facebook-wisconsinproject

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.