02 DOLLAR GENTLE CYCLE
EXH - RES
DATE: 2022
Collaboration with Sarah Aziz
Exhibited at the Mobile Design Box Gallery in Milwaukee, WI
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Research and design assistance from Natalie Kuehl, Jacob Rohan, Franziska Burkard, Ryan Bramlett, and Marshall Reilly
UWM students enrolled in the Spring 2022 seminar titled Mono-Poly-Dollar, taught by Lindsey Krug, also contributed content to the exhibition
Photographs by Abby Platz
Collaboration with Sarah Aziz
Exhibited at the Mobile Design Box Gallery in Milwaukee, WI
--
Research and design assistance from Natalie Kuehl, Jacob Rohan, Franziska Burkard, Ryan Bramlett, and Marshall Reilly
UWM students enrolled in the Spring 2022 seminar titled Mono-Poly-Dollar, taught by Lindsey Krug, also contributed content to the exhibition
Photographs by Abby Platz
Dollar Gentle Cycle (DGC) is a pop-up exhibition that gently cycles the resources of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning through Dollar General Corporation (DG) in a vacant retail space on Milwaukee’s Historic Mitchell Street - where the two organizations are neighbors - to understand the extent to which both institutions push resources back into the communities they purport to serve. As the only school of architecture in Wisconsin and the foremost dollar store in the region, SARUP and DG play critical roles in influencing large-scale commercial practices and mom-and-pop-corner-shop small-scale domestic realities across the Midwestern United States. Workers from every DG store in Wisconsin were polled and consolidated donation lists from community support groups on Mitchell Street and around Milwaukee were compiled to glean insights into the type of dollar store items that facilitate civic life in the city. Krug and Aziz used resources from SARUP to purchase each of the requested items in bulk from Dollar General. The products are on display in a faux Dollar General in a storefront leased by SARUP’s Mobile Design Box and adjacent to Dollar General store #19014, and were made available for collection by the DG workers and organizations Krug and Aziz consulted.
The project builds upon Milwaukee’s history of using retail operations to challenge the standardization imperative and blur categorical distinctions between economy, belonging, and commodity; this legacy extends from Clarence Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly system for human and object automation to James Wines’ BEST Supermarket on Brown Deer Road. By folding the institutional ecologies of higher education into the physical spaces of America’s fastest-growing retail empire, the exhibition functions as an interlocutor that compresses the flow of object and building life cycles, labor practices, resource distribution, and logistics management, putting them into conversation with each other.
Dollar Gentle Cycle was made possible with the generous support of the University of Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning Fitzhugh Scott Fellowships, along with the UWM Office of Undergraduate Research, SARUP’s Mobile Design Box, the ACSA, and a team of collaborators and contributors from UWM, the University of Colorado Denver, and Dollar General.
The project builds upon Milwaukee’s history of using retail operations to challenge the standardization imperative and blur categorical distinctions between economy, belonging, and commodity; this legacy extends from Clarence Saunders’ Piggly Wiggly system for human and object automation to James Wines’ BEST Supermarket on Brown Deer Road. By folding the institutional ecologies of higher education into the physical spaces of America’s fastest-growing retail empire, the exhibition functions as an interlocutor that compresses the flow of object and building life cycles, labor practices, resource distribution, and logistics management, putting them into conversation with each other.
Dollar Gentle Cycle was made possible with the generous support of the University of Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning Fitzhugh Scott Fellowships, along with the UWM Office of Undergraduate Research, SARUP’s Mobile Design Box, the ACSA, and a team of collaborators and contributors from UWM, the University of Colorado Denver, and Dollar General.
