Milwaukee Diaspora Artist Gives a Puerto Rico Touch to Public Space

Milwaukee artistic interventions were created inside the Milwaukee County Courthouse, the Milwaukee Public Library’s (MPL) Mitchell Street Branch and an exterior wall of Woodland Pattern bookstore on East Locust Street. The 35-years-old transdisciplinary artist Erick “CK” Ledesma Borrero, from Levittown, Puerto Rico, which is in the municipality of Toa Baja, collaborated these artistic interventions.

Ledesma’s interventions included sculptures, paintings and even vinyl print. They described their work as expressions of the intersectionality of identity from a diaspora life.

Ledesma often moved to and from Puerto Rico and Wisconsin, and split time between their parents, who had a tumultuous relationship. They attended Milwaukee Public Schools and schools in Puerto Rico. Ledesma went back to Puerto Rico during Sixth grade and asked to pursue art.

“When I was back in Puerto Rico, at that age, I truly homed in on my interest in art,” Ledesma said. “And decided I wanted to try and find a specialized school, where I could grow those skills.”

Ledesma started attending Escuela Central de Artes Visuales in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico for Seventh grade, and though their Twelfth year studied at a high-level art school.

“Seventh through Ninth grade you study everything from drawing, painting, sculpture, design, ceramics and photography,” Ledesma said. “And then you graduate in Ninth grade and choose a focus, and my focus was clay.”

Ledesma also got involved with the theater group Trampolín Teatro while they studied in college. They created theater performances with friends, whom had a range of contrasting interests like movements, makeup, writing and acting.

“I didn’t major in arts in college. I was interested in anthropology then,” Ledesma said. “I was in a dance group before, and that kind of led me into movement and performance work, and then I went onto College of the Arts in San Juan.”

Ledesma moved back to Milwaukee where they had family and continued with artistic aspirations. They also met their husband Daniel Schuyler while working with Fred Astaire dance studios.

“As an adult, it was my decision, and I said ‘I’m gonna go back to Wisconsin,’” Ledesma said. “I had aunts are here, cousins and uncles are here, so, I was gonna try something new.”

Ledesma was a recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists in 2020, and worked on an interactive food-based performance installation for the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University. Additionally, they worked on an installation about the Puerto Rican funeral tradition of Baquine, scheduled at the Haggerty Museum of Art for summer of 2022.

“Modern medicine wasn’t great back in the day, so, a lot of children passed after birth, or as kids or babies,” Ledesma said. “In Afro Puerto Rican tradition, what they would do, instead of a sad funeral, is they would host a festivity to celebrate that heaven got a new angel.”

The Milwaukee County Courthouse

Ledesma emphasized their interests in artistic interventions of public spaces, and in the Milwaukee County Courthouse, working as Cosecha Creative Space, they painted a mural of two facial silhouettes among feathers in 2020.

The mural is located over the elevators on the first floor of the Milwaukee County Courthouse, where there were four artistic interventions paid for by the former Milwaukee County Executive Chris Able.

The other three artistic interventions were created by Latina Unidas en Las Artes (LUNA), the Muslim creative group Fanana Banana and Scott Hill, an Oneida artist.

The Milwaukee Public Library

The Mitchell Street Branch of the Milwaukee Public Library opened in 2017, and it is the first library in the system that employed resident artists. Ledesma collaborated with the library in an artist position made possible through a National Endowment of the Art (NEA) grant.

In the main room of the Mitchell Street Branch, there were public workspaces with vaulted windows and ceilings, shelves of books, public computer terminals, a multimedia installation, and overlooking those spaces from a second-floor loft was a large collaborative sculpture called Common Thread.

“I know that CK worked with members of the community to develop this piece,” Mitchell Street Branch Manager Maria Burke said. “It really was this sense of humility to create this piece with a whole group of people doing self portraits into 3D pieces as one sculpture.”

The Milwaukee Public Library opened Studio M, a creative maker space in the basement of the Mitchell Street Branch, which hosted many creative workshops for community members, studio recordings, and it was a place for resident artists to work, learn and teach.

In the creative maker space, three large metal garage style doors were installed along the South wall to secure equipment, materials and multimedia workspaces. Those large metal doors were bare and gave the room an industrial look. Ledesma transformed all three doors in the maker space with murals on vinyl prints, while they were working as the library’s resident artist in 2018.

“We’ve got, what on first glance looks like three different dramatic murals,” Burke said. “But if you look more closely, you’ll see that they each blend into one another.”

Woodland Pattern Book Center in Riverwest

In Milwaukee’s Riverwest community, public spaces are often reimagined with artistic interventions, and at Woodland Pattern Book Center on East Locust Street, Ledesma contributed to that tradition in 2019.

On the South-facing exterior wall and the entrance to Woodland Pattern bookstore, a large mural and poem was painted for public observation. Alexa Nutile, Woodland Pattern educational director, and whose mother is from Puerto Rico, said the mural was inspired by influencers from Puerto Rico.

“Yeah, I love the mural, I love the colors, and I know they are inspired by another Puerto Rican artist, Bad Bunny and their music videos,” Nutile said. “I love the poetry that’s featured on the side of the mural, which is by Pedro Pietri, called Puerto Rican Obituary.”

The Puerto Rican Obituary was written in 1973, and it described the challenges and experiences of Puerto Rican immigrants and their living conditions in New York City. Pietri was famed for his founding contributions of the Nuyorican movement, which was started as an intellectual movement of diaspora Puerto Rican creatives.

“I think that the poem, actually beyond the Puerto Rican diaspora, represents all immigrants,” Nutile said. “The conditions that they face when they get to America, and the American dream that they’re promised, and how hard they have to work, sacrificing so much just to get by.”