Lecture: "The Traditional Arts of Wisconsin's Industrial Workers"

The Traditional Arts of Wisconsin's Industrial Workers Please join us for an illustrated talk by University of Wisconsin-Madison folklorist Jim Leary this Sunday, March 27, at 1:30 pm in the James Watrous Gallery, located in the Overture Center for the Arts, located at 201 State Street. This free talk is in conjunction with the photography exhibition Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait. Wisconsin's culturally diverse industrial workforce has included many practitioners of traditional arts who have used job site skills, scraps, experiences, and downtime to fashion carvings, fabrics, musical instruments, sculptures, songs, stories, and more.  Although the creations of these folk artists sometimes evoke their particular occupations as factory and construction workers, they often conjure an ethnically homogeneous, rural, handmade, holistic, largely bygone world contrasting markedly with their cosmopolitan, urban, mechanical, fragmented, contemporary surroundings.  Folklorist Jim Leary will offer an illustrated presentation on the significance of such industrial workers and traditional artists as a Ho-Chunk ironworker adept at bridge construction who relies on metalwork skills to make German Silver jewelry, an African American industrial seamstress who transforms scraps from hemmed pants into quilts, a Serbian immigrant crane operator who carves black walnut miniatures of his Old Country peasant village, and a Hmong weaver of bamboo baskets who finds a new medium in plastic strapping castoff from pallet loads.