MILWAUKEE, WI.- Sculpture Milwaukee presents Power of the Margins, the organization’s tenth annual exhibition of free outdoor public art in the streets of downtown Milwaukee. Now on view, the 2026 exhibition celebrates the vitality of artistic communities working outside the major cultural capitals and the distinct creative strategies they develop as a result.
Evolving out of conversations between Sculpture Milwaukee and a group of international curators and artists, the exhibit brings together seven works in various media by artists from the Baltics, Japan, and Milwaukee.
John Riepenhoff, Sculpture Milwaukee’s executive director, noticed in his travels to international art fairs and curatorial exchange programs that some of the most arresting works were coming from so-called second cities with their own vibrant, artist-run art scenes. “The margin is where the most unguarded experimentation tends to happen, where necessity produces invention, and artists aren’t optimizing for institutional recognition,” Riepenhoff said. “The idea that art coming from outside the center generates a kind of seeing that being in the center doesn’t allow became a driving theme of Power of the Margins.”
Connections with curators and artists from other communities with art scenes similar to Milwaukee’s developed organically. “After completing Actual Fractals—a three-part, three-year exhibition built around pattern, interconnection, and the many Milwaukees within our single city—I was ready to invite peers to help build perspective on what cultural production looks like in a city like ours,” Riepenhoff said. “For years I had been researching artist-run scenes, including in places like former Soviet-occupied states. I wanted to understand how rigorous conceptual art scenes sustain themselves outside the major markets,” Riepenhoff said. In Tallinn, Estonia, and Riga, Latvia, in particular, he “found avant-garde scenes with more in common with Milwaukee than either city has with New York or London—genuine, community-rooted, inventive, and largely overlooked on the world stage for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the work.”
To bring works by artists living and working in the Baltics to Milwaukee, Sculpture Milwaukee teamed up with Evita Goze and Zane Onckule, director and curator, respectively, at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, who had been working with similar ideas in their region. With support from the Baltic Culture Fund, Goze and Onckule became Sculpture Milwaukee’s Baltic partners. Artist selection for the Baltic section of Power of the Margins also came with support and input from the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Kai Art Center in Tallinn, with each institution bringing deep knowledge of their own communities.
For assistance with the exhibit’s Japan section, Sculpture Milwaukee partnered with Mizuki Takezaki, a curator from the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art in Marugame, Japan.
When these curators’ and advisors’ independent selections came together, common themes emerged. The curatorial approach ultimately “connected through questions of public space, memory, social structures, and regional experience,” Onckule said. “The exhibition focuses on artists and communities working within geographically, politically, or culturally overlooked contexts, highlighting how these positions can generate new perspectives on identity, public space, memory, labor, and collective experience.”
“Sculpture Milwaukee has shown how public art can expand possibilities, and I deeply resonate with the vision of Power of the Margins,” Takezaki said. “I’m thrilled to introduce Japanese contemporary art that offers delicate and decentered ways of seeing the world. I hope people living and visiting Milwaukee will encounter the city through these perspectives.”
About the exhibition:
Spanning roughly a mile of Wisconsin Avenue, Power of the Margins reveals new connections among artists from Milwaukee, the Baltics, and Japan who are experimenting with form and identity, technology and spirituality, politics and aesthetics.
At its western edge, the exhibit features Standtune (2026), a newly commissioned work by Augustas Serapinas, a Vilnius-based artist whose practice involves recomposing public spaces to foreground and question the assumptions that shape them. On view outside Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art, the 40-foot structure, built with locally sourced birch, riffs on a style of fencing (standtune) used in rural Sweden to explore the dynamics of social hierarchy, economy, and memory embedded in objects people typically pass without questioning their meaning or purpose.
A few blocks east, at Baird Community Commons, Statue of Woolen Sock (Keep Warm) (2025) rises from the plaza at the intersection of Wisconsin and Vel R. Phillips Avenues. The piece, a towering copper sock by Flo Kasearu, an Estonian multimedia artist who also runs her own house museum in Tallinn, naturally reminds viewers of homey, cozy things. But at this monumental scale, the sock also becomes something else: part watchful neighbor, part silent authority.
