Exhibitions are included with Museum admission and are free for Members.

Learn about artists Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Raphael Soyer through their prints in After Ashcan: The 14th Street School, presented in connection with the exhibition The Ashcan School and The Eight: “Creating a National Art.” These 20th-century artists, who had studios on 14th Street in Lower Manhattan and were taught by Ashcan artists, similarly focused on subjects from everyday urban life, depicting scenes around Union Square and the Bowery District in the 1920s and 1930s.

Exhibitions are included with Museum admission and are free for Members.

“We could say that [The Close] is a journey between the past, the present and the future of the filmic image.”
—David Claerbout

The Close, a new video the Belgium-based artist David Claerbout completed in 2022, will be presented at the Milwaukee Art Museum in November, marking the work’s premiere at a U.S. museum. It will be accompanied by six related drawings the artist created at the completion of production. Claerbout is known for his works using photography, video, digital technology, and sound. His large-scale, immersive installations consider questions of time, memory, and truth.

The Close is conceived as a journey traversing the past and future of the camera, bringing together a reconstruction of amateur footage made in about 1920 and a digital 3D rendering of that footage. The silent scene, which shows barefoot children in a brick-walled, one-way alley—known as a “close” in English—transitions from grainy footage of a child into a highly detailed, quasi-technical portrait, objectifying face, eyes, and body. As the video freezes and holds the small child enraptured, singing voices set in. A recording of 24 spatially distinct singers performing Arvo Pärt’s 2004 vocal composition Da Pacem Domine surrounds the isolated child, who has become the focus of the work, with an architecture of voices.

Exhibitions are included with Museum admission and are free for Members.

Ten years ago, the Milwaukee Art Museum became a leading institution in North America for American and European self-taught art. With Playing Favorites, we celebrate the large gift from the local collector Anthony Petullo that catapulted the Museum to this distinctive position. This special installation features more than 20 drawings and paintings by self-taught artists such as Minnie Evans, Martín Ramírez, Alfred Wallis, and Adolf Wölfli, including some of Petullo’s favorite works from his 2012 gift and others he is lending from his personal collection.

Exhibitions are included with Museum admission and are free for Members.

Recognized as the first American modern art movement, the Ashcan School and The Eight captured everyday life at the beginning of the 20th century, a moment of increasing industrialization and great cultural change. Rejecting what traditional art institutions considered appropriate, these artists embraced a loose painterly style to portray factories and immigrants, congested urban streets and bawdy entertainments. Some praised the artists as “creating a national art” while others dismissed them as painters of rubbish or “ashcans.”

The Ashcan School and The Eight: “Creating a National Art” re-examines these artists and the social issues they depicted, drawing parallels to those still relevant today. The Milwaukee Art Museum has one of the largest collections of works by the Ashcan School and The Eight in the United States, and the exhibition is drawn from this significant collection. Prints, drawings, paintings, and pastels by artists including Robert Henri, George Bellows, and John Sloan are featured, revealing the full range of the group’s subjects and artistic practices.

Exhibitions are included with Museum admission and are free for Members.

California’s Mojave Desert and a U.S. naval shipyard in Maine are featured in two single-shot films brought together in conversation in Over Time, Chapter II. This follow-up to the Museum’s 2019 exhibition Over Time, Chapter I again pairs the work of the American artists James Benning (b. 1942), a Milwaukee native, and Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964). Both artists examine the relationship of film to still photography and often cite the other as an influence. Their respective films, BNSF and LUNCH BREAK, are extended, careful observations on different landscapes and the impacts of our global economy.

Benning’s film BNSF engages with themes involving the natural landscape, overconsumption, the transformation of industrial environments, and the passage of time. The film is titled after BNSF Railway, a 170-year-old freight transportation company that describes itself as “a critical link that connects consumers with the global marketplace.”

Lockhart’s LUNCH BREAK centers on shipyard workers at Bath Iron Works, where she spent a year exploring the complex relationships between labor and leisure. A series of Lockhart’s still-life photographs included in the exhibition celebrate the underground economy that workers created in the shipyard.

Exhibitions are included with Museum admission and are free for Members.

Photography lends itself to series: both film and digital cameras make it easy to create images or capture a scene in quick succession or over time, and the images can be readily reproduced. On Repeat: Serial Photography draws on the Museum’s collection of 20th- and 21st-century photography to examine the ways artists have used serial and sequential imagery.

Some multiple images are typologies of often overlooked common structures and places, such as Bernd and Hilla Bechers’ Water Towers (Cylindrical) (1978), which draws attention to differentiating details. Others, such as Rineke Dijkstra’s Almerisa (1994–2008), are serial portraits used to consider how identities are created, represented, and recognized. Repeated experiments with the materials and technology of photography suggest the medium itself as a subject, as do variations on themes from art history. John Houck’s First Set (2015) pairs different media, prompting viewers to consider the frequently competitive relationship between painting and photography.

The artists represented in this exhibition offer new connections, reflections on the past and present, and a deeper understanding of photography by putting their subjects and processes “on repeat.”

Edouard Castres’s painting Convoy of Wounded (Franco-Prussian War 1870) received wide acclaim after its display at the 1872 Paris Salon. A citizen of neutral Switzerland and member of the newly formed International Red Cross, Castres (1838–1902) was uniquely positioned to capture the humanitarian disaster that occurred toward the end of the Franco-Prussian War, which lasted 10 months. The French had suffered a decisive defeat by a coalition of German states, and French troops were allowed to enter Switzerland as refugees.

Castres and the conflict that inspired the painting are brought into critical focus in this exhibition. Different views of this significant turning point in European history are explored through related periodicals and decorative arts made in response to the conflict.