Milwaukee Art Museum
I went up to Milwaukee over the weekend to check out the Milwaukee Art Museum. Given that Milwaukee is only about a 90 minute drive from Chicago I’m a little surprised I hadn’t made the trek sooner. In addition to having a generally pretty excellent collection of post-1960 American, the MAM also has a ton of great outsider/folk art and one of the dumbest additions to any building I’ve ever experienced.
The Quadracci Wing designed by Santiago Calatrava was a huge let down.The only work from the permanent collection on display was a so-so Calder and a giant Dale Chihuly sculpture. I guess those are the only objects in their collection fitting for what is essentially a giant hall for wedding receptions. The Calder because it hangs from the ceiling and is out of reach from unruly wedding guests and the Chihuly because it’s a Chihuly and who cares if drunk wedding guests trash it? Most of the exhibition space is used for temporary shows which would be nice when they start getting stuff that’s more exciting than a third rate contemporary Rembrandt. Sorry unknown curator, Jan Lievens isn’t going to be part of the canon, he wasn’t that good.
Luckily my cynical take on the Quadracci Pavillion was tempered by the strong work in the rest of the collection. Highlights I didn’t take pictures of included a great Jackie Winsor (which I had to tell a teenaged kid he couldn’t touch), a really fantastic group of Robert Ryman paintings and a three panel Ellsworth Kelly painting.
Highlights I did take photos of:
Sol LeWitt’s handwritten instructions for the associated wall drawing on an adjacent wall. I’ve never seen these displayed before.
There next two paintings were in the Recent Acquisitions Gallery by people I knew. This was the first which is by Jose Lerma who teaches at SAIC and was one of my advisors this past semester.
This next one is by Iona Rozeal Brown who’s a friend from DC.
Large Michelle Grabner piece. Another professor at SAIC and someone I’ve taken a class with. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a museum where I’ve seen work by someone I know personally and here I saw work by three people I know. That might’ve been the raddest thing about the trip.
This probably gets the award for strangest object of the day. It’s a little study model Thomas Hart Benton built for a painting.
This is a Ralston Crawford who was a mid-century American abstract painter. Nobody really ever talks about him and I don’t know why. He’s good. They should do a show of this guy.
A cool Frank Stella.
This is the second worst painting I’ve ever seen in a museum. I don’t know who the artist is, but this wasn’t in the outsider/folk art section!
This is the worst painting I’ve ever seen in a museum. A couple people have told this looks exactly like a scene from The Lion King. I’ve never seen The Lion King so I can’t vouche for that, but it was enough for me to promote this to worst painting in a museum over that other turd. And something about the sheer badness of these last two somehow managed to elevate this museum experience. Maybe it was because these paintings were bad in such unexpected ways that leads me to believe that someone at the Milwaukee Art Museum has a sense of humor.
