Guides

In your mailbox? Catalogs of stuff. On the tube and the radio? Stuff for sale. Dinnertime conversation? “Oh, you have that stuff? You should try this stuff.” Weekend plans? Well, there’s stuff in the basement and the garage. Stuff to dust, throw out, polish, tune up, paint, reupholster. When we’re done, well, there’s stuff to play with.

That’s your stuff and my stuff. But what about our stuff? All that resplendent stuff in our museums – everlasting, climate-controlled and lovingly displayed.

In 1793, the French republicans persuaded the royals to open their Palais du Louvre to all of France, thus turning the king’s stuff into everybody’s stuff. And so the museum was born. We Americans eventually caught on, and rich men built big buildings for our stuff. It was just as good as European stuff, after all. (Though we collected a lot of their stuff first…just to get started.)

Museums started out in big cities, but now it seems everyone wants a nice place for nice stuff. We collect. We display. We seek out things beautiful, unusual, important or weird. At their best, museums are the most tangible part of our collective brain, holding objects that connect us by the mere fact they are here, real and close at hand. These days, we’re only a mouse click away from a Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art or a Gutenberg Bible at the British Museum. But nothing can replace the presence of the real thing, objects that become part of our shared experience. Things as essential to our community as laws and the land itself.

As our idea of community spreads across city and county lines, expanding our sense of place, our collective consciousness expands as well. Our stuff is no longer limited to a few Downtown Milwaukee buildings; it’s spread beyond the city limits – Sheboygan, Racine, Madison – and if you haven’t ventured beyond the usual spots, you’re missing some pretty great stuff.

You’d be surprised what’s out there, such as the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, which holds over 4,300 different kinds of mustard. You can see bees dance at Honey Acres Museum in Ashippun and find out everything you wanted to know about the artificial insemination of cattle at The Hoard Museum in Fort Atkinson. There are 600 African-American Angels (donated by Oprah) at Beloit’s Angel Museum. And there are lots of funny shoes at The International Clown Hall of Fame (which, interestingly enough, is now located in the Tommy Thompson Center at State Fair Park). Alas, no museum lasts forever: The Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue closed the doors on its 2,500 rolls six years ago.

But there is much, much more. What follows is a look at some of Wisconsin’s most intriguing cultural cathedrals within 75 miles of our fair city, all depositories of the true and beautiful, all places with stuff that may change your view of life. Or maybe not. Even if you fancy yourself a museum hound already, you may be surprised at what’s out there. I know I was.

The House on the Rock
There is a place in Wisconsin so distinctive, so American, that it simply must be included here, even though it’s a bit outside my travel zone, and it’s not quite what many think of as a museum. Alex Jordan’s crazy paean to packrats places him in the great tradi-tion of American eccentrics and entrepreneurs. Jordan reportedly started things after he was kicked out of the Taliesin apprentice program by Frank Lloyd Wright. Hiring vagrants from Madison to do the heavy lifting and blasting, he built a cramped, meandering house atop Deer Shelter Rock and filled it with Asian artifacts and robotic “music machines,” which still scratch out hits like Ravel’s “Bolero” as you navigate through the shag-carpeted pathways. This, of course, was only the beginning.

More than 60 years later, the “house” is a 200-acre complex of buildings and gardens filled to the brim with stuff, a testament to the late Jordan’s collecting zeal, vigorous salesmanship and colossal ego. Today, his followers carry on his tradition, bringing thousands to his Spring Green compound every year to take the three- to five-hour “self-guided tour” of Jordan’s kitschy salvage yard. In this increasingly sham-savvy age, there may no longer be a sucker born every minute, but there are apparently still lots of people who will pay over $25 to see (no riders please) the world’s largest carousel.

There is a simple, apple-pie American philosophy here: more. Why have one eight-foot model of a Mississippi paddleboat when you can have a dozen? Rather than 20 doll houses, let’s make it 250. Instead of one huge theater organ, why not three? And while we’re at it, let’s build the three instruments into a massive Piranesi-like environment that also includes brewery vats, ship propel-lers, industrial electrical transformers and a 45-foot-high “perpetual motion” clock.

Being a strictly for-profit enterprise, The House doesn’t share much information about the objects on display. Its contributions to scholarship are of the “what you see is what you get” variety. But the staff nonetheless seems to consider the Alex Jordan mission a divine quest. “Breaking a longstanding tradition, The House on the Rock is opening the transportation building while it is yet uncompleted,” read a recent sign posted within view of a hot air balloon and a Cadillac with a heart-shaped bathtub in the trunk. “You have the great honor and privilege of getting a glimpse of our creative staff hard at work on the latest edition of The House on the Rock tour.” Lovely.

The Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University
Tucked into a gracefully sloping hill on the south side of campus, overlooking… well, overlooking I-94 construction actually, the Haggerty is a prim and proper building befitting its place on a Catholic university campus. Built in 1984, before it became the rage for art museum architecture to adopt the color palette of Stay-Puft marshmallows, it’s clean-lined, warm-hued and just geometric enough to be interesting.

Inside, the Haggerty has given over most of its space to special exhibition galleries but mercifully has not dumped its permanent collection into the basement forever. Two small rooms serve as places where the curator can skim off the top of the collection and allow it to see the light of day. There’s one for the Moderns, and one for the Masters.

Now I know there are going to be museum snobs that scoff at representing Modern Art in the space of a single room. But I like it. There’s no generic narrative that takes you from one “ism” to the next. The selection is quirky, the juxtapositions jarring, the results interesting and even hilarious. There’s an Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe right next to another woman, an “Art Brut” ab-straction by Antonio Saura (which is indeed rather brutal) that includes breasts signified by slightly inflated balloons hanging by pieces of twine. A small but stirring Jacob Lawrence hangs beside a Roy Lichtenstein, showing two distinctive ways of using planes of solid color to suggest space.

The “Master’s Room” next door is a crowded menagerie of paintings and sculptures from the 15th to 19th centuries. Hung “salon style,” as the Haggerty’s Web site declares, it’s a terrific concoction, hung without annotations or even the names of the artists. An accompanying pamphlet with titles, artists and dates is available, but I’m all for avoiding it. Keep the art historians at bay for a while and spend some time just looking at the paintings: the luminous skin of the naked figure in “St. Sebastian” (by François-Guillaume Ménageot), the bright architectural geometry of the church interior (by Abel Grimmer) and the rich surfaces of the Madonna and Child (by Pieter Claeissins). They are not necessarily famous, nor even the best of their kind. But the chance to sit quietly with something that has endured for several centuries is nothing to trifle with.

Wisconsin Automotive Museum, Hartford
Back before Detroit’s Big Three, the aspiring entrepreneur could seriously consider a business making cars instead of, say, opening an Internet café or starting a video blog on YouTube. Louis Kissel and his two sons started building cars in Hartford in 1906 and made a go of it until the Great Depression. Thomas B. Jeffrey of Kenosha produced 1,500 or so “Ramblers” in 1902 and kept going until he was bought out by Nash Motors in 1916, which eventually became AMC.

The Wisconsin Automotive Museum – set in a former beet canning factory in downtown Hartford – is a monument to these little guys of the piston-and-carburetor set. There are dozens of models from each company: an original 1902 Rambler, a 1953 Nash-Healy that raced at Le Mans (the 24-hour one) and a whole lineup of “Kissel Kars,” as they were known, including the Kissel “Speedster” also known as the “Gold Bug.” Favored by West Coast celebs like Fatty Arbuckle, it’s the car the guys from “Entourage” would turn to if they were breaking into the Silents.

On the first floor, the cars are neatly arrayed with little touches of nostalgia. For gearheads, there are descriptions printed in strange languages: “bore and stroke – 4.5 x 3.5 inches…Compression ratio, 70:1.” But the true beauty here are the parts of the museum that resemble your Cousin Mike’s garage – you know, the guy who lives out by Mukwonago with a few spare cars in his backyard, who spends his evenings restoring that ’74 Mustang? After you’ve browsed the Kissels and paid homage to the 1948 Tucker (remember the movie?), climb the stairs to amble through a more eclectic and disheveled collection: a Saab that’s traveled one million miles, a DeLorean, a 1949 Kaiser, a 1951 Frazer and a Brooks Stevens-styled 1949 Jeepster (a civilian version of the classic WWII Jeep). There’s also a collection of Briggs & Stratton small engines and an assortment of what can best be called Service Station kitsch – tune-up gadgets, gas pumps, oil cans and other things once operated by the Men Who Wore the Stars.

Chazen Museum of Art, Madison
Museums have many lofty, educational and social purposes. But let’s not ignore the age-old struggle to “get a little peace and quiet around here!” If only your dad could occasionally retire to his own Impressionist wing.

Ah, the silence of museums. Save church perhaps, few public spaces offer such solace for the ears: no airport CNN, Muzak or an-nouncements of great deals in aisle four. Of course, museums have occasional gangs of school kids, chatter from museum cafés and so on. But a small university museum like the Chazen is usually long on quiet.

