

Ozzie Sweet considered himself a "photo illustrator" making photographs for baseball trading cards, magazine covers, and apparently postcards such as this one of a couple consuming the landscape of Wisocnsin. He aligned himself with Norman Rockwell in his portrayal of Americana and use of painterly techniques in constructing his photographs. He died February of 2013 at the age of 94.