Faythe Levine’s life is all about creativity. Though she doesn’t come off as a rebel, the 31-year-old Milwaukee artist, boutique/gallery owner and filmmaker has crafted her life according to her individual vision since she struck out on her own after high school.
Recently she has found that her unique path has placed her at the forefront of a new wave of interest among young people in making things by hand using traditional and nontraditional materials and techniques.
Beginning in 2006, she traveled 19,000 miles to 15 cities to document the phenomenon in 80 hours of video. With her friend and colleague Michaela O’Herlihy, Levine is currently in the process of refining it into a documentary film, which she is funding through community support and her own credit cards, she said.
Levine spoke with The Chronicle in a recent interview at Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery, the store and gallery in Bayview that she co-owns with business partner, Kim Kisiolek.
She talked about the movement that Princeton Architectural Press, the publisher of her recent book, “Handmade Nation,” refers to as “what has emerged as a marriage between historical technique, punk culture and the D.I.Y. (Do-It-Yourself) ethos.”
One interesting and wonderful aspect of the movement in Levine’s eyes is that the word “craft” can be interpreted many different ways and those who make crafts can define it as they wish.
So, she said, people involved in this new wave of art and craft can, if they have a political agenda, make it very political. If they want to make it purely a business endeavor, or a way to make themselves better people by making something and giving it away, “it can be that, so it’s really nice because it doesn’t mean just one thing.”
While Levine acknowledges and embraces the fact that “handmade” and “do-it-yourself” arts and crafts have been practiced continually for centuries, she is interested in the reasons and ways this movement is re-emerging in the younger population.
“The people that I’m focusing on working with tend to be within the age demographic of 25-35. However, there are people of all ages making things,” she said.
Levine herself has “from a very young age, had that creative drive within me, which is pretty similar to a lot of the people that I’ve interviewed who are still working artists. I’ve never had any formal training per se and I consider myself a self-taught artist.”
Levine said she is drawn to hand sewing. “It’s very methodical and very meditative. And you can take it with you, which is really nice — so like knitting or crocheting, if you are on vacation, you just bring your little sewing bag and you can work on it.”
Levine believes that people are drawn to the empowerment that comes with developing a concept for something and then going through the steps of making it — “making the decisions as you go along, like what fabric or what color, and then having a final product at the end and knowing that you made that yourself.”
Levine thinks that her generation particularly has become disconnected from “where things come from and the process, because we’re so used to just going to a big box retailer and purchasing it and not having any thought about where it’s coming from or how it’s made.”
Handmade and D.I.Y. appeals to the young in a way that is similar to the green movement, slow food and conscious consumerism, Levine said. And she sees it as “very positive.”
“It’s very exciting, I think, creating an awareness around who we are and how we interact with our environment and other people and appreciating the things around us.”
“I think it’s really exciting that for my generation that’s so technology based and so fast paced with everything that we do, that so many of us are interested in slowing down and making things by hand and then sharing them with each other,” she said.
Rather than setting a lofty goal or mapping out a grand plan, Levine — who has won two Mary L. Nohl grants from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, in 2004 and 2007, and is receiving considerable media attention — has always focused on the creative ideas that interest her.
“I get excited about something and I just follow through with it. I think I set a goal of completing a project, but I don’t have unreasonable expectations of what’s going to happen.”
As an example, she said, she and business partner Kisiolek, decided they needed to open a store because they needed to have a physical space to show their work and that of other members of their art community. “So we just went with it and three years have passed and it’s been successful.”
When Levine, who has done freelance production work on films, decided to create her documentary, which shares the title “Handmade Nation,” with her book, she first made a trailer and posted it on YouTube, the Internet video Web site, in April 2007. It has received more than 100,000 hits and a lot of blog attention.
As a result, three publishers approached her and suggested that Levine also write a book on the same topic. With co-author Cortney Heimerl, she submitted a formal proposal to Princeton. It was accepted and the book was released in October.
It is already in its third printing, she said, and is being sold by the retail clothing chain, Urban Outfitters and was reviewed in the October issue of Nylon magazine.
Levine was scheduled to leave the day after her interview with The Chronicle to start a book tour in Los Angeles.
Levine discovered Milwaukee in an unusual way. “I had a pen pal who lived here — an old-fashioned pen pal from when I was 17. Someone who I met through the underground punk music community.”
After living in Minneapolis for four years, Levine came to visit her pen pal and found that she was attracted to Milwaukee because it’s an affordable, mid-size city that seemed like a reasonable place in which to be a working artist, she said.
“There’s a great local art community that’s really supportive and for me, because I travel for my work, it’s nice because it’s central. If I want to fly east or I want to fly west, I’m not spending seven or eight hours on a flight. It’s just four hours each way; it’s fantastic.
“And you can’t hope for a better airport than Mitchell — it’s the most mellow airport ever. I finally made myself stop going two hours early, because I realized I don’t need to.”
Since moving here in 2001, Levine has become a part of that art community and has actively participated in supporting the work of her fellow artists. The work of many local artists is featured at Paper Boat Boutique and Gallery. Further, she collaborates with other artists in a variety of ways.
This fits well with Levine’s guiding values, which she explained when asked how she would change American society if she had that kind of power.
“A big thing for me is people being aware of other people. That consciousness of having respect for the people around you, within your community, but also extending that on a larger scale.”
Levine said she thinks that “having a positive outlook on life and being informed about your neighbor — trying not to have preconceived notions about what people stand for and just being open to learning new things” are also essential for a better world.
“I was really happy with the outcome of the election, with seeing Americans excited and inspired to do something different or to change something within themselves.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that in my lifetime on that sort of level — like skin-tingling energy of people really wanting to make a change. You could sense the energy…. I just hope that doesn’t get lost after January. I think it’s really positive and it could really make a difference on a world-wide scale.”
Levine, whose father is a professional astrologer and whose mother is an organic dairy farmer said she is very close to her parents. They have always supported her creativity — when she was a child, by sending her to after school and camp programs in arts and crafts and as a young adult, “by respecting my path and trusting me to do what I’ve needed to do.”
Her Jewish father and non-Jewish mother are very spiritual people, she said, and though they have never had much interest in organized religion, they chose to send her to Hebrew school “just to make sure that, as a kid, I had some sort of sense of culture and [a sense of] what my family had gone through.”
Her best memories of her five years of Jewish education at “a very liberal temple” in Santa Monica, Calif., she said, were that studying Hebrew and connecting with a Jewish community made her feel that she was part of something larger.
Also one of her teachers “was the first woman I had ever met who had served in the [Israeli] army” and that made a powerful impression on her. Levine said she respected and loved this teacher and thinks such a strong female role model at that age, about 11-years-old, had a very positive effect on her.
As she gets older, Levine said, “the more interest I have in the history and the culture of what [being Jewish] means within my family.”
That is especially true in the case of her paternal great-grandfather, Harry Levine, a sculptor whose work is part of the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Levine’s work is on display through Jan. 18 at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) at the UWM Peck School of the Arts in Inova/Kenilworth, 2155 N. Prospect Ave. It is part of an exhibition of works by the recipients of the 2007 Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists, of which Levine was one of four fellows in the emerging artists category.
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