Fort Atkinson Club looks to grow diverse programming

FORT ATKINSON — The Fort Atkinson Club is partnering with UW-Madison’s Division of the Arts for an upcoming conversation with Laura Anderson Barbata about textiles and preserving cultural heritage.

The presentation “Thread: Artists, Activists, and Educators working with Fiber,” which has also been made possible through support from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, is Saturday, Oct. 26, from 3-5 p.m., at the Fort Atkinson Club, 211 S. Water St. E.

Anderson Barbata’s work combines performance, procession, dance, music, spoken word, textile arts, costuming, paper making, zines and protest, according to an online biography.

Since November 2023, Fort Atkinson Club Executive Director Lawan Glasscock has been working to expand the club’s diverse and culturally immersive offerings.

Glasscock, who has a PhD in anthropology with an emphasis on preservation of visual culture, hired Emely Sanchez-Opp as its programs coordinator. Sanchez-Opp has a master’s degree in business administration with a focus on nonprofits.

In an interview, Glasscock expressed admiration for women who make a difference in their community. She shared about how the club started as a Gentleman’s Club in 1912 and then changed hands during the Great Depression. Eventually, its building fell into disarray.

Glasscock especially voiced appreciation for Joan Jones who bought the building to get it off the list of top blighted historical properties in the state of Wisconsin.

“She wanted it off that list,” Glasscock recalls. “She had no idea what she was going to use it for, but she wanted it off that list and restored.”

With the help of friends and community, she raised $2.5 million and restored it within two years.

When Glasscock began working for the Fort Atkinson Club, she asked herself these questions: “What is a community serving charitable organization? What is at the core? What does it mean?”

One of her passions is to bring together diverse populations to benefit from the arts, culture, and resources that the club brings to the community.

Glasscock said one of the reasons that she loved moving to Fort was because it has one of Wisconsin’s highest per capita Latino populations, other than in big cities.

Sanchez-Opp also sees that potential to reach that subset of the community.

“One of my passions, actually, it’s been the exchange between English speaking, Spanish speaking individuals, and how even though they don’t speak the same language, with somebody that translates, they can really learn from each other and get together and share,” Sanchez-Opp said.

The two said that about 100 people recently attended a Latin Night event, about evenly split between native Spanish and native English speakers.

Glasscock shared her passion for bringing cultural connectivity and beauty to the people that The Fort Atkinson Club serves.

“You find ways to create programs to introduce and expose beauty, right, whether it be architecture, whether it be culture, whether it be music, whether it be food, whether it be a Quincenera Fashion show, whether it be the mentality of building up locally, right?” she said. “All of these things, the goodness, right? You just keep exposing and exposing.”

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