Paula Crown | JOKESTER | 2018

Photo by: Kevin J. Miyazaki / Sculpture Milwaukee

Paula Crown has an active studio practice of drawing, painting, video and sculpture, using high tech tools and ancient techniques while committing to sustainability. Her practice is also rooted in social activism. She has been involved with the national movement For Freedoms, launched in 2016 by by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, contributing imagery that juxtaposes the hard fact of guns against the political platitudes of “thoughts and prayers” that attend mass shootings in our country. That Crown’s home of Chicago has had historically one of the highest gun violence rates in the country makes this type of intervention timely and meaningful. In other works Crown highlights the climate crisis, and the personal perils faced by immigrants around the globe. 

For several years Crown has created work to bring the growing environmental crisis caused by single-use plastic to our attention. Single-use plastic includes the flimsy plastic bags from the grocery store and expands into virtually every product we buy from amazon, the grocery store, the mall, and the convenience store. There is no escaping this product.

The image Crown uses is the ubiquitous red plastic SOLO cup that has become synonymous with frat parties and floating refuse. Crown suggests through her giant work JOKESTER, 2018, that although there is a big party going on somewhere, someone is responsible to clean up afterwards. The slick red cup—a cry of joy or alarm—sits sedately on the sidewalk, unaware that it is crushed and discarded after a rough night’s use. 

The Third Ward is a deliberate site for the work. As the area adjacent to Milwaukee’s Summerfest grounds that plays host to “the world’s largest music festival,” and numerous concerts and ethnic festivals held throughout our warmer-weather seasons, the Third Ward becomes that ground zero for cleaning up refuse left behind by transient visitors. 

Like all sites of human habitation, Milwaukee was founded on the shores of a great body of water that sustains life, food, agriculture, manufacturing, sport and recreation. Yet each pond, stream, river, lake and ocean is increasingly under threat from the chemicals that are released through our sewer system, the air-borne particulate matter that settles from the sky, and the tons of garbage that finds its way into the very lifeblood of the earth. Crown’s giant red cup, crafted to perfectly mimic the throw-away culture we live in, becomes a shameful reminder of how we treat Mother Nature.