Milwaukee
— — the city the lake keeps honest.
Not only on a wall.
“A brick-and-cream-coloured city on the western edge of Lake Michigan, where three rivers meet the lake and the wind comes off the water cold even in June. The Calatrava-designed wings of the Art Museum open and close above the lakefront each day at ten, noon, and five. From the studio: a place that holds its German bones and its Polish bones and its long industrial winters with the same plain pride. — from the studio
Milwaukee, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Milwaukee sits on a natural harbour where the Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic rivers empty into Lake Michigan, about 145 kilometres north of Chicago. With a city population near 570,000 it is the largest city in Wisconsin and the cultural anchor of its 1.5-million-person metropolitan area. Incorporated in 1846 from three rival settlements, the city grew on the lake trade and on the brewing industry built by waves of German, Polish, Irish, and later Hmong, Mexican, and African-American settlement.
The Milwaukee Art Museum's Quadracci Pavilion, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2001, is the city's signature building. Its movable brise-soleil, the Burke Brise Soleil, spans about ninety metres at full extension and opens and closes daily, weather permitting, at ten, noon, and five. The older Eero Saarinen-designed War Memorial Center, completed in 1957, sits just behind it on the lakefront, anchoring a continuous strip of post-war and contemporary civic architecture along the bluff.
The lake moderates the city's temperatures and dominates its weather. Spring arrives slowly; the lake stays cold into June and onshore winds keep the shoreline ten degrees cooler than the inland neighbourhoods on hot days, a pattern called lake breeze. Winters are long, with average January highs near minus three Celsius and annual snowfall around 120 centimetres. Summerfest, the lakefront music festival running since 1968, fills the eleven days around the Fourth of July with crowds along the harbour.