What happens when you don’t let a good idea die? For Milwaukee’s Cactus Club, it looks like a 29-foot ramp.
It’s no ordinary ramp. Owner Kelsey Kaufmann and artist-in-residence Kate Klingbeil have turned it into a work of art, featuring stone mosaics, swirling glass designs, and spinnable resin beads. It makes the century-old building wheelchair accessible. And it sets the stage for the kind of space Cactus Club wants to be: creative, original, and welcoming to all.
After years as a bartender, Kaufmann bought the beloved punk/rock/indie hub in February 2020, four weeks before lockdown. But what could have been a dream-shattering challenge became a defining chapter.
“The mindset for me and my amazing team was like, oh, we just figure it out and we pivot,” says Kaufmann.
That meant a GoFundMe, a Patreon, and a collection of what Kaufmann calls “harebrained schemes”: candle-making, homemade mustard, “left-field merch to try and cobble together enough to stay afloat.”
“It was only possible because of the support of so many different communities with so many relationships with the space: vegan pop-ups, outdoor artist markets, unforgettable music shows, lots of perspectives,” says Kaufmann.
These relationships secured Cactus Club’s future. But what would that future look like?
“There’s not a lot of spaces that don’t center monetization,” says Kaufmann. “So, how do we create an environment that’s conducive to coming and meeting people?”
Cactus Club’s partnerships with artists and local organizations primed it to reimagine what a music venue could be, fueled by a commitment to radical welcoming.
Considering Accessibility
“The immediate focus on mobility access was by virtue of having worked here for 10 years,” says Kaufmann. “Cultural accessibility, financial accessibility, sensorial accessibility came into the fold too as we looked into disability and neurodivergence and those intersections, wanting to be more thoughtful about how people experience spaces.”
These goals led to an innovative addition to Cactus Club’s mission: Cactus+, an arts education nonprofit organization created in 2022.
“Recognizing that we wanted to make the building accessible was a foundational priority, and every direction we looked, there weren’t many resources, and if there were, they were tethered to nonprofit status,” says Kaufmann. “We’d been doing a ton of mutual aid, community education programming, burning the candle in every direction, so how do we resource this more sustainably?”
Their solution: a 501(c)3 nonprofit status for Cactus+. This opened up access to grants and donations as funding sources. It’s helped fund the ramp and accessible bathrooms.
It’s also funded programming like intergenerational line dancing, a family-friendly block party, papermaking workshops, all-ages DJ classes, a book club, a seed library, queer karaoke, Narcan trainings, and more.
For Kaufmann, the work is about responding to identified community needs and trying to resource them. “In this era of such bleak isolation and loneliness . . . there is something so, so imperative about communing in real life,” they say, adding how Cactus Club’s multimedia, hands-on activities help in creating more meaningful connections.
“There is so much liberatory potential in providing space and being the permission-giver, of doing what you believe in,” says Kaufmann.