An art escape to Milwaukee (and Sheboygan) 

Earlier this spring, I found myself strolling along the Milwaukee River in downtown Milwaukee, enjoying the city’s rich historic architecture, urban walkability, cool bridges and public art. It’s a city that reminds me of Chicago, and also Duluth in a way— with its giant great lake hugging the eastern side. The city’s river game (Milwaukee has three) reminds me of Minneapolis’s own Mississippi. There’s even a bronze statue devoted to the city’s most famous 1970s TV character (“The Bronze Fonz”), just like Minneapolis’ own Mary Tyler Moore. 

Here in the Midwest, we have some wonderful cities that are just the right distance for a short trip over a few days. I dream of the day we have high speed rail that can zip between Chicago, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee, but even now these places are close enough you can easily get to them for a short trip. 

I’m attracted to road trips for a few reasons. For one, it tends to be cheaper than flying. It also seems to be slightly less of a carbon footprint if you have at least two people in your car, which in my case I did have, as my partner came along with me. Another option is bus or train, which just got more appealing with the new Amtrak Borealis line. It takes about 6 hours between St. Paul and Milwaukee. Now that I’ve gotten a taste of the city’s delights, I may very well try out the train option next time I visit. 

Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center

The benefit of taking a car is that you can take a detour or two along the way. Because I was going to be so close, I wanted to pay a visit to the Kohler Art Center’s Art Preserve, which opened in 2021. Located in Sheboygan, and an hour outside of Milwaukee, the Art Preserve is pretty special and unlike any other art center I’ve ever been to.  

The preserve showcases a mix of folk artists, artists that developed their practice outside the bounds of formal training, and people who in other ways have nurtured artistic visions that are uniquely idiosyncratic. 

The Art Preserve’s building is a thing of wonder in itself. Designed by the Denver-based architecture firm Tres Bird, it’s enveloped in huge wooden timbers that look as if they’re simply leaning against the building at different angles. Inside, the building creates an environment around each artist’s work that makes it feel like you’re stepping into the artist’s personal studio. The bathrooms are all artist-designed as well. 

I had a great time at the preserve, as well as at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center a few miles away. A very cool feature of the main art center is the art it showcases created in a residency program at the Kohler factory. Artists come from all over the country to create work in the industrial factory, and that work is featured in the center, and there’s a replica of what happens in the factory as well. When I was there, I also enjoyed the terrific textile-based exhibition, “Cloth as Land: HMong Indigeneity,” where I happened upon work by two Minnesota-based artists—  Ger Xiong and Pao Houa Her. 

Out and about in Milwaukee  

After we finished checking out Sheboygan, my partner and I headed to the city. It was raining a bit, but that didn’t stop us from taking a tour of “Actual Fractals, Act I”, a temporary public art exhibit in downtown that’s part of the city’s robust public art scene. Once again I ran into a piece by Pao Houa Her— a gorgeous light box photograph glowing with greenery.

One of my favorite public art sculptures I saw walking along Wisconsin Avenue was a storefront piece, viewable from the windows at the Bradley Symphony Center. It’s a bronze work of a figure kneeling and leaning forward. Their hands are missing. Look closely, and you realize the face is made to look like Michael Jackson. It’s called “Michael in White,” by Nicole Miller. 

Down Milwaukee Avenue a ways, we stopped into the decadent Pfister Hotel, before our wonderful dinner at Alem Ethiopian Village a block away. 

Designed in a Romanesque Revival style by architect Charles Koch in the late 19th century, the Pfister’s high ceilings, decorative adornments, chandeliers and Victorian art collection usher in a feeling of extravagance. 

Later, we made a stop at Stella’s: A Cocktail Dive. It’s this strange anomaly in the city, a former single family home surrounded by high rise buildings. The bartender told me the place used to be a speakeasy, and it still sort of has that vibe. You might not even know to enter, it seems so innocuous except for the stained glass window in the front. Inside, you’re treated to a dive bar experience and quirky art— including a portrait of Stella— who used to work at a previous iteration of the business. 

