MIAD bridgeOCTOBER 2010ISSUE #1

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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08eco-fashion by vannessa wainwrightclothing that is good for you and the environment you live in

06 this i believe by carlie nesgodaa local job can make you see things a bit differently

the domes by jade watringa volunteering experience that goes suprisingly well

miad’s vegetarian perspective by zac jacobsonwhat vegan/vegetarian options do for the environment and community

07 volunteering by zac jacobsonwhat statistics say about volunteering and MIAD

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04 OCTOBER 2010

department: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

T here is no question that MIAD has a strong passion to give back to the community. Attending the school

for my third year, it shows every year that students like to give back to the community in any way possible. I have attended a university in Florida for two years prior to MIAD, I have definitely noticed a difference in student’s attitudes towards community service. Students at the university I attended wanted to just get it over with because they had to. They dreaded it and complained about it. Here at MIAD, students seem to be happy and excited to do community service. It’s definitely a huge difference from an art school like MIAD. Throughout this magazine, you will find how MIAD bridges the gap between our school and the community.

Enjoy the read!

Zac Jacobson

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department: THIS I BELIEVE

I used to work at Piacentine’s Bread, it was more widely known as “the bread place”at the Milwau-

kee Public Market. Working alone, responding to the same array of questions day in and day out I found my enjoyment came from watching people in the market, learning about others through the behavior of customers towards others and their environment. I was intrigued to observe that most people were trying their best, mostly for them-selves, but also for their family and friends. This understanding I gained about the world gave me the chance to appreciate my role as a sales person. I was doing my best too, working two jobs, going to school full t ime and trying to figure out my goals as a designer, trying to find social time, and time for homework, and time to spend with those who matter most. This belief was strengthened during my travels with NOLS, where our instructor lent some insight into conflict resolution. One mentor taught me about “the as-sumption of good will.” This I believe is that [most] people do not intentionally hurt each other, but often chose the choice, which benefits themselves without consideration of other parties involved. It is the neglect of consideration, which causes pain and suffering. Not the decision to be hurtful. I think many of us are quick to judge actions without understanding why another person was driven to

TEXT BY carlie nesgoda

Carlie Nesgoda talks about the workplace and how she came to learn quite a bit about the people around her.

act a certain way. When I think about this further I begin to draw parallels between our great leaders of change in history like Gandhi or Dr. King who both demanded to understand the reasons of their oppressors to understand better how to react. Their movements were not to dominate or to over-come for power; rather they fought for equality and justice. Further proof can be found in that the non-violent life styles that each of these men chose; each choosing to confront situations di-rectly, responding with determination patience and understanding. These qualities are inherent in “the

assumption of good will” because they allow one to take the time to view a situa-tion from a multiple perspectives. This is so important when discussing topics of diverse interests; one must understand that each party has justification, though the morals of the

reason are often what is in question. I believe in “the a sumption of good will”, I believe that trying to understand the reasons of others around you helps to inform your actions and widen your per-spectives. I believe that most people don’t realize they are being rude. I believe that questioning others forces internal reflections. I believe most of us choose ourselves before others. Most impor-tantly though, I believe people can change.

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department: STATISTICS

While MIAD is a very passionate school about volunteering time to the community, we wanted to touch base on the percentages of students vs. volunteering in the MIAD community. It’s no suprise that students are becoming more and more involved with the community, especially after graduation.

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08 OCTOBER 2010

t’s the simple things in life that make a world of difference. From the food you eat to the clothes you buy everything we use on a day-to-day basis affects the world around us. From organic, eco, to fair

trade; what you’re wearing can make a difference. When looking around MIAD it’s not too hard to notice that many of the students have decided to support this environmentally healthy lifestyle too. Many students are making an impact through the artwork they make and the clothing they wear. Before you consider this the next fashion fad, consider how they’re helping out around Milwaukee.

This isn’t about what kind of canvas you’re using, although it could be. Buying and wearing eco-friendly clothing cannot only help you, but it also helps the world around you in a variety of different ways. Hemp or bamboo fiber clothing leave less of a carbon footprint and require less chemicals to produce. As young artists we like to make a state-

Article by Vanessa Wainwright

Fashion and the environment don’t seem to be

things that people would necessarily think about

when going shopping for clothes. Fortunely, there

are MIAD students and people around the area

who actually do.

clothes that make a difference

featured: ECO-FASHION

ment through our fashion style. Not only do many MIAD students try to make artwork that is in support of being eco-friendly, but they are also wearing clothing brands like Levi Strauss and American Apparel. Both of these brands make sure their products are produced in heathy safe envi-ronments from fabrics that are helpful to us and the planet. Imagine all of the t-shirts in your closet; are any of them organic? By buying organic clothing you can help the environment it was pro-duced in.

