Demitra Copoulos |
Demitra Copoulos is an interdisciplinary artist who lives, works and is a 2nd generation property owner on West Historic Mitchell St. She has spent much of her time there, incorporating a creative approach to helping revitalize the area and bring awareness to the potential of this commercial corridor. She has worked at the Milwaukee Art Museum in the Conservation and Registrar Department, earned her BFA degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, been an active board member of BID#4 for the last 15+ years, and chairs the Safety and Public Arts Committees.
Her studio practice strongly emphasizes the human form in its many expressions, from the physical, psychological and the physiological aspects, which all have played a role in her imagery. She has extensively exhibited in Milwaukee and Chicago as well as nationally, and has received funding from the Milwaukee arts board. She and her husband Tom Littmann, purchased and transformed an old 4 story building on West Historic Mitchell St. into an active artist live work community called; the Creative Cube. |
Lalo Garcia |
Lalo Garcia is a Milwaukee Native that grew up right in the Mitchell Street neighborhood and is now a fourth-year journalism major with a women and gender studies minor here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has always had a love for writing and wants to utilize his journalism knowledge and career in seeking social justice. She feels a news source that is not as polarized as most has potential to do a lot more for a community. Lalo’s writing has recently been recognized by HBO for the story on “How Two Wisconsin Brothers and Their Mother Allegedly Built a Vaping Empire”. The story garnered interest from a production company that works with HBO to make a TV adaption.
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Nora Godoy-González |
Nora Godoy-González was born and raised on the Southside of Milwaukee. She recently graduated from Marquette University with a double major in Spanish for the Business Professions and Public Relations. At Marquette, Nora was part of the McNair Scholars Program, the Educational Opportunity Program, Sigma Delta Pi Spanish Honor Society, and the Ignacio Ellacuria Dreamers Gala planning team. Nora also worked as a Non-Violence Educator with the Center for Peacemaking at Marquette University. Nora has also volunteered and worked at a number of community based organizations and schools like the United Community Center, Voces De La Frontera, the Boys and Girls Club, and Carmen Schools of Science and Technology. Nora's main interest for her future career is working in the non-profit sector, public relations, education, and becoming a translator.
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Katie Avila Loughmiller |
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Celeste Contreras |
Celeste Contreras is a Xicana - Indigenous artist who works in mixed mediums to share stories of ceremony, culture and tradition. Her work includes illustrations, print, book arts and animation. Her research includes storytelling through images and objects, exploring the condition of the book and book form and recalling the palimpsests of intergenerational trauma from migration and genocide of ancestors to relearning and decolonizing through ceremony. Currently enrolled as an MFA student at UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts, focused in Print and Narrative Form and holds a BFA from Alverno College. Contreras was the 2019 Gathering Art, Stories and Place Artist-in-Resident with the Milwaukee Public Library on Mitchell Street where she published a 200 edition box set of artists’ books, Artist in the Library, that will be distributed throughout libraries in Milwaukee and libraries around the country.
https://celestazuchitl.wordpress.com/author/celestazuchitl/ |
Jorge Lopez |
Jorge Lopez is a fourth generation baker that owns Lopez Bakery located on 11th and Mitchell Street. They started as a family business and have been in business since 1973 - now have multiple locations across the city. Jorge has also lived on the Southside of Milwaukee all his life, so the Mitchell neighborhood is very familiar.
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Alberto Morales |
Alberto Moralez owns a candy shop on Mitchell Street called Dulceria Alice that sells party supplies and Mexican candy. He was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco Mexico, but his aunt and uncle have lived in Milwaukee for most of their life. After receiving his license in business administration, the aunt and uncle that he had visited a number of times throughout his childhood passed down the family business and he moved to Milwaukee. He has been living here in Milwaukee for 1.5 years now.
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Nancy Bush |
Nancy Bush is the Executive Director of the Business Improvement District 4, which includes Historic Mitchell Street. She has lived in Milwaukee all her life for family, education, and her career and has been working in her current position for over 10 years. Throughout her time in the industry, she worked for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, MBTI Business Training Institute as a corporate officer for its four locations, and managed several large commercial office buildings in the downtown area.
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Tony Frausto |
Tony Frausto is a Milwaukee Native and currently the Branch Manager of the Mitchell Street Library. This will be his third year in the neighborhood, but has been working and actively involved in libraries for around 20 years after attending college at Marquette University. Tony has worked his way up the system and successfully managed a total of 5 different libraries, his first being Mill Road Library, which is now known as Good Hope Public Library. The opportunities that Milwaukee offers and his family ties are what keeps him here and being transferred to the Mitchell Street Branch brought him closest to his childhood memories.
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Isabel Castro |
Isabel Castro, also known as “Isa”, is a junior in the Architecture program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as an emerging community artist. She embraces her cultural knowledge within her studies, and finds a way to expand the conversation of design through using both of her languages, Spanish and English. She values community work and collaboration in the efforts towards cultivating a safe and inclusive environment. She constantly thinks critically upon her actions within her architectural studies and community art. She hopes to expand her knowledge in architectural design with an emphasis on empathy, culture, and community empowerment. As a research scholar and interviewee for this project, Isabel is invested in understanding how to assess the needs and accessibilities of the neighborhood through story-telling. She is determined to learn how to interpret architectural language into illustrations that can be accessible to all. She is invested and excited towards participating in her neighborhood through the lens of architecture and collecting data that is from multiple perspectives that represent the Historic Mitchell St. of Milwaukee.
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Gabriela Ramos |
Gabriela Ramos is a foreign architecture transfer student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. She is now a senior at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Throughout her career as a student, Social Architecture and Graphic Design have always been her main focus. She has participated in various social projects and was awarded with an honorable mention in the PISE contest of 2018. As a new resident, Gabriela's focus was on understanding the city's urban and social environment, which led her to participate in this project as a research scholar and interviewee. She has past experience with modular construction and projects with community involvement and aspires to contribute her knowledge in both Spanish and Hispanic culture to design and represent the neighborhoods of the Historic Mitchell Street of Milwaukee as accurately as possible.
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Tess Richard |
Tess Richard is a senior in the Architecture program at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. She works as the social media coordinator as well as the architectural intern at a small firm in Northern-Wisconsin called C&S Design & Engineering, a lifeguard at the Klotsche Pavilion on campus, and a Supplemental Instructor for a junior level studio. As a research scholar and interviewee for this project, she looks forward to exploring the reality of designing around and for the human, especially within the context of a community. She believes the current condition of social distancing poignantly demonstrates how public spaces and the public infrastructure have such a strong potential to encourage growth and become as asset to any community. In planning to attend Graduate school in the near future, she wants to continue the exploration or architecture’s relation to people and the public realm.
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