The Milwaukee Art Museum 

On the second day, we wandered around Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward, where there are a number of fantastic outdoor dining cafes that push out into the street. It was still a bit cold at that point, so we went inside to Cafe Benelux, a Belgian place with a gorgeous ornate staircase. I tried the beignets and an absolutely delicious fried hash with a fried egg on top. 

Much of the day was spent exploring the Milwaukee Art Museum, a gleaming white ship-looking building overlooking Lake Michigan. The best way to enter the museum is by crossing the Reiman Pedestrian Bridge over Lincoln Memorial Drive. As you walk across, you feel like you’re entering into a spaceship, with the museum’s wing-like architecture spanning out into the horizon, with the lake in the distance.

I also love the huge windows inside the museum, in the gallery spaces and various other places throughout the building. If you set your institution at such an idyllic location, you might as well take advantage of it. 

MAM’s collection is enormous, with nearly 25,000 works of art on four floors. I was especially impressed with its “50 Paintings” exhibition of 50 works made by artists across the globe in the last 5 years— it’s on view through June 23, 2024. With its mix of abstract works like Mary Heilmann’s palette-looking “Floating Spots 1” (2022), to Lisa Yuskavage’s erotic red-tinted “Night Classes” (2020), the exhibition attempts to gauge current trends in the painting form, spanning all sorts of different directions.

MAM is a museum you can spend hours in and not come close to seeing everything. This was my second time visiting, and there was a whole new set of gems that caught my eye as I wandered. This time, I found myself drawn to the museum’s Georgia O’Keeffe works on view, like “Spiral I -No. 3.” (1918). The pastel yellows and pinks swirl with a deep turquoise in the work, recalling the scroll of a violin, or perhaps an ocean wave. I also loved O’Keeffe’s use of negative space in “Pelvis I,” (1944), which looks a bit like a portal into another heavenly dimension. 

I was very impressed with Idris Khan’s “Repeat After Me,” the first solo museum exhibition by the British artist on view through August 11, 2024. The exhibition charts Khan’s career from his early explorations in digital photography through more recent explorations in painting, video, sculpture, and interdisciplinary experiments. I was struck by Khan’s meticulous attention to detail and the artist’s way of layering and texturing, resulting in deeply felt and thought out work.

I felt completely mesmerized by one series by the artist that finds a juxtaposition between poetry and visual art. Using stamps and ink, Khan layers the text thickly in the center of glass panels, fanning them out so that you can only read the words at the edges of the white and blue starbursts. In other works, Khan overlaps many layers of photography, or he’ll deconstruct beloved texts or works of art through a process of repetition and subtraction, finding new meanings and insight. 

After my time at the museum, I explored the Saint Kate— The Arts Hotel, which is operated by the same management company that runs the Pfister. It’s kind of the contemporary art answer to the Pfister’s more old school aesthetic. The Saint Kate has contemporary art on all its floors and in its rooms, and also has formal gallery spaces. St. Kate also has an artist in residence— currently Anwar Floyd-Pruitt, who has a studio in the gallery and engages in a practice that often invites guests to be a part of the process. Floyd-Pruitt showed me around St. Kate’s impressive collection and several gallery spaces, including one operated by the University of Wisconsin. When I was there I got to see a joyful, sensuous journey of paintings by Meghan Lionel Murphy. 

We wrapped up the last evening of our trip having dinner at Amilinda, a Spanish and Portuguese-influenced restaurant, enjoying a magnificent half roasted cauliflower and lentil dish and a spicy salad with tuna. After that, we headed to the Cactus Club for live music. We ended the night listening to records courtesy Saint Kate with the handy record player that comes with each room. 

I really wasn’t ready to come home the last day, so I did make one last art stop, at The Green Gallery. It’s a very strange little gallery that looks like it could be a drive through or a gas station. It’s a one-level mid-century building and unfortunately, it was closed when I got there. Luckily, I was able to see at least some of the paintings on view through the windows. They were showing a companion show to MAM’s “50 paintings” exhibition.

We drove home in less time than it takes to listen to an audiobook. I do wish I could have spent a bit longer in the city, but I had to get back to real life. Like any great city, you can’t possibly see all there is to see in just a couple of days, but there’s so much to do and things going on, that it’s well worth going even for a short time.

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