Not only does it matter whether or not you’re clothes are hurting the environment; but also whether or not they’re hurting the people pro-ducing them. Many clothing com-panies such as American Apparel have taken action to produce cloth-ing that follows labor laws. In some

cases workers are too young to be working or working too long to take care of their families. They are making next to nothing for the hours they spend producing t-shirt after t-shirt. Knowing that someone was paid honestly for their work and treated properly can give you a piece of mind when you’re looking at something fair trade or not.

Another factor that students at MIAD consider with their clothing is whether or not it’s vegan or animal friendly. Knowing this can be beneficial to a vegan or someone who cares about animals. When looking for vegan clothing make sure you’re buying fake leather or thick fabrics and simulate heavy materials. Tanning animals skins is harmful to the environment and the workers as wel l . Many toxins are used

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in the process of making a pair of leather shoes or purse. Wool sweaters aren’t just itchy for us, they are actually needed to keep the animal warm in their natural habitat. MIAD students have taken a stance against animal cruelty in many of their works, now many of those students are wearing clothing that they know isn’t made from animals. Take a step to make a difference for the things you care about.

As students, many MIAD students want to be ensured that they’re buying a quality pair of shoes that won’t fall apart. In general, most organic or eco-friendly clothing is made to last. Many companies today are using recycled car tires for soles and hemp for the canvas of their shoes. Brands like TOMS and Simple are making an impact with their either recycled or organic materials. As a student if you want

featured: ECO-FASHION

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to give to a charity through your clothing purchases, go ahead and order a pair of TOMS. For every pair of shoes you buy, they’ll give a pair to a child in another country. Al-though they might not fill this seasons fashion trend; they’ll keep you warm or cool.

Another simple step you can take is to buy used. Not only is i t cost e ffect for a co l lege student, it helps keep anything from sitting wasted in a landfill. Many MIAD students shop at thrift stores like St.Vincents and Yellow Jacket. Also, many thrift stores give their profit to different groups around their community like Goodwill. You’ll leave with bargains and something a little more unique than what you’d f ind f rom Boston Store.

Take a look around you and you’ll see many of the students at MIAD have on a pair of TOMS or an American Apwparel t-shirt with a custom design. Before you think it’s the next fashion trend con-sider the fact that buying eco-friendly clothing could not only benefit you but also benefit your own community, like MIAD or Milwaukee. Like MIAD students, make an impact everyday through simple things like the shoes you put on your feet. Help make a change in your community like our stu-dents have done by supporting your local fair trade clothing stores and thrift shops. Find your nearest Goodwill or American Apparel store to make your closet a little bit more green and help Milwaukee’s habitat.

TEXT BY jade watring PHOTOGRAPHY BY zac jacobson

Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory

featured: THE DOMES

Jade Watring speaks about her experience at the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory completing her service learning hours as a student at MIAD.

12 OCTOBER 2010

My placement was at the Mitchell Park Horticul-tural Conservatory, most commonly referred to

as ‘the Domes.’ As of now I have completed 25 hours of volunteer service for them. It wasn’t what I ex-pected. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they needed me to work for them as a graphic designer. I thought that I may feed the koi fish or other small tasks. I met my supervisor Paula Zamiatowski, who is the head educator there. She teaches classes, performs tours, and oversees the development of the growing Domes learning center (a large room designed to hold classes, mostly for kids). On our first meeting she took me on a tour. I had never been there before and I was not prepared for it. I was amazed at how beautiful each environment was. The service the Domes provide are extensive. The Domes are a part of Milwaukee County Parks, which oversees Milwaukee camping, golf courses, and other nature centers such as the Wehr Nature Center and the Boerner Botanical Gardens. The Domes in particular have an interesting array of services. Guided tours, music and light shows (Music under Glass), band performances, five-theme seasonal decorations of the show dome, educational programs. The educa-tion programs offer services to students from kinder-garten to college. The discussions are appropriate to the grade level, and last around an hour. The Domes are even available for private reservations for parties and weddings.

Volunteering is like defeating the evil of neglect, by volunteering your time to the overlooked society.

