What a decade it was, for art

Local artists take stock of the 1980s in an arts feature. Printmaker Warrington Colescott says he expected blowback for his artistic attacks on the Pentagon, State Department and National Endowment for the Arts, but was instead rewarded with an NEA fellowship and invitations to exhibit in Bulgaria. Broom Street Theater playwright Joel Gersmann says his 1980s plays became "more action packed, complex and varied" than his 1970s work, "more political, dramatic and humorous." Author Kelly Cherry muses that, 10 years ago, she would never have guessed she'd "be so thoroughly ensconced here in Madison, where the politics are the strangest in America and the weather seems, to someone from the South, so completely unnecessary." And cartoonist P.S. Mueller writes that as his drawings "became more surreal" and "the gags more abstruse," they started to sell. "So here I am, cranking out my quirky little notions at the top of another decade and wondering, what next?"