Mounted on the facade of a building at 219 East Wisconsin Avenue, Neo Manyo (2023), a billboard-scale illustration by the Japanese artist Yuichi Yokoyama, reimagines a scene from the 8th-century anthology Man’yōshū, one of Japan’s oldest poetry collections. A manga artist and painter, Yokoyama explores the boundary between manga and contemporary art. Here, using an approach often called “neo-manga,” he strips away conventional storytelling in favor of pure motion, rhythm, and repetition to depict a ship moving through churning water. The ancient poem inscribed across the scene was written by the Buddhist monk Sami Mansei: “How shall I liken this world? It is like a boat that rows away at dawn, leaving no trace behind.”
Fridge Cultures, a lightbox image created by the local collaborative Open Kitchen, is tucked in the alley next to the restaurant Amilinda at 315 East Wisconsin Avenue. Founded in 2016 by Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen, in partnership with Alan Medina, Open Kitchen brings artists, growers, cooks, and neighbors together around tables to investigate shared questions about ecology, identity, land, and community. Presented in collaboration with the Lynden Sculpture Garden, where Medina and Christensen are ongoing resident artists and were 2025 recipients of Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships, and the Haggerty Museum of Art, where an exhibition of works by Open Kitchen and other recent Nohl Fellowship recipients recently showed, Fridge Cultures shows a refrigerator packed with fermenting foods—a sourdough mother tended by collective members, a yogurt culture sourced from an artist residency in Istanbul, and an innovative double-cream Colby cheese developed by a local artist and creamery—along with pickles made with seasonal Milwaukee produce by XCellerator Pickles, another local collective. The vibrant image illuminates the earthy edges of what we digest and food’s fundamental ability to create culture everywhere.
Perched in front of 411 East Wisconsin Avenue is Gaze Grows Bones (2026), a large-scale work by Indriķis Ģelzis, an artist who lives and works in Riga. Ģelzis draws on personal memory, imagination, and experience, then works his ideas into physical form through cutting, welding, and bending steel. With Gaze, he clusters of steel spheres along a curved vertical spine in a way that suggests eyes. And with a scaffolding-like structure surrounding the work and chains connecting its parts, the piece points to the possibility that years of looking—at screens, at each other, at the world—have changed perception. The work asks a quiet question: Does the way we see the world eventually shape us? And who—or what—shapes the way we see the world?
Looking at first glance like any abandoned water bottle, Ryoko Usui’s PET – Portrait of Encountered Things (2026) is a piece of trompe l’oeil—a meticulous glass reproduction of the standard plastic castoff. Born in Shizuoka, now living and working in Tokyo, Usui began photographing abandoned containers in 2009, noticing how often each one seemed to hold a trace of whoever had left it. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, he began remaking lost bottles in glass, transforming them into objects that were both more fragile and more precious. Coming soon, Usu’s piece for Sculpture Milwaukee will sit near street level, easy to miss, but that’s partly the point—an invitation to stop, look more carefully, and consider what we overlook every day.
At the lakeside edge of the War Memorial campus, near the Milwaukee Art Museum’s east entrance and Robert Indiana’s famous “Love” sculpture—formally, The American LOVE (1966), one of the legacy artworks Sculpture Milwaukee has brought to city cultural institutions for permanent display—viewers will find Law of Immutability (1974/2026), by Kishio Suga. Born in Morioka, Japan, Suga has spent more than fifty years exploring what it means to simply let things be—to allow natural and manufactured materials to exist in relation to each other, without forcing them into something new. Here, by covering stones already on the ground with vinyl sheeting, Suga nestles new questions about beauty and permanence into the existing landscape.
Speaking of the relationships of the artists in the exhibit to each other, Riepenhoff said: “What I notice across the work is a shared orientation—toward public space as a site of inquiry rather than display, toward materials and forms that often challenge the logic of commodity, toward the viewer as an active participant rather than a passive audience. Ģelzis embeds personal memory and perception into industrial abstraction. Serapinas reroutes inherited craft traditions to expose the social assumptions underneath them. Kasearu builds monumentality out of vulnerability rather than power. Suga, co-founder of the Mono-ha (‘School of Things’) movement, works with already present stones, asking you to see what’s always been there in a different way. Usui renders discarded plastic bottles in glass, restoring presence and weight to things the city has forgotten. Yokoyama translates Japan’s oldest waka poetry into kinetic imagery about water and weather. Open Kitchen works in soil, in the apiary, in seasonal and Indigenous ecological knowledge—a radical extension of the show’s premise, operating outside the realm of art objects as we typically understand them.”
Distinct practices, developed in distinct contexts, converging on a shared question: What does it look like to make serious work outside the terms the center has set? Power of the Margins empowers viewers to look, contemplate, and discover their own answers.
