CULTURE | SPONSORED BY THE MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM
SOMETHING FUNNY HAPPENED IN WISCONSIN
MOWA’S DOWNTOWN EXHIBIT FOCUSES ON MILWAUKEE’S ROLE IN ALTERNATIVE, POLITICAL COMIC STRIPS IN THE ’60S AND ’70S By David Luhrssen
I
can still remember saving my school lunch money to buy copies of Milwaukee’s underground newspaper, the Bugle American. For a quarter a week, the paper gave me a window onto new worlds of possibility—a truly alternative take on news and culture in the mid-’70s. Among the elements of the paper that stood out were the covers. The boring ones were usually photographed. The best ones were drawn by a crew of underground “comix” artists that called Milwaukee home.
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Shepherd Express
Did I ever suspect that those covers would one day be exhibited as art? There is a lot of the Bugle American in the current Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) exhibition, “Wisconsin Funnies: Fifty Years of Comics” in West Bend. The Bugle is also prominent in the scaled down version on display at MOWA/DTN in Saint Kate— The Art’s Hotel through November 22. The message at MOWA’s satellite gallery in Saint Kate is decidedly political. “When we developed the idea for the exhibit in
2019, the world was a different place,” says J. Tyler Friedman, MOWA’s associate curator of contemporary art. “The DNC was coming to town and I thought the Downtown exhibit called for some lightly subversive material to provoke, reflect and give lie to the idea that comics are all adolescent superhero fantasies.” Friedman co-curated “Wisconsin Funnies” with Wisconsin historian James P. Danky, Madison graphic novelist Paul Buhle and one of the artists whose work is prominent in the show, Denis Kitchen.
