COMMUNITY

“Art provides new ways to start conversations about climate change with each other. It allows us to look at the issues from different angles and find new approaches to dealing with them.”

-Lynn Battaglia, Curator

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“The regional filmmakers of the Wisconsin Film Festival’s Wisconsin’s Own program often celebrate the power and diversity of our state’s landscapes. Joseph Brown’s Winter Cranes reminds us of the need to prepare for the coming winter, and the rhythms of migration. The dance drama North sets its love story in the sparse, white, winter Wisconsin terrain. Elemental explores the energies inherent in each of its beautiful environments. We live in a remarkable, magical place, and filmmakers help frame and focus the natural world so that we see it more clearly.”

-Kelley Conway, Director of the Wisconsin Film Festival

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“At the Aldo Leopold Nature Center, we are always looking for new opportunities to engage and educate our community, including integrating climate change concepts across our programming and finding new and interesting ways to empower students and visitors to respect and protect the natural world. We are excited to take part in this multi-disciplinary community-wide event, providing safe ways for the public to enjoy, reflect on, and be inspired to care about the state of our natural world.”

-Brenna Holzhauer, Director of Operations & Strategic Initiatives, Aldo Leopold Nature Center

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“We believe that a successful downtown is a sustainable downtown.

The Downtown Madison property and business owners encourage you to get out and explore your community through art and innovation.”

-Tiffany Kenney, Executive Director, Madison Central Business Improvement District

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“Winter is Alive! is a spark, a catalyst, and a mirror to consider our relationship to the environment. It is by coming together as a community that we can initiate dialogue to incite change.”

-Marc La Pointe, Artist, Project Coordinator and Co-Curator of Winter is Alive!

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“Change happens when inspired people take action. Sustain Dane provides holistic sustainability education that inspires, supports, and connects individuals and organizations to accelerate sustainability for community well-being. Participants in our programs have completed over 590 sustainability projects. Join us for an upcoming program and make a positive impact in local environment, equity, and economy.”

-Claire Schaefer-Oleksiak, Executive Director, Sustain Dane

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 “I am grateful for weather. She is a reminder that we (humans) are small, that we are all just cosmic specs of debris. We can’t control the weather, but we can control how we react to her. We can listen.”

-Anna Orbovich, Artist, Website Curator and Designer for Winter is Alive!

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“Enjoying the beauty of winter is an important way to connect to our precious planet.  The best way to acclimate to the cold is to be in it so put on your long underwear and get outside!  Winter is Alive Carnival has a huge vision to raise awareness about climate change and inspire positive relationships between people and nature.  These artistic collaborations help us to understand and respond environmental challenges. Thanks to all the artists who are making work and all the audiences who will participate.”

-Beth Racette, Overture Galleries and Community Programs

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Winter is transformational. In regions of the planet that experience winter, the seasonal experience permeates the habits and habitats of all of its systems and inhabitants. For humans, this includes many cultural activities related to winter, its approach, its fulfillment and its passing.

Winter is often used as a metaphor for death, as there is a sense of cessation and stillness that comes with winter, when animals hibernate and plants store their energy underground or expend their energy as seeds for the coming of spring. Winter cultures often express turning inward through storytelling or focusing on media. In the darkest time of winter, there is a sense of vitality in the quietness and the gathering of energy for new growth, and the return of the light and spring – the promise and the fulfillment of new life.

The spiritual and social rituals of winter are found throughout winter cultures – as expressions of hope as life becomes harder to sustain, as experiences of joy through family and social gatherings and as enlightenment during the darkness of winter.

Winter is Alive! a cooler world carnival is a celebration of winter and the culture of winter, but it is also an allegory – even as we celebrate, we are aware of the hardships that life and lives are facing globally due to the climate crisis. The goal of this project is two-fold to raise awareness about climate change and activate all of us to begin thinking in a new way but also to appreciate what we have – winter.

-Tamsie Ringler, Artist, Project and Artistic Director

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“For me as a sculptor winter’s snow is always bringing as much excitement as a new white canvas for a painter: space and material for new thoughts, ideas, a whole world for drawings, imprints and sculpture bodies.

Until now the honest concerns about the environment in the contemporary art world seemed to come from another star than the art world itself – with its fair-jet-set and the urge to overwhelm audience by the mass of material, the frequence of filling exhibition halls or the number of oversea studios and galleries. The sudden stop of this drift gives all of us a small moment to re-think and reset navigation.

Tackling climate change is no individualistic job and some of the best examples come – as in the art world – from the farest sides of society -might it be a tiny fishing village in Alaska, might it be a sensational project in an old oil country facing future horizons.”

-Susanne Roewer, Artist and Curator