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your own rain garden. Rain gardens in Wisconsin reduce the amount of polluted runoff into Lake Michi-gan. Apparently you can get a grant for your rain garden; the Lake Michigan Rain Gardens Initiative will award grants to certain plants intended for a rain garden. That is the kind of thing that I find very interest-ing but would never have found out about if not for the Domes. In my opinion, they are successful. Overall I think that the Domes outreach programs are success-ful. It really shows that their main objective is to inform people. I th ink that is a real ly noble cause. What stands in their way; the Domes are pretty lax on self-promotion. They do not get record-breaking attendance either. I think for them to become a bigger force in the community, they need to make themselves bigger. I do not mean build another dome, although that would be cool. They do need to market more. The most powerful moment is when I volun-teered to hand out exotic juices at Rainforest night. It was much more fun that I expected. I was blown away at how nice everyone was. The whole spirit of the night was so good-natured. I felt so welcome about being there that I knew that it wouldn’t be the last time I volunteered there at a promotional funct ion.

the mission statement

To provide the residents of Milwaukee County and their visitors a horticultural showcase featuring five

changing floral shows per year, examples of tropical and arid floral displayed as naturally as possible, edu-cational opportunities, cultural programs, horticultural information, and the protection of certain rare and endangered species” (Domes Mission, Friends of the Domes). How does the agency fulfill its mission? The Domes’ organizations try reaching out to the com-munity, even with their limited staff. They only have five horticulturists, which I found to be very surprising. From the looks of the educational programs, they care all about human relationships with plants and their importance to the planet.

problems the agency tries to solve

The Domes organization really tries to educate t h e c o m m u n i t y a b o u t t h e e n v i r o n m e n t .

All around the outside of their facility there are infor-mational signs, and they give out informational fliers about different ways you can help the environment. The one I received from Paula was about how to start

I felt so welcome about being there that I knew that it wouldn’t be the last time I volunteered there...

featured: THE DOMES

Inside one of the domes.

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one frustrating moment

The only issues that I struggled with were involving technology and communication. The only comput-

ers in the offices at the Domes were really old desktops. My supervisor was unable to open the files I sent her most of the time and I would have to send her files in all of the different formats. Every service to the community can be related back to the work of Dr. Martin Luther King. I believe he really knew what it was like to be a part of a group of people that could relish in working together as a func-tioning unit. He knew the possibilities. So many others are skeptical as to how much good people can actu-ally achieve. He used the utterly simple but complex understanding of love to reach people- “ That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understand-ing goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat evil system” (Loving your enemies speech delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957). Defeating evil systems can be reduced to a smaller scale that overthrowing and evil

dictatorship. Volunteering is like defeating the evil of neglect, by volunteering your time to the overlooked society. The empty lot, the polluted river, the battered, the homeless, the elderly. So many citizens are content with their own worries. Content enough not to notice what is gong on in their cities. We remark at the trash in gutters, but do we ever stop to pick anything up? Hasn’t each of us negligently added trash to those gutters? And occasionally we may offer a coin to a jar promising the money to someone in need, but that’s usually as personal as it gets. There really is an absence of love, and it is replaced by apathy. Dr. King fought against not only hate and prejudice, but also apathy; “ He who pas-sively accepts evil is as involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.” I still think there is hope for the apa-thetic majority, because we can never give up hope. Vaclav Havel has a powerful opinion of hope; “Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands as a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situa-tion in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that

Rain gardens in Wisconsin reduce the amount of polluted runoff into Lake Michigan.

Inside the Tropical Dome.

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hope is” (An Orientation of the Heart 82). I believe the civil rights leaders were great men because they had the same deep, unwavering hope in us. The kind of hope that most of us are too pessimistic to trust. But Havel assures us that hope is what sustains all humans; “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something ill turn out well, but certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out… It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.” Hope is the certainty that all, one day, will be well because it has to. connections & insight

My action plan started out as a plan to improve the way the Domes look on the inside. It looks like they

have the same interior decorator as they did in the sixties. My idea was if they updated their interior, they would be more appealing as a fun contemporary place

featured: THE DOMES

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The total cost was 4.5 million dollars and it was completed in 1967.

Each dome is 140 feet in diameter at the base and is 85 feet in height.

They are properly referred to as the world’s first conoidal domes.

Designed by Donald L. Grieb Associates, Architect.

The three domes featured are the Floral Show dome, Tropical dome, and Desert dome.

The domes cover 45,000 square feet.

It was closed during the summer of 2008 to replace 800 cracked glass panels.

A $500,000 donation was given for a new external and internal lighting system.

All three domes maintain a precise climate and setting for the exposition of its contents.

Mitchell Park is one of the six original Milwaukee parks.

to go and attendance may rise. My other issue I ad-dressed was the fact that after each seasonal show in the show dome, they throw away hundreds of plants. They simply do not have the manpower to sell or dis-tribute the flowers themselves. My new action plan is to propose they enlist the help of volunteer organizations to give away those flowers. It would be great to see those flowers at a day care or retirement home. Flowers really have a way to brighten someone’s day, no matter how trite that sounds. Just talk to people who go to the Domes; plants are what beautifies the world. My idea is to ask a local church volunteer organization near the Domes (Ascentsion Lutheran Church, Lutheran Church ECLA, Archdiocese of Milwaukee, all on Layton Boule-vard). The labor could be done with two to three volun-teers and a pickup truck. Of course, agencies will be called to find out which are interested in receiving free healthy flowers. It may seem like a small task, but I really do believe small things like giving away flowers can make so much good.

