Milwaukee Art Museum Blog
The new exhibition Framing a Decade has opened to rave reviews and the newest acquisition by the Museum, a work by Ludwig Meidner, will be installed in the exhibition on Tuesday, so be sure to stop in this week and see just a small sampling of the over 3,000 prints and drawings that the Museum has acquired since 2001.
With a new exhibition opening this week and “Holiday By Design” Family Sunday, it is a very busy time here.
This Thursday, December 9, the Museum opens its newest exhibition, Framing a Decade: Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings, 2001-2011. Featured in the Koss Gallery, this exhibition showcases 50 of the over 3,000 works on paper that the Museum has acquired since the Quadracci Pavilion opened in 2001. It includes works by Picasso, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Nauman, Francis, and more.
As of late we at Chipstone have found ourselves discussing how the different senses affect our perception of decorative arts objects. For example, have you ever been asked to describe an object while blindfolded?
At our summer session for college undergrads, titled Object Lab, the students are required to do just that. It is amazing how “seeing” an object with our hands instead of our eyes, makes us drop the art historical jargon and really get into the essence of a piece. Although our conversation at Chipstone has centered around touch and how touching a piece of furniture or a ceramic object helps the viewer understand the object better than if he or she were just relying on sight, I’d like to explore how sound can add to an object’s experience and understanding.
The Museum’s Junior Docents are 5th graders who spend three years studying the Museum’s Collection, then graduate from the program by doing a presentation on a single work of art. The program has been around since 1976, making it over thirty years old! In fact, many of my friends here in the city, now in their mid-twenties, were Junior Docents when they were in fifth grade. Every year around April and May, the Museum receives wonderful thank you notes from recent Junior Docent graduates. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share a few of my favorites!
It’s the start of another busy week at the Museum full of classes, lectures, and another free admission day for veterans.
On Thursday, November 11, the Museum is offering free admission to all veterans in honor of Veterans Day. The Museum staff extends heartfelt “Thank You” to all the men and women who have served in the armed forces.
Also, this is the last week to bring in your donations for our “Soup for Soup” food drive to benefit Hunger Task Force. It is your chance to give back to the community and enjoy a wonderful meal in a beautiful setting, all at the same time.
This week, the Satellite High School students took a field trip to the Pfister Hotel to visit Katie Musolff, a full-time artist working in Milwaukee, and a Satellite graduate! Katie generously let us into her studio and shared her experiences and advice, from being a Satellite high school student, to her time at MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design), to her decision to make her art her job. Since many of the Satellite students are artists themselves, this was a great opportunity.
Satellite students have been tagging, talking, and sketching in the past two weeks at the Museum. Traveling through Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and France (virtually, of course), we’ve looked at figural paintings, portraits, and still lifes, and have even done some time-traveling to compare artwork hundreds of years apart.
The most exciting and challenging part of my job this semester is teaching the Satellite Program, a 30-year-old program meant to introduce high school students to Western art history. Not only do I have big shoes to fill (Chief Educator Barbara Brown Lee passed the Satellite torch to me this year), but I also have a couple of big questions to consider: How do I teach a solid, but fun, overview of art history using the Museum’s collection as our textbook? How can I incorporate new technology into the class to enhance our looking experience, and not distract from the artwork?
This month’s book salon found me revisiting a book I first read in college: How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto. Well, we all know that just as we can never step into the same river, we can never read the same book. Happily, it did read like a new book–partly because I didn’t have to write a paper about it afterwards– but mostly because I read it surrounded by 40 handmade quilts on display in the American Quilts exhibition.
