Mary Louise Schumacher

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Artist Nirmal Raja was on a long flight home when President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order closing the nation’s borders to many refugees and immigrants from around the world, particularly those from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Raja, who had been visiting family in India, was not affected personally by the travel ban. But the massive crowds at O'Hare International Airport were a jarring way to get the news about the new immigration policy, just days after Trump’s inauguration. Protesters were chanting “Let them in!” as Raja, an immigrant from India and a U.S. citizen, struggled to get out of the airport and home to Milwaukee.

Because of Trump’s election and her experience at O’Hare, Raja stopped making art for a time. It wasn’t just the surprise of the political upset. She felt shock and sadness, she says, a shift in context that she couldn’t easily put words to.

Like many artists, she also wondered what the role of the artist is in fraught political times.

Eventually, Raja's mind drifted to the trunks full of beautiful saris she kept at home, auspicious gifts given to her for various occasions, usually by family members.

“I lived on the East Coast, and I used to wear them there,” she said of the garments, traditionally worn by South Asian women. “I felt fine in them, but here I don’t feel so comfortable.”

She didn’t wear her saris in Milwaukee, describing worries about “sticking out” as a woman from another culture. She thought about what it means to belong. She wondered what it might be like to express her cultural identity more publicly, more intentionally.

After some weeks, Raja returned to her art studio, determined to make work again. As a matter of discipline, she forced herself to make one painting a day.

Spills of watercolor inks formed soft-edged shapes on paper, paintings that resemble cells, ecosystems or universes. The paintings were purely apolitical, formal exercises that took a few moments to make and many hours to dry, during which time Raja started gathering her thoughts and making notes for a new art project.

'Oh, this is it'

Artist and photographer Lois Bielefeld was in her own artistic funk after the 2016 election.

Born and raised here, she was thinking a lot about “the sheer volume of people around me who thought very differently than I do,” she says, referring to Wisconsin turning red in the presidential election.

Bielefeld had grown up in a religious and conservative home, with family who believe she is leading a sinful life as a gay woman. Reckoning with opposing beliefs became especially acute when Bielefeld decided to marry, she says.

Her own views may be progressive, but she believed she was acquainted with a broad spectrum of political views because of that upbringing, though she was starting to question her understanding.

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She longed to make sense of the polarized and shifting political landscape through her work, though she wasn’t quite sure how, she says.

In recent years, Bielefeld has been making portraits that explore themes of gender and androgyny, as well as a series about Milwaukee families, in all of their manifestations and complexity, around the dinner table.

She noticed that some local photographers and artists had started documenting rallies and activism, but that wasn’t a fit for her.

Then she got a proposal from Raja, whom she’d never met.

In an email, Raja explained her idea. Wearing her saris, she would insert herself into public spaces around Milwaukee, some mundane, others beloved, from a trip to the eye doctor to City Hall.

She wanted to simply be herself, to celebrate her differences rather than to conform, and to document these quiet and deeply personal interventions through a series of photographs. She hoped Bielefeld, whose work she admired, would take the photographs.

“Immediately I was like, oh, this is it,”says Bielefeld, adding that it was the kind of collaboration she was hoping for.

Occupying space

Raja and Bielefeld call their project “On Belonging.” They’ve been collaborating for more than a year now and speak in an easy shorthand when they’re working. They've made 70 photographs so far.

Raja selects a sari or two for each shoot, unfurling and wrapping herself in more than 5 yards of brilliantly colored textile. Her bright pink sari picked up the pussyhats and signage at a woman’s march, for instance, where Raja looks directly at the camera and the crowd’s focus is elsewhere, somewhere just out of the frame.

While divisive political rhetoric was the impetus for the project, “On Belonging” is less a rebuke of certain political views than an exploration of the subtle cues and norms that make some people feel unwelcome or out of place in certain spaces.

People innately stereotype and categorize, often based on initial, visual perceptions, the women say. In those moments, racist and xenophobic thinking can be observed in small and subtle acts.

“You don’t know what people are thinking here,” Raja says. “Midwest nice is part of things here. People don’t want to say what they are thinking, but they will vote what they are thinking.”

The project was a way for Raja, who has called Milwaukee home for many years after living in several countries, and Bielefeld, who was preparing to move to San Francisco, to better understand the cultural and political landscape in a city they both call home.

"The work becomes an act of occupying space with a celebration of difference," Raja says. "It also becomes a gesture of learning what my adopted home is made out of, in all its beauty and ugliness."

People didn’t seem to notice Raja amid all of the color and costume of State Fair, though she definitely felt eyes on her during a shoot at a Brewers game. In some ways, the women have wondered if they didn’t give Milwaukee enough credit.

“I do get stares, but I haven’t so far gotten any rude comments,” says Raja. “I totally thought I would….”

One photograph in the Miller Park women’s room is a complex portrait of both friendliness and distance among Raja and a woman, a stranger, who came into the bathroom and agreed to be part of the project.

The complex cultural negotiations of people and places are not always easy to read in the resulting photographs. Sometimes they are as much about how the viewer looks at the them.

What does it mean to stand in a sari facing the altar of an old church, amid the novelty architecture of the Oriental Theatre or in front of Freedom Grocery in a mostly black neighborhood? What does it mean for her to walk alone across the 16th Street viaduct, once known as a racial dividing line and famous for being the site of fair housing marches half a century ago?

How did people perceive Raja’s garments on Bradford Beach or at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, where Christmas decorations and a sign for a meeting of a group who celebrate a freedom from religion coexisted?

In one photograph, Raja walks across a downtown bridge in a deep purple sari, while a group of pompom-carrying cheerleaders in red, white and blue walks the opposite direction. American flags flap above Raja and the girls.

In another image she stands beside the famous Milwaukee Public Museum diorama featuring Native Americans hunting bison. The historical confusion over the term “Indian” made that spot a natural for the project, Raja and Bielefeld say.

Raja wore a handwoven sari to the museum. She associates these with ideas of resistance and India’s freedom struggle in the early 20th century, when Mahatma Gandhi encouraged independence through home weaving and the boycotting of expensive foreign fabrics, often made with cotton from India.

Raja also describes a kind of self-segregation that happens among some immigrant communities, including her own. Some focus on re-creating a sense of home through tight-knit circles, she says. She and Bielefeld made photographs during some of these intimate gatherings, too.

As time went on, the sites for “On Belonging” became more personal to the women and the conversations they were having through the project. They made a photograph during a bus ride to Mayfair Mall with Bielefeld’s mother, for instance.

“This is my most courageous work so far,” says Raja, who has never included her own image in her work or worked in public before. It’s a departure for Bielefeld, too, who is used to more controlled circumstances, creating photos that are carefully choreographed and lit.

Many artists across the U.S. have refocused their art making around issues of cultural identity and politics in recent years, an art-world trend that has only become more pronounced in the current political climate.

“We wanted to take notice of what’s happening,” says Raja, adding that cultural vigilance seems needed. “That’s what’s happening now. Everyone is anxious.”

Bielefeld says: "It has been fascinating to dig much deeper into Milwaukee … and to see how we fit in."

"On Belonging," and elements of a second collaboration about the ways women are underrepresented in versions of Milwaukee's history, will be presented in spring of 2019 at a soon-to-open art gallery, The Warehouse, 1635 W. Saint Paul Ave.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. Connect with her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and subscribe to her weekly newsletter. Email her at mchumacher@journalsentinel.com.