How I Got Here
I’m an abstract painter located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There are two things in my life that have merged in the recent past, inspiring me to develop Calla Terra Studios — my childhood going to Wisconsin’s Northwoods, and my experience working in community-based arts, specifically developing and managing youth programming with my last employer. I’d like to share these stories with you through a series of posts over the next week. This is my introduction to Calla Terra…
A nonprofit program manager…
For 17 years, I've been working in the arts and culture industries and, in various formats, and intermittently with youth ages 1-21 during that time. In 2017, I made a career switch. I started working as an educator and administrator at arts nonprofits while pursuing my Master's Degree in Community Arts; one of these organizations was Artists Working in Education, which I credit for introducing me to the professional world of community-based arts education.
One year into grad school, I started my job as Program Manager at a nonprofit called ArtWorks for Milwaukee, which employs high school students for arts internships to help them develop career skills. In my four-year tenure at ArtWorks, I oversaw 16 arts programs located in 12 different Milwaukee neighborhoods with over 40 program partners, 30 teaching artists, and 100 high school interns. As I expand my portfolio with Calla Terra, I’m sure I will reference many of these experiences in the future.
ArtWorks’ filmmaking interns with lead artist, Emily Moore, and me at the premiere screening of the team’s short film “COVID: A Teen Experience” in summer 2021
At ArtWorks, my most notable accomplishment was developing two year-long programs that merged visual arts media and social justice, specifically mental health and environmentalism. This was a result of two major observations I found in the teens I'd worked with until that point: they want to make a difference in their communities and mental health conditions significantly impact their day-to-day lives.
Personally, I felt I did my job when ArtWorks’ departing interns would tell me they had more self-confidence. I know, having been a troubled teenager not all that long ago, that confidence is absolutely everything. After the first run-through of programming with this new content, we found abundant evidence from intern exit interviews that the young people felt more connected to their communities, had greater understanding of other cultures and backgrounds, developed self-efficacy and leadership skills, and were empowered to self-advocate.
My Wisconsin story…
I was about two years old when my parents brought me to the Northwoods for the first time. I most often visited Boulder Junction with my dad and sister in a cabin overlooking a small serene lake. There are pictures of me at sunset by the docks, wearing a striped shirt and yellow shorts, with blonde curls and a cheesy smile, and I am in heaven.
Some of my fondest memories are of sitting in the fishing boat with my dad, “Musky Marty” (his childhood nickname), with him whispering, “Lauren, look, look, look!” and pointing to a musky following his sparkly bait on the water’s surface alongside the boat. The muskies were terrifyingly large to a young girl, in comparison to the four-inch perch I’d catch off the dock with worms.
My dad would say the same, “Look, look!” when we saw a bald eagle across the lake. He’d slowly row the boat over to the line of trees, and the next bluegill we caught was the eagle’s victim. My dad threw the little fish up in the air and we’d watch the eagle swoop down, snatch the fish, and land on the next treeline. As a little girl, I was pretty devastated to see a fish go, but then again, seeing that bald eagle swoop down in front of us was like magic.
I remember when the loons began to call around dusk, my dad again would quietly row the boat for a closer look, prompting the loons to duck underwater abruptly and reemerge 100 feet in the other direction. It was like a game trying to find them pop back up. Another favorite memory was when my dad decorated the sidewalk in front of our cabin with a smiley face of dried corn from the 50-pound bag we brought up to feed the deer. For a six-year-old, four deer stopping by the front door for a feast was a most joyful experience.
Everything up north was supremely special. My dad let us sit in the trunk of his pick-up when riding on the gravel roads (both of which he would never let us do anywhere else). I drove a car for the first time when I was 15 on one of the sideroads in Boulder Junction. I caught my first fish there, watched my first horror movie (too young) there, and made my first best friend there. The Northwoods was the subject of projects during all years of my education, and was the reason I understood what “family” meant as a little kid.
The coolest part was that the past three generations of my paternal side had enjoyed these memories before me. My great-grandpa traveled to Boulder Junction from Illinois during the Industrial Revolution to take a load off and have a drink with his buds. His daughter, my dad’s mom, passed of Melanoma in December 1972. She was the glue of the Martin/Zens family of six — that is clear to me now — and she clearly instilled the importance of natural serenity in my dad, which he passed to me.
Going up north was a retreat, rather than a busy, action-packed getaway. We never rented speed boats (in fact, my dad was opposed to them because “they scare the muskies away”), watched TV, nor spent more than one hour of the daytime inside. Although it was usually only one or two weeks of every year that I spent my childhood in Boulder Junction, I equate most of my developmental years with the Northwoods.
