Surf City, Wisconsin

The John Michael Kohler Arts Center

Sheboygan. What a delightful word to say. It almost encourages exaggerated pronunciation, especially when spoken with the rounded consonants and dragged-out vowels of many Wisconsinites. It’s a small city, hovering around 50,000 in number, and has been historically known as the “Bratwurst Capital of the World,” as well as home to the world’s largest American flag. On an old postcard, it boasts “Cheese, Chairs, Churches, and Children,” but in recent years, it’s also on the precipice of becoming, at the very least, a splendid place to see some fantastic art, new and old.

A few journalists and I were given the chance to visit the John Michael Kohler Arts Center for two days, which seemed more than enough, considering my metropolitan mindset and distaste for cold Winters (my San Francisco relocation was deliberate…) What I found, however, was that I could have stayed for weeks, meandering around this unfamiliar yet deeply welcoming landscape, investigating the fascinating history of this moderately-sized city that lies between Milwaukee and Green Bay.

Visiting Sheboygan in the winter is tough, as most Wisconsinites have entered what my shuttle bus companions referred to as, without humor or hesitance, “hibernation.” And that is not to say they can’t handle the cold. Wisconsin regularly dips below zero in the winter, and I imagine it probably has something to do with the fact that my fingers felt like they were going to break off after a three-block, gloveless journey with my (rather tasty) gas station coffee. This is coming from a Maine-native, given to regularly chastising Californians’ tendency to whine when the temperature drops below 50. The coldest temperature recorded in Wisconsin is -55 degrees.... Anyway, everywhere I went indoors was warm and the locals’ temperament even warmer.