Category: 20th and 21st Century Design

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20th and 21st Century Design Art Collection

Welcoming “Miss Blanche” into the Design Collection

Detail of Miss Blanche by Shiro Kuramata

On the heels of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s annual Art in Bloom celebration, a new kind of flower is blooming in the design collection galleries: the Miss Blanche chair created by Shiro Kuramata. It is one of the final works by Kuramata, the legendary designer who brought Japanese design onto the global stage with his expressive and conceptual objects. An homage to Blanche DuBoise, the heroine of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, the chair exemplifies his poetic approach to the everyday and his longstanding engagement with materiality. Its presence in the galleries expands the Museum’s narratives around Japanese design and provides a new, exciting context to the beloved Carlton bookcase by Ettore Sottsass.

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20th and 21st Century Design Art

20th-Century Silver: An Unexpected Medium for Modernism

Circa '70 Tea and Coffee Service

Alongside many other strengths, the Milwaukee Art Museum boasts a remarkable collection of modern American silver. To celebrate these holdings, we wanted to reflect on a few of the significant 20th-century works here at the Museum.

Silversmithing has a long history in the United States, but in the 20th century it emerged as an unexpected medium for the exploration of modern forms and lines. Each an important part of the story of modern silver in the United States, the works featured below express how different designers related to and understood the goals of modernism, and how they worked through a range of ideas around production, craftsmanship, and aesthetics. Some of these objects are currently on view while others will make future appearances in permanent galleries or exhibitions.

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20th and 21st Century Design Art

A Closer Look: Ruth Asawa’s Milwaukee Connection

The pioneering sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa spent most of her life in California, but she has a surprising—and significant—connection to Wisconsin and the city of Milwaukee. A new work acquired in 2020 and recently installed in the 20th- and 21st-Century Design Galleries represents Asawa’s time in the city and speaks to its impact on this influential artist and her career.

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20th and 21st Century Design Exhibitions Library/Archives

Paging Through the Publications on View in “Scandinavian Design and the United States”

Colorful manuals about people
Colorful manuals about people

Alongside the brightly colored Dala horses, large-scale woven artworks, and fabulous furniture featured in the Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890–1980 exhibition are eight publications from the Milwaukee Art Museum Research Center—two magazines, an exhibition catalogue, three books, a beautiful serigraph, and an interactive ergonomics manual.

Why, you may be asking, are these publications on display in an exhibition with works of art and design?

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20th and 21st Century Design Art Collection Education Studio at Home

Play Date with Art at Home: Make Your Own Futuristic Fashions!

Neckpiece made of plastic and gems resembling computer parts
Alice H. Klein, Calculation, 1984 (detail). Acrylic, cubic zirconia, peridot, amethyst, cultured pearls, gold filled wire, mother-of-pearl polyester resin, 5 × 8 3/4 × 1 1/2 in. (12.7 × 22.23 × 3.81 cm). Gift of TKO Designs Incorporated M1991.52. Photo by John R. Glembin.

In our Play Date with Art program this month, we imagined what we’d be wearing in the future, and then we used found materials to bring our vision to life. You can do the same at home, using materials from around your house! Your designs can be anything you want. Think of future styles, or think of a special occasion you’d like to dress up for.

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20th and 21st Century Design American Art Collection Education Studio at Home

Kohl’s Art Generation Studio at Home: DIY “Stained Glass” Windows

Stained glass
Marion Mahony Griffin (American, 1871-1962), Window, 1907 (detail). Glass and zinc came, 24 × 29 1/2 in. (60.96 × 74.93 cm). Gift of family and friends in memory of Pamela Jacobs Keegan, architect M1984.14.
Stained glass
Marion Mahony Griffin (American, 1871-1962), Window, 1907. Glass and zinc came, 24 × 29 1/2 in. (60.96 × 74.93 cm). Gift of family and friends in memory of Pamela Jacobs Keegan, architect M1984.14.