Structured around a three-story atrium clad in pale marble, the Chazen’s collection is modest but just right for a satisfying one- or two-hour stroll. For its size, the collection is particularly strong in paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Claude-Joseph Vernet’s luminous port scene and 19th century American works like Charles Franklin Pierce’s Singer Sargent-like portrait, “The Shawl.” And you’ll see more than the usual share of Soviet Social Realism, with earnest laborers in fields and factories cheerfully contributing to the great Soviet state.

The third floor’s contemporary galleries, however, are the best place to sit and soak things in. A large open space with light streaming from the skylit center, it’s a great setting for large-scale contemporary pieces like Helen Frankenthaler’s “Pistachio,” David Klamen’s dark and seemingly haunted still of a museum gallery after hours, or Judy Pfaff’s wacked-out wall relief, “Honey Bee,” which looks like an exploded Roy Lichtenstein.

On the House
Sometimes, you want more than painting upon painting in stark white rooms. You want a little warmth, a little woodwork, maybe even some flocked wallpaper. Fortunately, there are people around who love old stuff and make it their business to keep it out of real estate developers’ dumpsters. This includes not just 14th century altarpieces or ancient Roman statues but stair banisters and bathtubs and window shades, too.

There’s plenty of that at the 1890s-era Pabst Mansion, which was saved from the wrecking ball in 1975 and then painstakingly restored, forever preserving Capt. and Mrs. Pabst’s ecstatically overwrought sense of taste. There are elk-horn chandeliers aplenty, stairways adorned with carved clusters of hops and a faux French Rococo parlor complete with gold-leaf embellished plasterwork. The house’s exquisitely carved woodwork (be sure to see the birch china cabinets in the dining room) is a testament to the artisans who worked on it over a century ago. But the house doesn’t say much for old Captain Pabst himself, other than his deep pockets.

There’s also no shortage of gilding and froufrou at Ten Chimneys , the renovated summer residence of actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, located near Genesee Depot. But the mood is airy and playful compared to the Pabst’s determined one-upmanship. Ten Chimneys was, after all, painted by a theater set designer, and the house seems like one big cocktail party stage set. It doesn’t hurt to know that Noel Coward, Katharine Hepburn and the other wits and notables hung around the pool during the summer.

The Charles Allis House and Villa Terrace are as much museums as possible stops on a tour of old homes. Some rooms are “as they were,” but much of the space has been cleared and converted to gallery areas for temporary exhibits. In the Allis Museum, there’s a small but impressive collection of paintings, including a Winslow Homer fishing scene and a George Innes landscape. A beautiful collection of Chinese and Japanese ceramics is located in the Marble Hall.

Villa Terrace’s art is unfortunately similar to the Pabst’s collection of rosy-cheeked “Herren und Frauen,” but here the story is loca-tion, location, location – and lovely residential architecture that makes the most of it. Architect David Adler went Italian at the request of his client, Lloyd Smith, and was smart enough to keep things simple, particularly in the charming courtyard. Elsewhere, the view of Lake Michigan from the Great Hall and from the “Terrace d’Luna” is one of the city’s best. And while you’re there, be sure to climb the stairs to the Zuber Bedroom, which is swathed in original, hand-screened 1935 wallpaper, “Décor Chinois” from the Zuber studio, the legendary French wallpaper company. Its stunningly bright colors give the feeling of stepping into a Rousseau painting or a Beatles album cover.

Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend
Consider the retrospective. It’s a chance to delve deep into one artist’s life and consciousness, tracing the work from the earliest glim-mer of creativity to an autumnal acceptance of life’s limits and compromises.

But bringing together a large body of work by one artist is not often done.

Yet in the little brick house formerly known as the West Bend Art Museum, one can see several dozen paintings of Carl von Marr. While hardly major, he’s still an important Wisconsin artist and a fascinating study. Firmly ensconced in the academic tradition (which unfortunately endeared him to Adolf Hitler), von Marr nonetheless flirted with Impressionism and other trends. One of the pleasures of browsing through this collection is to witness his push-pull relationship with the art world. His portraits are exceptional – gentle but probing studies that put his academic technique to good use. And no visit to the von Marr collection can avoid the billboard-sized painting, “The Flaggelants,” a massive historical canvas depicting disciples of a 14th century Italian hermit, who urged his followers to scourge themselves and expunge the sins of the world.

