The Milwaukee Art Museum (also referred to as MAM) is an art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its collection of nearly 35,000 works of art and gallery spaces totaling 150,000 sq. ft. (13,900 m²) make it the largest art museum in the state of Wisconsin and one of the largest art museums in the United States. The Milwaukee Art Museum emerged from the reunion of two prior art institutions, the Layton Art Gallery and the Milwaukee Art Institute, both established in 1888. In 1957, they combined their collections inside the newly-completed Milwaukee County War Memorial designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, forming the Milwaukee Arts Center (renamed Milwaukee Art Museum in 1980). Subsequent expansions included the David Kahler Building in 1975, the Quadracci Pavilion by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, inaugurated in 2001, and the East End entrance, opened in 2015. Among highlights of the collection are paintings by American artists of the Ashcan School, American and European decorative arts, 19th-century German art and early-20th-century German Expressionist art, as well as folk and Haitian art. The museum also holds one of the largest collections of works by Wisconsin-born artist Georgia O'Keeffe in the United States. In 2024, the Milwaukee Art Museum was ranked 8th best art museum in the country by the readers and editors of USA Today, one of the biggest US newspapers by number of subscribers and print circulation.
Location and visit Located on the lakefront of Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee Art Museum is one of the largest art museums in the Midwestern United States. Aside from its galleries, the museum includes a café, named Lakeshore Café, and a gift shop.
Hours Normal operating hours for MAM are Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Thursday 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
History
Origins to the 1960s
Beginning around 1870, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with few or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions. All attempts to build a major art gallery failed despite the presence of active art collectors in town, such as banker Alexander Mitchell, and manufacturers William Henry Metcalf and Charles Allis. In 1883, local businessman Frederick Layton, a British immigrant who made his fortune through wholesale, meatpacking, and railroad ventures in Wisconsin, suggested establishing an art gallery for the city of Milwaukee. He commissioned Scottish architect George Ashdown Audsley, of the firm W. & G. Audsley, to design the building later known as the Layton Art Gallery. Audsley's Greek Revival, one-story building was inaugurated on April 5, 1888. Layton provided a $100,000 endowment to the new gallery for the acquisition of artworks, while part of his own collection was put on display. Wisconsin painters Edwin C. Eldridge and George Raab served as the gallery's first and second curators, respectively.
In parallel, the Milwaukee Art Association (later Milwaukee Art Society), created by a group of German panorama artists and local businessmen, disputed the claim to be the city's first art gallery, having also been established in 1888. In 1911, it relocated to a new building adjacent to the Layton Art Gallery and eventually took on the name of Milwaukee Art Institute five years later. The institute's collection consisted mostly of gifts and purchases from Wisconsin artists, as well as gifts from the personal collection of one of its presidents, Samuel O. Buckner. Following Frederick Layton's death, George Raab was replaced by educator Charlotte Partridge as curator and director of the Layton Art Gallery in 1922. Partridge had founded the Layton School of Art two years prior, and would continue to lead it along with her lifelong partner, art instructor Miriam Frink. During her tenure, she focused on contemporary art exhibitions and acquisitions, and additionally served as director of the Federal Art Project for Wisconsin from 1935 to 1939, as part of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency. Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Art Institute came under the direction of German-born painter Alfred Pelikan in 1926, a position he occupied until 1942.
In 1954, Partridge retired from the Layton Art Gallery, while Frink retired from the directorship of the Layton School of Art, where she was replaced by artist Edmund Lewandowski. A year later, the Milwaukee Art Institute and Layton Art Gallery formed the Milwaukee Art Center, under the direction of art historian and museum curator Edward H. Dwight. The institution moved into the newly-built Eero Saarinen-designed Milwaukee County War Memorial and formally opened in 1957.
Kahler Building and folk art, 1975–2000
In 1975, Margaret (Peg) Bradley, the widow of industrialist Harry Lynde Bradley, donated an ensemble of more than 600 European and American Modern artworks to the museum. Highlights of the gift include Fauvist paintings, German Expressionist works by Wassily Kandinsky and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as a group of works by Georgia O'Keeffe. The brutalist Kahler Building (1975) was designed by architect David Kahler in response to the donation to house the museum's new Bradley Wing, as well as other suites of galleries for the collection. Peg Bradley herself contributed $1 million to the construction of the addition. In the wake of the Kahler expansion, the name of Milwaukee Art Museum was officially adopted by the institution in 1980. In 1989, the gift of the Michael and Julie Hall Collection strengthened the museum's collection of folk and self-taught art. In 1999, the Milwaukee-based Chipstone Foundation established a partnership with the museum to display part of their collections of American decorative arts and furniture in dedicated galleries on a rotating basis.
Quadracci Pavilion, gardens, and further acquisitions, 2001–2015
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