Milwaukee Art Museum

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The Milwaukee Art Museum

Interior of the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum from the north at night

The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Starting around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no places to hold major art exhibitions. Over at least nine years, all attempts to build a major art gallery have failed. In 1881, exhibitions were held at Milwaukee's Exposition Hall, which was Milwaukee's primary event venue at the time. Shortly after that year, Alexander Mitchell donated all of her collection into constructing Milwaukee's first permanent art gallery in the city's history.

The museum's history began in 1882 when the Milwaukee Museum of Fine Arts was founded. The museum dissolved six years later. In 1888, the Milwaukee Art Association was created by a group of German panorama artists and local businessmen; its first home was the Layton Art Gallery. In 1911, the Milwaukee Art Institute, another building constructed to hold other exhibitions and collections, was completed. The institute was built right next to the Layton Art Gallery. Alfred George Pelikan, who received his Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) from Columbia University, was the Director of the Milwaukee Art Institute from 1926 to 1942. The Milwaukee Art Center (now the Milwaukee Art Museum) was formed when the Milwaukee Art Institute and Layton Art Gallery merged their collections in 1957 and moved into a three-story building underneath the Eero Saarinen-desinged Milwaukee County War Memorial.

The MAM's permanent holdings contain an important collection of Old Masters and 19th-century and 20th-century artwork, as well as some of the nation's best collections of German Expressionism, folk and Haitian art, American decorative arts, and post-1960 American art. The museum holds a large number of works by Georgia O'Keeffe.

The MAM recently gained international recognition with the construction of the new white concrete Quadracci Pavilion, designed by Santiago Calatrava (his first American commission), which opened on May 4, 2001. The structure contains a moveable, wing-like brise soleil (pictured below) which opens up for a wingspan of 217 feet during the day, folding over the tall, arched structure at night or during inclement weather. The building has since become a symbol for the city of Milwaukee. The galleries themselves are contained in the MAM's older building, a 1957 Eero Saarinen commission (along with the Milwaukee County War Memorial) added to by Kahler, Slater, and Fitzhugh Scott of Milwaukee in 1975. The 1975 addition was commissioned by the Milwaukee Art Center in 1969 to make room for other exhibits and donations. The museum is home to over 25,000 works of art.