Milwaukee Art Museum Blog

Joseph D. Ketner II, who was chief curator at the Museum from 2005 to 2008 (when David Gordon was the director), died earlier this month after a battle with cancer. Many of you may have seen the article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by Mary Louise Schumacher.

Though I did not know Joe personally, he left an indelible imprint on this institution: he enriched our collection with works by Sol LeWitt, Nam June Paik, and Amy Sillman, among others, and brought to Milwaukee ambitious exhibitions on Bruce Nauman, Francis Bacon, and Andy Warhol.

Prior to his tenure at the Museum, Joe, a specialist in modern and contemporary art, was the Henry and Lois Foster Director at the Rose Art Museum, at Brandeis University, and director of the Washington University Gallery of Art, in St. Louis. For the past ten years, he was the Lois and Henry Foster Chair of Contemporary Art Theory and Practice at Emerson College, in Boston.

We are the institution we are because of the people who paved the way before us, and it is an honor to count Joe Ketner among the Museum’s distinguished leaders.

For those who wish to pay their respects, the family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Joseph D. Ketner II Memorial Fund to benefit Emerson Urban Arts.

Warmly,

Marcelle Polednik, PhD
Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director

Arthur Carrara in his studio, Kettle Moraine, Wisconsin, ca. 1964. Published in Recent Works: 1960-1965 (1965). Photo by John Cornwall/Arthur Carrara.

Architect and designer Arthur A. Carrara (American, 1914–1995) was born in Chicago and worked in locations across the world, from Buffalo, New York to the Philippines. But for Carrara, Wisconsin felt like home; in his 1964 retrospective catalog he fondly described Wisconsin as “my adopted state.”[1] Over the course of his multifaceted career, Carrara worked repeatedly in Wisconsin—creating homes for private clients, designing exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Center, and eventually building a studio for himself in the state’s Kettle Moraine region. Continue reading →

A selection of educational products from the 1970s, recently installed in MAM’s 20th- and 21st- Century Design Galleries, tells the story of two pressing issues in the United States during the period through the lens of design for children.

Kent Dickinson (American, active 1970s), manufactured by Odlot Game Company (United States, active 1970s), Metradoms: a Game of Metric Dominos, 1976. Plastic and paper. Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Daniel Ostroff M2017.28. Photo by John R. Glembin.

First, the issue of metric conversion is represented by the record album Songs of Metric Man and the game Metradoms: A Games of Metric Dominos (a recent addition to MAM’s Design Collection). Both aimed to teach children how to use the metric system in anticipation of “metrification,” or the adoption of metrics as the standard system of measurement in the United States. From our twenty-first-century perspective, this may not seem like a particularly divisive political issue, but in the 1970s, American were divided between those who perceived the shift from feet to meters as step towards greater economic and scientific cooperation with the rest of the world, and those who viewed the system as an unwelcome invasion of foreign customs.

Continue reading →