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LEFT: Purple flowers in the Tropical DomeMIDDLE: Cacti located inside the Desert Dome

RIGHT: Pink flower blooming in the Show Dome

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featured: MIAD’S VEGETARIAN PERSPECTIVE

As the number of vegetarian and vegan based diets increase, so does the demand for more options around the community including MIAD.

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I t seems safe to say that there have been an increas-ing number of people who have become vegetarians

or vegans all around the world. There are many reasons for switching over to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, which include ethical, personal and environmental reasons. What these reasons are depend entirely on each person. One of the most effective reasons is the environment, which show many statistics encouraging a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. Being at an art school, we have an advantage of having vegetarian and vegan options. If you go to the MIAD Union, you probably won’t even find anything with meat in it, except for the occasional Cousin’s Sub.

But overall, MIAD is supporting the eco-friendly life-style even with their food. The cafeteria has vegan options, which is something you might not find at any other ordinary school. But because we are an art school and many of us make the environment one of our top priorities, we have that alternative. Though some students that come from smaller communities aren’t aware of how eating vegetarian or vegan can help our environment, MIAD does a great job at voicing those reasons. The environment is our surroundings, what we live in, and what accompanies us and other organ-isms. It’s what keeps us living, so it’s no rocket

Article by Zac JacobsonIllustrations by Constance Beckham

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science that we need to protect it and not take it for granted. Eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is an effort to help our environment and our community in many ways that most people overlook or are completely oblivious to. Some of the more serious positive effects on the environment by eating vegetarian or vegan include avoiding global warming, protecting and using less of our Earth’s limited resources, decreasing pol-lution, and saving many species from extinction. Global warming is an issue that has re-cently become an issue in the last few years. This includes increasing temperatures, melting icecaps and glaciers, higher sea levels, weather patterns that seem unpredictable, and currents of the ocean that have been changing. Global warming’s is probably one of the most serious issues the world has to face and it’s obvious that we as the human population must try to do as much as we can to prevent as much of it

as we possibly can. Going vegetarian or vegan helps this global warming issue in many positive ways. The production that goes into making food for vegetarians or vegans is beneficial to the environment because it uses less water, which helps us to conserve water on a regular basis. It takes multiple times as much water in the production of protein from animals as it does protein from plants. Another thing that helps the prevention of global warming is that less tropical forests and other forests are cut down to create more area for livestock to be raised and graze. Forests are a huge factor in our environment that gives a filtered air supply and only benefits our world in many other ways that are uncountable. These forests are ripped down and destroyed only for the production of animal protein for food. The reduction of rainforests and other forests also reduce the ability for less carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere. In order to keep our temperatures on Earth to be stable, we need to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Just by simply eating vegetarian or vegan can help this issue in so many ways. Rainforests and forests in our environment ripped down only for animal protein, raises another issue: the extinction of many species that have homes

Eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is an effort to help our environment and our community in many ways that most people overlook or are completely oblivious to.

featured: MIAD’S VEGETARIAN PERSPECTIVE

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in these forests. This not only includes animals, but plants as well. Many amphibians have already gone extinct due to global warming, but what will happen when many of these plants go extinct? What will our medicine supply for our health become when these plants disappear and are never to be seen or used again? It’s more of an issue than we think. Without some of these vital plants, could the human race someday become extinct? It’s a little far-fetched, but these things need to be thought about each day we are using hazardous ways and procedures of produc-ing food. Food that isn’t necessary for our health or our planets’. Pollution and the use of many limited re-sources is another factor that plays into our environ-ment negatively. Our environment is polluted daily through the use of large amounts of water, petroleum, grain, drugs, and pesticides that go into the production of livestock or animal protein. Manure and wastewa-ter with manure containing it are constantly polluting rivers and other water sources, which in turn harm the ecosystem, kill off fish, and block waterways. Just eating vegetarian or vegan can reduce all of these negative effects.

Milwaukee has vegetarians and vegans whose voice is heard throughout the city. Many res-taurants around the area offer quite a few vegetarian or vegan options. MIAD has also heard the voices of students whose diets are vegetarian or vegan. The MIAD’s cafeteria now offers options for the vegetar-ian or vegan, as well as the Union café on campus. These options help our community and the environ-ment in just the simple fact that there is no animal protein in these foods. It’s environmentally friendly and healthy and it’s in our community all over. It’s easy to help the environment simply by eating veg-etarian or vegan, so why not?

Our environment is polluted daily through the use of large amounts of water, petroleum, grain, drugs, and pesticides that go into the production of l ivestock or animal protein.

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