Going Home to the Right Light

Going home to the right light

In old boxes, Josie Osborne carefully arranges disparate and curious objects. Children’s blocks and old marbles. Tiny architectural remnants, often rusty or with worn paint. Scraps of journals, poems, books. Bones. Images of birds. Schematic-like drawings.

From each artwork, intangible sentiments are drawn from the power of odd, old, common things and bits of personal artifacts.

It is hard to imagine Osborne making her assemblages anywhere other than Milwaukee.

But she and the city were not an immediate fit.

In the early ’80s, her punk rock look was not that unusual. But she swears now that her multicolored hair and strings of earrings sent Milwaukeeans across the street when they saw her coming.

She shared an apartment with other students in a rundown, Victorian house just a half block up from Brady St., above the city planner’s office. She didn’t have enough money for a car, so she walked, biked and took the bus, which she liked to do anyway.

That, too, made her seem out of step here, she says.

“There are parts of the old blue-collar culture that are really good and I like to celebrate and then there are other things, like having a car and driving a car being a social status thing,” she says.

“To make a conscious decision to not buy into that is almost threatening to people.”

A not-so-hip Brady St.

Brady St. then was nothing like Brady St. now, either, she says. Except for Glorioso’s, the Italian grocery store, and a few other shops, seedy bars and boarded-up buildings were pretty typical.

“It was like the era with the hippies and flower children hanging out there had passed, but it hadn’t gained a new identity yet,” Osborne says.

Osborne was living on the east side while studying art and art history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. When she landed a job at the Union Art Gallery on campus, the community of artists opened up to her — which was engaging but limiting, too.

“It was this incredible explosion of creative energy, but then it was the in-between times when there was a lack of accessible things,” Osborne says. “There were fewer galleries then and fewer alternative spaces.”

It took several years to work her way through school. Many of her friends, other artists, were moving to New York, which had a lot of allure.

“You get into New York and it’s all about activity, and you drive into downtown Milwaukee, even on a weekend evening, and it’s quiet and still and you feel like you’re on the set of the ‘Omega Man.’ “

Osborne was also in the process of becoming more open with friends and family about being a lesbian, as well as being comfortable with it herself. Milwaukee wasn’t much help there, either.

“The bars weren’t just blatantly gay, they were tacky,” she says. “One of them felt like someone’s basement rec room. There were a lot of mullets, a lot of flannel plaid shirts and construction boots, and I walk in with my lipstick and semi-fashionable wanting to dance.”

It was Osborne’s first serious relationship that took her to Miami Beach in 1994.

“I had been talking about moving away for so long,” she says. “There were so many things that I wanted and a lot of it was a romantic notion of what a move would mean . . . “

She had never felt so out of place as she did in Miami. Walking and riding her bike was not only frowned upon, but downright hard to do without getting killed.

Few people seemed to have roots there, something she took for granted in Milwaukee. There was almost no middle class, either, she says. And poorer people were often assumed to be less educated.

Osborne struck up a conversation with an older woman one afternoon, while the two were working in the box office at the Florida Grand Opera. The woman was a wealthy volunteer. She called everyone “love,” Osborne says.

When Osborne made some art-historical reference, the woman was taken aback.

“She was like, ‘How do you know about that . . . oh my goodness, what are you doing here?’ “

Miami’s image

The youth and beauty culture in Miami Beach, a vacation destination, made Osborne feel “huge and hairy and pasty white and really old in my early 30s.”

She joined an artist cooperative in an old bread bakery warehouse, expecting the art scene to be perhaps her only haven.

“It was rare that I saw anyone in the studio cooperative . . . it was lonely,” she says.

She searched for good bookstores and “the people who read,” to no avail and found even public radio lackluster — all things she took for granted in Milwaukee.

Perhaps most striking, though, was how the constancy of bright sun made her long for Milwaukee.

The lack of light here, and its subtlety, when you do have it, create a sensitivity to it.

“I couldn’t stand that it was just sunny all of the time . . . There was no time for that introspection or that moodiness that makes you suddenly go, ‘Ah, the light, oh thank you.’ “

She began to think of Milwaukee in much the same way. Certain qualities were lacking, certainly, but she was now more discerning about the simpler, subtler goodness she left behind.

A job offer from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design afforded her a chance to return. Reunited, the relationship now works, and Osborne’s not sure whether she or Milwaukee has transformed more.

— Mary Louise Schumacher