Some of the most engaging galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum are filled with folk and outsider works, exuberant constructions that seem to have been improvised more than planned, by minds not always concerned with the opinion of others.
For many years, the lakefront museum itself felt a little that way. Its trio of buildings — highlighted by Santiago Calatrava’s renowned Quadracci Pavilion, an elongated structure topped by a great white dorsal fin — seemed to have been nudged together, like three strangers a party host decided absolutely had to meet.
Not only did the buildings labor to function as an ensemble but in recent years, parts of them struggled to work at all. The building closest to the lake had been closed off to it, which is sort of like hanging your best piece of art in your darkest, least-trafficked room. More fundamentally, museum executives tell stories of waterlogged ceiling tiles, and drip pans in the vicinity of multimillion-dollar paintings.
In places, “it had sort of a shabby quality to it,” said Dan Keegan, the museum’s director.
All of that seems to have changed, thanks to a newly opened, almost complete reimagining of the museum’s physical space and of the presentation of art inside it, one of the most ambitious that any American museum has undertaken in recent decades.
The $34 million project — $10 million of it public money — adds a new lakefront atrium and entryway, which at last lets people walking by know the building is an art museum and invites them in. It puts on display 2,500 works, 1,000 more than previously, from a collection that will impress even those used to Chicago’s art treasures. And it brings coherence and navigability to a once-puzzling floor plan.
Backstage, following more than a year of the museum being mostly closed, there are new HVAC innards that can keep precious paint intact, and there’s a new ownership structure that shifts fundamental control of the buildings from Milwaukee County to the museum.
Early reviews have been promising. “The Milwaukee Art Museum has come into its own. It feels like a new —and considerably more grown-up — institution,” wrote Mary Louise Schumacher, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s art and architecture critic.
She called it “a top-to-bottom rethinking of the story of art” that is “transformational for the institution.”
The alt-weekly Shepherd Express was pleased, as well: “MAM’s shifted and supplemented space yields a more user-friendly experience. … The Milwaukee Art Museum is a metamorphosed institution and no-longer-leaky roofs are the least of it.”
The country’s 15th largest art museum by square footage, the MAM already claims Cook County as its third-largest visitor base, by county. Visits from the Chicago area doubled in the past five years, the museum said, while overall attendance has climbed in recent years to about 400,000 annually, from 250,000 six years ago.
Officials hope the makeover will inspire more folks from the massive population center to the south to come see not only the Calatrava calling card and the superb gathering of folk art, but the rest of it: enough old Europeans to satisfy traditionalists, a collection of modern art by most of the droppable names, superb stashes of German expressionists and of Haitian art, and such potential crowd-pleasers as new design and photography galleries.
The reinvention is relevant to anybody who goes to museums and thinks about them even a little bit, or to people wondering how a certain big new art institution planned for Chicago’s lakefront might arrange itself for the public. Rarely does a museum get to redo itself so profoundly. Looking at the choices made and the results achieved was fascinating, even in a viewing two weeks ahead of Tuesday’s opening, when a few galleries were still showing works on the floor.
Walking through the remade rooms, Keegan was quietly exuberant. He should be, as a Green Bay native who arrived eight years ago without knowing the scope of the problems and who will retire in the spring having helped to solve most of them.
He remembered a worker on an early building tour explaining to him, ” ‘Dan, those are drip pans.’ “
Now he has shiny new — and dry — surfaces to show off everywhere. “It’s exhilarating,” he said.
“It’s so new the director can’t even remember where the hell the art work is,” Keegan said at another point, bustling a visitor along from one realm to another.
He had forgotten, temporarily, that the basement now contains a big new photography and video space — light-based media, the museum calls it — to show off a photo collection that was one of the first begun by an American art museum. To the back of the cool spaces are video installation rooms, plus a must-see work, especially if you are trying to keep kids engaged. Stanley Landsman’s “Walk-In Infinity Chamber” is a fun-house room bringing together mirrors, light bulbs and a pleasing disorientation.
For the first time, the museum has a gallery devoted to design, the art that we all live with in one way or another. A concrete wall displays an army of chairs and in one corner is a (relatively) local piece, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s desk ensembles from the Johnson Wax building in Racine.
Local art is sprinkled throughout, a trick the museum pulls off without feeling provincial or even regional. There’s also a subtle, but pleasing, emphasis on works relating to the African-American community in particular. Amid the American art works now being shown together on the second floor, there’s a gallery devoted to African-American decorative arts, which curators believe may be the only one of its kind in the country.
For all of its show-horse qualities, the Calatrava building, which opened in 2001, has drawn criticism for being so distinct from the two older buildings, one designed by Eero Saarinen and also hosting a war memorial. The 1957 Saarinen and the 1975 brutalist building by Milwaukee architect David Kahler at least tried to fit together, however uncomfortable some of the transitions.
While the main museum entrance at the south end of the Calatrava is still a long way from the bulk of the collection, the new curatorial design, Keegan points out, uses the building’s extravagantly long hallways to invite visitors in to see the permanent collection. Look down the western one, he points out, and you see a Roman sculpture, a torso, presaging the more classical art behind it. A highlight: Francisco de Zurbaran’s “Saint Francis of Assisi in His Tomb” from the early 17th century.
Through the eastern hallway, with the lakefront views as you walk, there is tunnel vision toward a contemporary (and Milwaukee) work, Tom Wesselman’s rendering of a man-sized Pabst Blue Ribbon can, hinting at the more recent art behind it.
Where the galleries were not only “shabby” before but they also had a sameness to them, new attention has been paid to lighting and backdrops, Keegan said. Contemporary art remains on the white walls that curators believe it thrives against, but elsewhere more than 60 paint colors were used on walls with an aim to creating surprise and fending off the dreaded “museum fatigue.”
“We wanted to kind of match what the Calatrava building does,” Keegan said. “We felt the collection presentation ought to live up to that in its variety and unusual elements.”
Along with a new cafe and bathrooms on every level, the result brings monumental sculpture back toward the lakefront.
One of those pieces, Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, now gets a place of pride in the corner window of the new atrium building that comes closest to Lake Michigan.
It may be there because it fits thematically with the other works in its gallery. But it’s also not bad as a symbol for an institution that decided to erase and redraw so many of its own boundaries.
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
Where: 700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee
Tickets: $17 adults; 414-224-3200 or www.mam.org
