Spotlight Newsletter: Beerline Trail
Updated: Sep 8
The Fantastic Future of Milwaukee’s Waterways
In Summer of 2025, Jill Capicchioni, past Riverworks Beerline Trail Coordinator and current member of Friends of the Beerline, was approached by her friend and neighbor Jessica Laub with a proposal. Jessica was the Artist-in-Residence for Milwaukee Water Commons at the time, a program where local creatives join the Water School to learn about local watersheds and environmental justice and then create public-facing art. Jessica knew she wanted her art to be in her community, Riverwest, and knew Jill and Riverworks support public art in both Riverwest and Harambee. On a hot August day, Jessica and Jill got on their bikes and rode the entire Beerline Trail. They located a multitude of potential spaces for a mosaic, and after careful exploration and consideration, decided on La Estación. La Estación is a train-depot style bench installed behind Café Corazón as part of Phase One of the Beerline Trail project in 2009. Jill had been brainstorming putting a community bulletin board in La Estación, and with its cover overhead, it would be a perfect location to keep elemental impact on the mosaic to a minimum.
Community collaboration is a key part of the Water Commons residency, and Jessica knew she wanted the community to help create some of the mosaic's tiles. Jessica's studio is located in the Toy Factory on Richards, right down the street from our Connector Building, along the north end of the Beerline Trail. It made perfect sense to host the community tile event there. The Milwaukee River Estuary restoration is scheduled by the EPA for spring 2028, addressing the long-term environmental impacts of long-gone industry in an area currently considered highly toxic and hazardous to humans.
The plan involves dredging the riverbed to remediate contaminated soil and clear-cutting the banks to remove invasive species. Melanie Ariens (Water Commons) worked with Jessica to identify native species in our waterways that signal the recovery of the river's ecosystem, and that we hope will return in abundance once the plan is executed. These were then printed as photos that neighbors would use to shape and paint their tiles.
In March of 2026, fifty community members came to the Connector Building to make art. They were able to select their species, were given clay and tools, and got to work! As much as they were there to make art, they also took the opportunity to visit with their neighbors. While
folks carefully cut, carved, and embellished their clay, then added three layers of glaze, they met new people and shared facts about their animals with each other. All in all, people spent an average of an hour and a half on their tiles, with many working longer, and this event made as much community as it made art.
Once the community members' tiles, and the tiles for the rest of the mosaics, were fired, Jessica began the painstaking assembly process, bringing not one, but two beautiful works to represent the "Fantastic Future of Milwaukee's Waterways." The bulletin board/mosaic is two-sided, with Lake Michigan facing the Corazón patio and the Milwaukee River facing folks using the Beerline Trail. Jessica's goal is that this will help the community visualize what the riverbanks will look like when native species are replanted, attracting our native birds and animals and recreating a unique habitat in the heart of the city. The community is welcome to post their own information about community events on either side of the board.
The mosaics and new boards were unveiled in a community celebration this past June. Riverworks is grateful to Jessica and the Milwaukee Water Commons for coming to us with this project, and honored that this work is on the Beerline Trail.
When asked how she hopes this work will impact the community, Jessica said she hopes the poem on the Lake Michigan side will help "people think about the reasons they love the lake too … we really are so fortunate to live in a place with such beautiful and life-sustaining bodies of water." We asked Jessica about any hopes for continuing this work, and she said, "I would love to create more mosaics dedicated to native plant and insect species along the trail that could use some TLC too."
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