Milwaukee Art Museum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

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.

The museum's history began in 1888 when 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 the early 1900s the Milwaukee Art Institute was founded. 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 MAM) was formed when the Milwaukee Art Institute and Layton Art Gallery merged their collections in 1957.

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.