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Kyoung Ae Cho: Portfolio Collection Vol. 17

Today we’re highlighting Kyoung Ae Cho, visual artist, professor, and head of UW-Milwaukee’s Fibers program within the School of Art & Design. Born in Onyang, South Korea in 1963, Cho completed her graduate work at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She has been on the faculty at UWM since 1999. The images here are drawn from the 17th volume of the Portfolio Collection series, edited by Matthew Koumis for Telos Art Publishing out of Winchester, England. Cho’s volume, published in 2003, features a forward by textile artist and head of the fiber arts department at Cranbrook Academy Gerhardt Knodel, and an introduction by poet and scholar H.L. Hix.

Raised in a multi-generational home, Cho was often left in the care of her grandmother while her parents worked. From her grandmother she learned the craft of sewing, and the art of collecting and transforming unassuming objects. Hix concurs with Cho in defining the character of her art as that of a gift:

Gifts embody love and care and attention, enacting the values instilled in Cho by her grandmother: the pursuit of craftsmanship, respect for materials, and an insistence on imbuing the ordinary with singularity, the trivial with gravity, the negligible with meaning.

Cho prioritizes the gathering of materials in respectful conversation with environment and its natural processes. Materials gathered for the highlighted pieces include: wild sage bushes, balsam fir needles, thread, cotton, honey locust stems, beeswax, hair, shells, a found typeset drawer, horsechestnut twigs, and burning bush leaves. Cho weaves or stitches decoration with thread or hair, and with burn marks on wood. She explains:

It brings me a smile whenever I find myself spontaneously organizing pine needles, autumn leaves, twigs, shells, pebbles…because it reminds me that what I am doing now is not much different from what I did as a little girl sitting next to my mom.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

UWM Archives’ new Black History Month pop-up exhibit highlights the more than half-century of organizing for integrated public schools in one of the most segregated cities in the United States.  

The exhibit traces the fortunes of public education in Milwaukee from the early, militant organizing of Lloyd Barbee’s Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC) through a stagnating desegregation program and flashpoints over school closings in the 1980s, to the rise of voucher schools and privatization since the 1990s. The exhibit also highlights how organizing to “Defend Democracy” and “Protect Our Public Schools” from takeovers since the 2010s sit within a longer activist vision of “Freedom and Independence” and “true equality of educational opportunities.”  

📸: MUSIC calls on Milwaukee parents to “Keep Your Children Out of School” and send them to a Freedom Day School instead. Call Number: MUSIC Records, Milwaukee Mss 5.

📸: A “Freedom School Certificate” certifies that a student “took an active part in this historic battle for equal education and human dignity.” Call Number: MUSIC Records, Milwaukee Mss 5.

📸: A flier from Blacks for Two-Way Integration shows how organizers kept up the pressure even after the adoption of a formal desegregation plan, protesting that the burden of integration rested primarily on students and families of color. Agitating for integration that was “two-way or no-way,” students, families, and community organizations defended neighborhood schools, autonomy, and the freedom to choose for students and families of color. Call Number: Metropolitan Integration Research Center Records, UWM Mss 332.

Drawing on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we also invite visitors to respond to the exhibit by sharing their hopes for the future of public education in Milwaukee.

Students for a Democratic Society - Milwaukee:

NO HATE, NO FEAR, IMMIGRANTS ARE WELCOME HERE 🗣‼️

Join us Monday, April 14th in standing with the immigrant students on our campus as the Trump administration wages their racist and xenophobic attacks — With over a dozen student visas being revoked already the time to fight is now!

by Dion J. Pierre

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s (UWM) chancellor has apologized to the Jewish community for reaching an agreement with an anti-Zionist group which ended a “Gaza encampment” in exchange for the school’s issuing a statement calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas and considering an academic boycott of Israel.

“It is clear to me that UWM should not have weighed in on deeply complex geopolitical and historical issues,” UWM chancellor Mark Mone said on Tuesday. “And for that, I apologize. I acknowledge that it is an increasingly difficult time for many Jewish students at UWM and across America.”

He added, “Let me be clear: UWM resolutely condemns antisemitism, just as we do Islamophobia and all other forms of hatred. Our campus must be a place that welcomes all students and the full expression their history, culture, identity, and ethnicity. But words alone cannot create the culture of inclusion we desire, which is why we must transform our words into commitment and action. This work will take time, as all hard work does, and it will also take the openness of our entire community.”

Mone did not say whether he intends to honor the deal he brokered with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group that has been linked to terrorist organizations and is a source of a substantial number of antisemitic incidents on college campuses. In addition to agreeing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, on May 12, he issued a statement describing Israel’s war to destroy the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza as “genocide,” citing figures reported by Hamas-controlled authorities which have been lambasted by experts as unreliable. The deal also stipulates UWM’s reviewing “its study abroad policies” and pressuring a local environmental organization to cut ties with two Israeli companies, which Mone has already done.

“University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone capitulated to protesters who violated UWM codes of conduct and state law, vandalized university property, and used harassment and intimidation to fuel antisemitism on campus,” the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, Hillel Milwaukee, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said about the deal in a joint statement. “The agreement is amongst the most offensive and dangerous of any university agreement reached with encampment protesters over the last two weeks.”