Marshall McLuhan’s influential words, “media is the message”, are celebrated at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design through Dec 4th, 2021. The Global Village features international artists and collaborative collectives from all over the world. The exhibition opens a dialog and examines how people/communities connect, define themselves, and express their creative perspectives.

The overall curator/artist/conceptualist Nirmal Raja has gathered an impressive array of artists, activists, and visionaries in this presentation. The third category of international collaboration is the Global Art Collectives. The Carl Heyward and Akiko Suzuki-led group, the Global Art Project (GAP), is one of the most prominent exhibitors. And rightly so. The GAP is a membership-based international collaborative of mixed-media artists working in and across 12 countries. No wonder the GAP stands out as they have been intensely practicing this global village concept without much fanfare. GAP innovates in bridging myriad international perspectives through creating art via the exchange of collage and assemblage materials, starts, suggestions, discards, and ephemera between more than 60 members of GAP, distributed across 17 countries.

Global Art Project: Naomi Middelmann (Switzerland), Lawrence Philp (USA), and Ron Weijers (The Netherlands) Remnants of Memory, 2018

The conceptual and aesthetic complexity of multi-artist collaboration is fascinating in what “the work must go through to be made”. For example, one of the works in the exhibition is the result of a partnership between three GAP artists: Naomi Middelmann (Switzerland), Lawrence Philp (USA), and Ron Weijers (The Netherlands). Notably, the three artists to collaborate have to contend with the machinations of globalization. Their work depends upon the international flow and movement of raw materials and goods across multiple international borders. All these when the supply-chain crisis is in the news. Before Milwaukee, GAP had an exhibit at ARTHEKA 32 in Ostia, a Roman district in Italy. YES was the title of the exhibition of solo and collaborative works that upheld the assertion of the creative spirit in times of social distancing. However, their challenges were immense. An antiquated global delivery system tested the creative philosophy of art, the fruits of GAP’s trust and labor. Nevertheless, they indeed came out as the champions.

That spirit of art is currently being celebrated in Milwaukee, too, morphed into a dazzling grand quilt made by the quilt artist Akiko Suzuki herself. The layers of fabric demonstrate collaborative international initiatives that work through and over the obstacles like politics, language, culture, distance and depend on the instinct of creative individuals to transcend these artificial barriers and become a village of sorts. It celebrates the confluence of ideas than the idea itself, a fitting toast to the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote, “media is the message”.