Artist Statement on St. Michael Catholic Church Project

This project took me several days to put together, but the majority of the time was spent interviewing several members of the St. Michael’s Catholic Church staff, mainly Sister Alice Thepouthay and Blong Yang. Sister Thepouthay and Mr. Yang are integral parts within the parish that welcome in new immigrants to the parish from Southeastern Asia and help them to adapt to what Sister Thepouthay calls “the double struggle of language and poverty”.

During this project, I learned one very important lesson over again, which is “You can’t always read a book by its cover.” When coming up to the St. Michael Catholic Church, I figured that it would be a church that would be fairly run down based on its location, however, as I found out, it was quite to the contrary. The church was very much alive and well, being one of the pillars of righteousness on which this particular neighborhood was turned around on.

I felt that throughout the project it was important to not only give a small history of where the church once was, but where it is today through images. Therefore, I started off the photo documentary by using a vintage photo to show the church and its original surroundings, and the church as it stands today. For the next step, I felt to give the proper representation about the parish, that the most important part to focus on would be the diversity. The diversity was illustrated through the images of various different types of art present throughout the church.
These different styles of art demonstrated how even a church could adapt to its congregation.

The last few images illustrate what has happened to the area surrounding the church in recent years. The convent has been changed into a building used for various Hmong and Laotian women community activities, and the grade school has changed into the Urban Day School, one of two schools that help to get 3 and 4 year olds ready for grade school. The last photo is a picture taken of a few of the houses in the neighborhood, which appeared like any house you would see in most of the suburbs of Milwaukee. This goes against the stereotypical idea of many inner city Milwaukee houses, and surrounding area, as being run down, which attests to the effort put in by the members of the St. Michael’s parish

I’d like to thank both Sister Alice Thepouthay and Blong Yang for their hospitality and openness with this project. I really appreciated all the help you were able to offer me during this project, and I hope to be of service to your parish in the near future.