The museum also contains the most extensive collection of pre-20th century Wisconsin art to be found anywhere. Much of it con-sists of standard academic-style genre scenes and landscapes, but the impressively detailed annotations turn this into a thorough course in Wisconsin art history. Along the way, be sure to see the airy landscape by photography legend Edward Steichen, Alexander Mar-quis’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson’s mixed-race grandchild, an impressive portrait by Merton Grenhagen and examples of work by 19th century Milwaukee painters who worked for a company that created historical panoramas.

Milwaukee Public Museum
It’s hard to walk into our beloved public museum these days without feeling the shadowy presence of fiscal malfeasance lurking behind the Buffalo stampede or the 1890s General Store. While legal battles continue and the museum grapples with an uncertain future, there’s a palpable sense of nostalgia in its halls. There was once a time when all this stuff – the artifacts, knowledge, the push-button rattlesnake – was securely and unmistakably ours.

Perhaps this sense of wistfulness made me gravitate toward the older parts of the museum recently. It’s changed a lot in recent years, adding various exhibits and attractions. But there is a spine to the building and the idea behind it – a through line of sorts – that predates the butterflies and the IMAX: The museum wants to represent the world.

The idea is so old-fashioned it almost seems quaint, but if you stroll through the museum’s second and third floors, its power is unmis-takable. You move through the history of the planet, from trilobites to saber-tooth tigers, then around the globe itself, through cultures and environments that seem frozen in some generic, unspecified time – one habitat after another, one non-Western culture after another, each place and people represented by maps, artifacts and the museum’s incomparable dioramas.

Today, we routinely interact with artificial, two- or three-dimensional worlds created with only a laptop. The idea of a diorama – a picture of the world, crafted by hand, which contains real elements of that world – seems like an eccentric folly. But wander the mu-seum and there they are – “A Prairie River: Near Yankton, South Dakota,” “The Woodlands,” – and they are luminous and beautiful. They’re as meticulously crafted as a Pouissin landscape, yet with depth and dimension that no painter could capture in oil.

The appeal of dioramas is that they are both seductively realistic and defiantly artificial, timeless yet quaintly old-fashioned. The North American section of the museum, which contains the oldest dioramas, has the bright, airy feeling of a classic 1950s ranch house: wood paneling and earthy pastel colors. The dioramas feel like living room picture windows, looking out onto scenes of bat-tling male elk instead of lawn sprinklers.

As the displays get newer, the exhibits come to surround us. The windows are gone, and the rain forest jungle seeps out into the formerly pristine path. But for all the educational possibilities of these “environmental” displays, the attempts to put us smack-dab in the middle of the savannah, I’m most drawn to the artificial and the man-made: the clean lines and intricate patterns of Iroquois baskets and bread paddles, the amazing carving of the Benin Fon boat and the eye-popping beauty of a simple array of sea shells. Perhaps we now understand that it is pure hubris to try to represent the whole world. But the Milwaukee Public Museum still offers lots of beautiful pieces – and lots of peace.

Kids
If you have children, you probably know the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum, and perhaps Discovery World/Pier Wisconsin. You know them as good places of fun learning and healthy development. But think about the last time you were there. Have you ever shouted “No!” more times within the space of an hour? Have you ever spent more time consoling your child while he frantically pulls a lever or pounds on a button: “I’m sorry, son. I don’t know what it’s supposed to do; it must be broken.”

Don’t get me wrong. I think children’s museums are great places, and I’ve spent many an hour watching my own son absorb vari-ous laws of physics while ricocheting from one exhibit or another. But some day, the noble and brilliant minds who design children’s exhibits will have to address the yawning gap between what they want an exhibit to do and what kids actually do with (and to) them.

Do these exhibit designers have children? Do they live in a house without on/off switches or TV remotes? We who live in places with such things know that buttons and switches fascinate 5-year-olds not because they want to understand how things work but simply because they love to turn it on and off, and on, and off. And on and off.

I wonder if “A Trading Place” at the Betty Brinn really fosters an understanding of American commerce. Kids are supposed to pick, sort, pack and “ship” apples, and eventually sell them to a café. I’m sure they’ll get to that after they explore whether they can get the Velcro apple to stick in the tree by throwing it across the room. And I really like the idea of conducting a digital orchestra with a laser-guided baton that the musicians actually follow. But the last time I tried conducting, my version of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes” sounded like a scratched CD of a Charles Ives symphony.

Which is why I like Discovery World’s people-centric approach to gadgetry. Many of the displays are run by a kind of “nerd patrol,” a collection of hip folks in lab coats and wacky ties that work the machines with you. They’ll help you ride a Segway. They’ll show you 3-D computer modeling. They’ll let you watch the blood pump through your arm.

