Sunday, July 10, 2016 – Milwaukee, WI
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| Rosy, Eleanor and Cooper in the RV |
I remember coming home from school back in January and telling my mom and dad about “this awesome workshop thing where there’s this famous photographer and he's gonna bring a group of teenagers around in an RV to do art stuff and they're gonna road-trip to New York and collaborate with the MoMA and all this wild stuff and Mr. Shipman says he thinks I could maybe get to do it!! Oh my god it sounds so cool!”
This morning, Mom brought that day up in the car…as she was on the way to drop me off for the trip.
Uh, holy shit, I’m actually doing this.
For those of you who don’t know already, I’m taking part in the
Winnebago Workshop, a free art and storytelling workshop for teens based out of Saint Paul and run by photographer
Alec Soth. (I’ll leave it to the
Kickstarter Video to give you the details).
I wrote about our first couple of excursions for
Rookie Mag, and since then we took a pretty transformative four-day trip to Iowa which I unfortunately haven’t taken the time to write about yet. But today marks the beginning of our two-week road trip to New York City, so I feel compelled to begin keeping a good record of what I’m up to in order to share with my family, friends, and anyone else who’s curious about my travels.
Everyone arrived at Alec’s studio at 8 this morning and we hit the road not long after. We drove southeast through light rain and almost all of us slept on the RV, prompting Alec to put unflattering pictures of each and every one of our sleepy selves on his snapchat story (I sought revenge and did the same to him when he went for a nap later).
We’ve started a tradition of making lunch stops at campgrounds and RV park restaurants–not ideal spots considering our high vegetarian count, but we make do–so we stopped at one outside of Madison today. It was the first of what I assume will be many baskets of sweet potato fries over the next couple weeks, which I say resignedly because I’d been on a bit of a health kick leading up to this trip and regret that I may not be able to maintain it. That said, I’m always a sucker for sweet potato fries.
We arrived in Milwaukee (our first of 4 stops leading up to NYC) around 4:30 and scoped out our Airbnb house. Let me tell you, we SCORED with this place. Not only is there a good amount of sleeping space for all 11 of us, it’s also near downtown, there’s netflix, a pool table, a huge backyard with hammocks and a hot tub.
We ventured out to the studio of Colin Matthes, which was on the seventh floor of an old industrial building with a view of Lake Michigan, and he told us about what he does as an artist and how he dives into his projects (most notably his “Essential Knowledge” illustration series and a solar-powered mini demolition derby). I love getting to visit art studios–everything about them is photogenic, even their messes, and I dream of all the colorful junk and paint splotches that will cover the studio I anticipate having someday.
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| Map at Colin Matthes's studio |
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| Ground floor of an industrial building |
I immediately loved the industrial character of Milwaukee. It seems like you can find repurposed old warehouse buildings almost everywhere, not just in specific parts of town like in most places. They’re extra gorgeous when the sun is going down and it shines through their foggy windows and reflects on their bricks, like it did when we stepped out of the studio to do some wandering.
First we found a group of guys doing motorbike tricks in a parking lot, and then when Galen, Chloe and I walked a few blocks away from the group we met a man named Tom whose favorite hobby was hunting for treasure with a metal detector. It was the perfect time of day for photos, too–the light, as I said before, was beautiful.
For dinner we grabbed Vietnamese takeout downtown, and extra-spicy curry noodles were a welcome change from the fried food I’d been having a lot of on our trips.
While half of us went to the grocery store to get breakfast food, the other half of the kids hung out in the hot tub before bed.
I’m happy I got over the culture-shock mound back on the Iowa trip because now I’m eager to dive into all we have to do these next two weeks (hopefully we’ll be so occupied I won’t even miss my parents–I’ve never been away from my family for more than three days before so this could get interesting). But there’s a strong connection between this group now and I feel really good about the weeks to come and what I might create.
Simply put, I’m really just excited as hell.
Over and out,
–Zophia
