DOLLAR GENTLE CYCLE
+ Exhibition (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Fitzhugh Scott Design Fellowship)
Dollar Gentle Cycle is a pop-up exhibition that gently cycles the resources of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) 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 ways both institutions grant and restrict resources for 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 small-scale mom-and-pop activities across the Midwestern United States. The project involved polling workers from every DG store in Wisconsin and compiling consolidated donation lists from community support groups in Milwaukee to glean insights into the type of dollar-store items that facilitate civic life in the city, then used resources from SARUP to purchase each of the requested items in bulk from DG. They were staged in a faux Dollar General in a storefront leased by SARUP’s Mobile Design Box and adjacent to Dollar General store #19014.
Dollar Gentle Cycle is a pop-up exhibition that gently cycles the resources of UW-Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP) 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 ways both institutions grant and restrict resources for 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 small-scale mom-and-pop activities across the Midwestern United States. The project involved polling workers from every DG store in Wisconsin and compiling consolidated donation lists from community support groups in Milwaukee to glean insights into the type of dollar-store items that facilitate civic life in the city, then used resources from SARUP to purchase each of the requested items in bulk from DG. They were staged in a faux Dollar General in a storefront leased by SARUP’s Mobile Design Box and adjacent to Dollar General store #19014.
