This winter, the Art Museum Store has had the good fortune to forge a new and wonderful relationship with an exciting Milwaukee artist, Chrisanne Robertson.
Author: Donele Pettit-Mieding
The Museum Store has a dedicated staff person whose primary responsibility is “Product Development.”
Julia Jackson is the Museum Store’s creative brain-power and organizational manager behind items like the Roy Lichtenstein Crying Girl V-neck T-shirt (I get so many complements when I wear mine and it’s really soft, too!) and the Calatrava-inspired “Wings” earrings that I love.
Every time you pour coffee into your Edmund Tarbell’s Three Sisters mug or admire Bastien-LePage’s Woodgatherer on a poster on your wall, you can thank Julia!
Here is a simplified breakdown of Julia’s design and organization process:
This spring, the Milwaukee Art Museum partnered with The A.V. Club Milwaukee to sponsor a design contest for a new line of T-shirts to be sold in the Museum Store. The contest prompted the designers with the question “What does the Art Museum mean to you?” Clearly, this question was a launching pad for a variety of interpretations.
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Visiting Wright Near Home
In the interest of immersing myself in the Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century exhibition (and fulfilling my goal of becoming a tourist in my home state), I have been visiting Wright-designed buildings in Wisconsin over the past few months.
In the Museum Store, we are always looking to highlight the artists and vendors that make commitments to ecologically and socially sustainable business practices. Throughout the store, this logo (left) will tell you that a company uses recycled, repurposed, or sustainable materials and is conscientious about their shipping and packaging. I recently gave a Cate & Levi repurposed wool hand puppet to a dear friend for her baby shower, and it was the perfect gift! See how cute above! And each is totally one-of-a-kind because of the material.
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Student Work Enlivens the Art Museum
Are you looking forward to the upcoming 2011 Scholastic Art Awards exhibition as much as I am? I enjoy viewing the diversity of amazing work by so many talented young people and I really love meeting the artists and their proud families and teachers when they come to see their work on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum (on view in our Schroeder Galleria Feb 5 – Mar 6, 2011). It is such a thrill for those kids and it’s an exciting time of year for all the Museum staff, too.
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Working the Fine Furnishings Show
I recently had the opportunity to represent the Milwaukee Art Museum at the Fine Furnishings & Fine Craft Show held at The Garage at the Harley-Davidson Museum. First of all—what a great venue! If you haven’t yet been to the Harley-Davidson Museum, the cool industrial architecture is definitely worth checking out. Also, the Show was a perfectly timed experience for me, with the European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century exhibition open at the same time at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Our exhibition explores notions of design as either primarily for function, or for a more conceptual idea. I was able to see more examples of how craft and design intersect at the Fine Furnishings Show. Apart from one prototype plastic chair, the objects there demonstrate a beautiful melding of function and handcrafted one-of-kind design.
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Art that You Wear
I’ll admit truly: one of my favorite pastimes is helping people pick out jewelry. I’ll watch a person walking casually along the outside rim of the cases Santiago Calatrava designed for the Museum Store, and then I’ll see the double-take and the excitement in their eyes as they hold that special item in their view.
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Quilt History in the Making
The thing I find particularly thrilling about the American Quilts Exhibition Store is that because quilts are such a living medium, a part of everyday lives, they often inspire very personal dialogues as visitors pass into the exhibition store. Every day we meet visitors who are eager to share their sewing stories—they admire the works in the exhibition in a profound way because of a shared experience with those artists. We learn about still-vibrant family traditions of sewing, memories of people’s mothers hand-stitching their clothing when they were children, the various techniques seamstresses develop over time, and the agony and the ecstasy of piecing those wee slippery scraps of fine fabric together.