Having to stay inside can get dull—especially if it’s too cold, too windy, or too rainy to play outside. I find myself staring out my window quite a lot these days. It got me thinking: what could make my window more fun? How could I make my indoors more colorful while also sharing some fun with my neighbors, who may be looking out their windows? For our first at-home art activity, I drew inspiration from leaded stained glass windows!

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20th and 21st Century Design Art Collection

Functional Fashions

Installation view, “Functional Fashions,” Milwaukee Art Musuem, 2019.

*Within the disability community today, some may prefer identity-first language (e.g., “disabled person”), or person-first language (e.g., “person with a disability”). Because the curators do not know the preferences of the historical subjects in the “Functional Fashions” display, they chose to use identity-first language based on the recommendations of collaborators.

The mistaken belief that there is no history of clothing designs for disabled users has had a number of repercussions. Among them: nearly all designers treat their own iterations as inaugural, there has been a dearth of innovation as designs are continuously repeated, and disability-led innovation is written out of the historical record [1]. Not only is there a long history of clothing designed by and for disabled persons, but in some cases it sets a higher standard than the efforts that followed. “Functional Fashions,” a display in the 20th- and 21st-Century Design Galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum, introduces the largest collaborative clothing line for disabled persons in American history.

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20th and 21st Century Design Art Collection Curatorial

20th-Century Tools for Measuring Time and Bodies

Isamu Noguchi for Measured Time, Inc., Clock and Kitchen Timer, ca. 1932 (detail). Bakelite, metal, glass, and painted metal. Gift from the George R. Kravis II Collection M2018.246. Photo: Sotheby’s, © Sotheby’s, Inc. 2016, © 2017 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Isamu Noguchi for Measured Time, Inc., Clock and Kitchen Timer, ca. 1932. Bakelite, metal, glass, and painted metal. Gift from the George R. Kravis II Collection M2018.246. Photo: Sotheby’s, © Sotheby’s, Inc. 2016, © 2017 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Isamu Noguchi for Measured Time, Inc., Clock and Kitchen Timer, ca. 1932. Bakelite, metal, glass, and painted metal. Gift from the George R. Kravis II Collection M2018.246. Photo: Sotheby’s, © Sotheby’s, Inc. 2016, © 2017 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Clocks, calculators, measuring tapes, and scales—tools for measurement and calculation have long been important for people to accomplish tasks at work, school, and home. A new display in the 20th- and 21st-Century Design Galleries considers the role designers played in shaping such devices in the twentieth century, with examples from the 1920s-1980s. On one hand, these objects demonstrate how many designers aimed to make tools that are simple to use and easy to read, such as the streamlined kitchen clock and timer that Isamu Noguchi designed for Measured Time, Inc. in the early 1930s. At the same time, these designs bring to light how measurement and calculation have been closely linked to the human body in the twentieth century, as this post explores.

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20th and 21st Century Design Art Behind the Scenes Curatorial Education Events Exhibitions

The House of Cards Project

UWM-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts students (left to right) Anna Emerson, Paul Manley, and Jessica Schubkegel installing the House of Cards spiral. Photo by Ray Chi.

In the early 1950s, designers Charles and Ray Eames painstakingly arranged penny cars, pencils, pills, and papers to photograph for their House of Cards construction set. They probably never imagined that decades later, thousands of children and adults in the Milwaukee region would meticulously decorate their own House of Cards, let alone that these cards would be installed together in a towering spiral at the Milwaukee Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America.

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20th and 21st Century Design Art Collection Curatorial

20th- and 21st-Century Design: New Acquisitions Now On View

Josef Hoffmann (Austrian, 1870–1956), produced by Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna, Austria, 1903–1932), Basket, 1905. Silver and ivory. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, with funds from the Demmer Charitable Trust, M2017.56. Photo by John R. Glembin.

Spring cleaning isn’t just for attics—the Museum’s Design Galleries were recently refreshed with a new coat of paint and numerous recent acquisitions. From turn-of-the-century silver to twenty-first-century furniture, these objects demonstrate the wide range of what we mean by “design” at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

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