Milwaukee Art Museum Blog
Everybody loves Andy Warhol! Who isn’t immediately attracted to the bright colors, crisp lines, and repetition in Andy Warhol’s artwork? Not to mention the fact that Warhol himself was such a character, playing with the art world, celebrity, and fame.
One of Warhol’s most iconic images, that of the Campbell’s Soup Can, is now available for mass-market purchase. For 75 cents. That’s right. 75 cents for your very own piece of Andy Warhol art history!
This summer, fourteen teens from 12 Milwaukee-area high schools came together to impact the present and future of museums. Funded by the MPS Arts Internship Program through the Milwaukee Public Schools Recreation Department, these teens were paid museum studies interns for five weeks, going behind-the-scenes at the Museum, developing career skills, and helping the Museum in its day-to-day functions.
Vasarely’s four-volume set Plastic Arts (1970), which features numerous color plates, foldouts and loose plastic overlays, not only exemplifies his unique approach to art, but equips the viewer with a finite set of colors and forms to play with and manipulate.
See our combinations below.
Picking paint colors. Stepping under ladders in closed off galleries. Artfully arranging teacups. All are things I’ve done in the past few weeks, and all are entirely fun perks to a curator’s job. Beyond the fun, what I aim to do in this post is go a little deeper into the process of installing, painting, and arranging an exhibition.
In the first three posts of this series, I’ve addressed steps to developing the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Grete Marks: When Modern Was Degenerate exhibition (on view September 6, 2012 – January 1, 2013), from idea to loan paperwork to marketing.
The next step of bringing this incredible story and artwork physically to the public were the conversations we had about the design of the gallery, because there are as many ways to display artwork as there are paint colors in the Sherwin-Williams sample book.
Recently, I had the opportunity to open an interesting book in the Museum’s Library entitled Milwaukee’s Great Industries (1892). This 352-page tome features a history of Milwaukee, articles on its various industries, schools, churches, trades, a variety of advertisements, and a list of city facts entitled “Milwaukee in a Nutshell.”
Did you know that in 1892, Milwaukee produced $135 million in goods; had the biggest iron foundry in the world; or produced fully one-third of all the tin-ware used in the United States? And yes, Milwaukee officially had the largest brewery and tannery in the world!
Last but certainly not least–did you know that, in 1892, Milwaukee also had “one of the finest art galleries in the land, and several of the best private art collections in the world”?
You had me at “one of the finest in the land.”
In the first two posts of this series, I’ve addressed the origins of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Grete Marks: When Modern Was Degenerate exhibition (on view September 6, 2012 – January 1, 2013). The exhibition went from my admiration of a certain artwork I didn’t know well, to years of background research to learn the context and nuance of the artist’s story.
In those steps, I looked at artwork, read about Bauhausian ideas, and traveled to Berlin and London to meet with curators and examine stunning teapots. For the next part of the task of making the exhibition, I mostly sat at a computer in Milwaukee generating forms and writing emails.
An exhibition goes from a curator’s idea to a museum reality through a series of approvals up the chain-of-command. To bring my personal research on Grete Marks into a real Museum exhibition, I first spoke with my curatorial colleagues and the Museum’s Chief Curator about the idea.
It’s hard to study art and not learn something about classical mythology. The gods and heroes of ancient Greece and Rome are not only prevalent in ancient art (as in the Museum’s two Greek Hydria), but in later periods such as the Renaissance (which saw a “rebirth” of classical antiquity, which you can see in our Orpheus Clock) and the Neoclassical era (a perfect example is Hiram Powers’ Proserpine).
So, for the next two months, I want to take you on a tour of the Museum Collection with mythology as our theme. And what’s fun about myth is that once you learn some of the basics in iconography, or the standard in how figures and stories are depicted, you’ll be able to recognize it in other works at other museums, and even in daily walks around your city or shopping mall.
As I moved through the stages of putting together the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Grete Marks: When Modern Was Degenerate exhibition (on view September 6, 2012 – January 1, 2013), I began by researching the designer through secondary literature and compiled a list of 417 Grete Marks ceramics and watercolors in institutional collections.
Those tasks I could do mostly from my office in Milwaukee, thanks to great library services and generous colleagues at other institutions.
However, to build relationships with curators for borrowing artwork, to meet with Grete Marks’ daughter Frances Marks, and to personally examine objects so that I could make informed decisions about which of the ceramic vessels we might want to request for loan to our exhibition, I needed to take a research trip to London and Berlin.
It was a tough job, but someone had to do it…
While researching in England, I made visits to “store” (Brit speak for “storage”) to see artworks at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The British Museum, and the National Museum in Wales. Those institutions have in their collections gifts from the artist herself, as well as from her husband, Harold Marks, and her daughter, Dr. Frances Marks (as do the Potteries Museum and the Museum at Wales’ Prifysgol Aberystwyth University, which I did not visit).
History also reveals patterns that sidestep the obvious cultural or historical narrative to stand on their own. One such pattern appears in the series of soap sculpture competitions held at the Museum (known then as the Milwaukee Art Institute) from 1927-1940. At least fifteen national and local soap-sculpture competitions and exhibitions were held over a tirteen-year period.
How did soap sculpting become such a popular part of local and national practice so quickly? The answer, it turns out, was no further away than my own grocery list.
Ever wonder about the details of developing an art museum exhibition? I have to admit, an advanced degree in art history does not directly prepare a curator for the loan agreements, budget constrictions, press relationships, and conservation concerns that must be negotiated and balanced along with telling a great story.
In order to break down and share what I think is a pretty fascinating process, I’ve put together a six-part blog post series that addresses the steps I took in developing the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Grete Marks: When Modern Was Degenerate exhibition (on view September 6, 2012 – January 1, 2013).
Every exhibition should start with and keep at its core great artwork and a meaningful story. For me, this exhibition germinated when I encountered a Bauhaus-trained ceramist named Grete Marks in 2007.
I’d never heard her name. I wasn’t a Bauhaus expert.
But I felt something for her teapots.