As I grew up, it was the escape I needed from the anxieties I had as an adolescent. Sometimes it felt more like home than my actual home did — feeling a greater connection to the wind rushing past me when I rode my bike through the trails, than I felt while riding my bike around our city block.
I look back on my late teens and early 20’s and wish I hadn’t spent as much time away from the Northwoods as I did. I was busier (and stressed and self-involved), graduated high school, moved to Chicago, graduated college, and suddenly it was several years later. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I began to remember the immense significance of visiting the Northwoods, a home away from home that makes my heart and soul feel so complete.
I'm so beyond grateful to have my husband, Marc. He comes from a family that cherishes all the outdoors values of my own family. He grew up camping, spending time at a family lake house, and a cabin in the woods. I feel so lucky to have him by my side fully supporting the decision to have our future children grow up in the Northwoods, just like I did. In my eyes, it wasn't an option not to have our children have the experiences I had in nature when I was growing up.
Marc and I got engaged and married under the trees and along a lake in Boulder Junction, exactly in the place where I grew up, and that makes it all the more special. If you’d told me when I was a kid that that was my future, I wouldn’t have believed you. How did I get so lucky?
Marc and I take every opportunity we get to travel to the woods. We would pass up a vacation in a large, famous city for a nature-filled up-north experience. Even when I was a kid, if my parents had asked me if I wanted to go to Disney World, I would have said, “No, up north, please.”
I get teary eyed thinking of how astoundingly lucky I was to have the opportunity to grow up in a sanctuary like Wisconsin’s Northwoods. That is why my deepest hope is that, someday, I can continue the tradition with my own children, and that the Northwoods can foster, in them, the same feelings it fostered in me throughout my life, especially as a child.
My hopes, in sum, very much align with my grandmother, Patricia, who I never met, but so wish I could have. She was a children’s book author and wrote often about her family and nature. My sister read her essay titled “Wisconsin Wellspring,” published in a local magazine in 1970, at our wedding. I’d like to close with that essay below. Enjoy her beautiful creative writing — It’s just perfect.
Wisconsin Wellspring by Patricia Martin Zens
Originally published in Exclusively Yours, 1970
This time of year, when the blood rises in the body as sap in the trees, I have become accustomed to return to notes of previous vacations. Even the supposedly sylvan life of the suburbanite needs the refreshment of spirit from the wellsprings of nature found in wilderness beauty. As adults in the harried world of the ‘60s we were seeking to restore our souls.
The sun smiled a late June benediction upon us as our packed- to-the-hilt station wagon began eating up the concrete miles to our rustic destination. As we proceeded further north, the land became pinned cushioned with trees. Lakes studded the countryside, and the children were kept busy identifying one upon another.
In due time bags were unpacked, beds made, and a supper-of-sorts assembled. Dragonflies perched on our windowsill, resting their cellophane wings. A pair of bald eagles nested behind the lodge house. Deer wandered casually around the grounds. Our days flowed calmly as the water in the smooth lake.
Evenings we made watery excursions into the lake, made lavender by the late setting sun. Weeds showed their tips like candlewick, and below bloomed like Christmas trees in an underwater forest. The sky seemed as big as forever, with sun-setting rays blooming from one elephantine cloud. All around with trees trimming the shore and connecting sky to earth. Mayflies were hatching in abundance and mosquitoes lent their itchy presents to the evening, precipitating our decision to return to shore.
As we were driving down the road, leaving our week’s retreat, we noticed the yellow water lilies beginning to bloom and met what proved to be our final deer, sitting in the high grass, flicking his ears at us. We stopped to relish the sight of him, and as we did, he rose and bounded off to the woods, his tail flying like a small white streamer.
As we drove off, thoughts nibbled at my mind of the pristine beauty of nature that had been ours. I wondered if our children would be able to bring their families to the lovely clean waters of the northland; if nature would, in this age of almost over-civilization, be available in all its beauty and simplicity for a future generation. It is to be hoped that the children of our children's children will someday be able to restore their souls, as we did, at the fountainhead of nature we found in the Northwoods of Wisconsin.
Remember the nonprofit work I mentioned above? I invite you to follow along with me in the next few writings to learn about the environmental arts program I developed (which ultimately led me here) and the plastic bottle cap mosaic project that damn near changed me. I also share a follow-up on the neighborhood where the eco project took place — a nice end to the story.
