Displaying items by tag: Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum is due to reopen on November 24 after a 14-month, $34m renovation that brings the institution back from the brink. When the museum made the unorthodox decision to begin planning an expansion at the height of the recession in 2009, mould flourished, floors buckled and ceilings leaked in the two buildings that housed the permanent collection. “We really had reached a breaking point,” says Daniel Keegan, the museum’s director.

Keegan’s bet to secure $10m from the county of Milwaukee, which owns and maintains the two buildings, and raise the rest of the project funding “in the [economic] up-cycle” paid off.

Bud and Suzanne Selig, who have been generous contributors to the Milwaukee Art Museum, will donate $2.5 million to create and support a chief curator position at the Phoenix Art Museum.

Suzanne Selig serves on the Phoenix Museum Board of Trustees, allowing her to extend her artistic support beyond Milwaukee and the Calatrava addition to the museum. The Seligs have homes in Milwaukee and Arizona.

All styles eventually go out of fashion. Colonial hoop dresses, Victorian handlebar moustaches, and 1960s shag carpeting all enjoyed great popularity before falling out of favor. Similar cycles of taste have governed the history of furniture design. Going out of Style: 400 Years of Changing Tastes in Furniture, an exhibition presented by the Milwaukee Art Museum, displayed four centuries of major American furniture styles alongside scathing commentary written in the period by designers, architects, and writers.

Their critiques—which range from sarcastic to downright ruthless—reveal powerful opinions that helped drive the ebb and flow of taste from generation to generation. While the harsh assessments of the past may seem unfounded to antiques enthusiasts today, they remind us that most period styles—even the perennial favorites—were out of fashion at one time or another

Admission to the Milwaukee Art Museum will be free for one weekend — Feb. 21 and 22 — thanks to a gift from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

The hope is to provide broad access to "Inspiring Beauty," an exhibition that celebrates the Ebony Fashion Fair, a fashion show that traveled the country for more than 50 years and served as a platform for black empowerment. It is the museum's first fashion-inspired exhibit.

The Milwaukee Art Museum, in partnership with Google, will offer a semester-long Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), beginning on February 10, 2015. This free course will allow participants to:

• Get comfortable with looking at art by making personal connections with works of art from around the world and in your hometown
• Develop skills such as observing carefully, reflecting and assessing, and creating meaning
• Connect art to unexpected disciplines
• Learn from and interact with a global community of arts-interested people
• Contribute to a worldwide understanding of art through a final project, creatively responding to a work of art of your choice

The Milwaukee Art Museum has hired a new curator to oversee its design and decorative arts collection. Monica Obniski will join the staff as the Demmer curator of 20th and 21st century design in January. She will lead the effort to rethink the display of MAM's design collection as part of a top-to-bottom renovation and reinstallation of the permanent collection.

For the last several years, Obniski has been at the Art Institute of Chicago as the Ann S. and Samuel M. Mencoff assistant curator of American decorative arts. She began her years at the Art Institute as a research associate and exhibitions coordinator in 2007.

That black speck walking precariously out on the Milwaukee Art Museum's giant white wings? That's a painter.

Matt Radmacher, owner of Wisconsin Industrial Painters, and two other painters are touching up 40 rust spots on the museum's Burke Brise Soleil — affectionately called wings — and repainting 72 rusted plates at the base.

This is only the second time the museum's addition, designed by internationally known Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has needed touching up since it opened in 2001. At the time, it was Calatrava's first completed American project.

Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and the Milwaukee Art Museum are sparring over who should pay more than $1 million in cost overruns on repairs for the Milwaukee County War Memorial, most of which is occupied by the Art Museum.

The debate comes out of a year-old agreement between the county, Milwaukee Art Museum and the War Memorial nonprofit organization that paved the path for significant building repairs. Milwaukee County agreed to spend $10 million through 2017, and committed to a list of repair projects to the center, which it owns.

A traveling exhibition of master paintings by some of the greatest names in European art ends its East Coast summer residency at the Allentown Art Museum on Sunday, September 7. "Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums" features works by Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Francesco Guardi, Salvator Rosa, and Titian, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see these forty major works; after Allentown, the exhibition will travel west to the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Thanks to a generous grant from the Society of the Arts (SOTA), the exhibition is free to all visitors, Wednesday-Saturday 11-4 and Sunday noon-4. “The elimination of our admission fees this summer, and dual-language labels in English and Spanish, are intended to deliver a message that in this, our eightieth anniversary year, the Allentown Art Museum is accessible to all and that we encourage everyone to experience what this extraordinary institution has to offer,” says David Mickenberg, Priscilla Payne Hurd President and CEO of the Art Museum.

The latest design of a planned addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum drew praise at a public hearing Tuesday night, with the Lakefront Development Advisory Commission unanimously recommending approval for the project.

The commission in April 2013 unanimously approved the initial museum addition design, which was done by architect Jim Shields of HGA Architects and Engineers.

But a revised design — made by HGA but without Shields — unveiled last month drew criticism. The Journal Sentinel's Mary Louise Schumacher called it "a dose of dullness for our most prized public space."

Another revision, this one with Shields back at the helm, was unveiled Tuesday.