But all the nerds in the world can’t hide the fact that the museum is essentially a half-empty shell. The intimate aquarium space is spectacular (and mostly complete), but it’s really more about the architecture than the fish, which swim over, under and alongside you and practically burst into the elevator as you arrive. Outside of that, the major attraction is the building itself, which elegantly ad-dresses Lake Michigan and allows wonderful vistas from almost anywhere inside – the perfect respite when little Michael has been pushing the same button over and over for the past five minutes.

Racine Art Museum
The sweetest little museum that you’ve probably never heard of, the Racine Art Museum opened its jewel of a building in 2003. For a cool $6 million, Chicago architects Brininstool + Lynch turned two outdated downtown structures into a warm, white Rubik’s cube which has a milky shimmer by day and an iridescent glow at night. It works beautifully into the fabric of its location. There are won-derful views of the lake from the east and south facades, which are made almost entirely of glass. The north side of the building sports a gallery space that faces the street and extends almost the entire length of the building.

After more or less languishing on the outskirts of town, the relocated facility tangibly announces that the RAM has arrived as one of the most important collections of contemporary craft in America.

The museum has no permanent galleries. Instead, it shapes parts of the collection into about a dozen shows a year centered on a theme, genre or artist. Recently, there have been impressive exhibits: “Women’s Tales,” work by four Israeli jewelry designers that shows how far contemporary artists can push their form. And a 25-year survey of ceramic vessels and drawings by Akio Takamori, who creates sensuous, organic sculptures with a fascinating interplay between form and surface decoration. In the window gallery, Racine sculptor Bill Reid’s colorful and fantastic metal animals create a loony panorama.

These shows have been beautifully mounted and displayed – not easily done with delicate pieces of jewelry and large three-dimensional ceramics. With a stunning building and an extensive collection, this should be a frequent stop for anyone interested in beautiful things.


Kohler Arts Center
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center is probably the happiest museum in the area. Befitting a place bearing the name of bathroom fixtures, it’s as bright and shiny as a new pedestal sink, a cluster of buildings in downtown Sheboygan with a postmodern suburban vibe – none of this “cathedral of art” look here. With up to a dozen exhibits on view simultaneously, there’s an eager, something-for-everyone feeling about the place.

There’s a strong focus on craft, with pieces created from the museum’s acclaimed “arts/industry” program, which gives artists the chance to use commercial industrial or manufacturing facilities to create and fabricate their work. But while much of the work could be called user-friendly, the Kohler doesn’t shy away from more conceptual or even politically-tinged shows. A recent show of Sonya Clark’s constructions, “Pockets and Teeth,” may just seem like cool things you can make with lots of pocket combs. But it’s also a subtle commentary on standards of beauty and disposable consumer culture. “Intersections: Shifting Identity in Contemporary Art” focused on conflicting ideas of cultural identity but with art that always seemed colorful and pretty. You’ll see pleasing objects that might make you think but probably nothing too angst-ridden or angry – or anything involving bodily fluids.

Unless you count the washrooms, that is. The museum’s six artist-created bathrooms have brought the Kohler national fame, and deservedly so. The artists took their task seriously, thinking of them as site-specific environments or installations that wittily and sub-stantially address ideas relating to The Bathroom: gender, beauty, power, fashion, privacy, childhood. See as many as you can – with-out violating any laws.

And remember, the washrooms are participatory art. If you don’t feel the urge, there’s a lovely little café where you can stop for a cup of coffee. Or two or three.

Milwaukee Art Museum
Think you know the Milwaukee Art Museum? Sure, you’ve seen the wings open and close and marveled at Calatrava’s soaring lines. And you’ve heard the to-ing and fro-ing over the “success” of the Calatrava addition. Masterpiece or not, it still takes my breath away, and I’m still being surprised and delighted by previously unnoticed details. Before you march to the pavilion to take in the lake hori-zon, wander around the smooth intersection of cylinders at the museum’s entrance – a rotunda rising up like a tiered cake of space and light, finally opening to the expansive space adorned with Calder’s celestial mobile. Wander down the long marble hallway that extends along the lake. Now that it’s adorned with the bustle of a café, it’s become an enclosed, celestial boardwalk. Through the windows, sil-houetted against the frozen lake, has Alexander Liberman’s “Argo” ever looked better?

The addition, however, does have one big drawback. Like a surprise birth to an only-child family, the Calatrava has kept every-one in Milwaukee leaning over and pinching its cheek for the last five years while the neglected older sibling sulks in the corner. The featured shows and buzz-worthy events draw crowds to the big white bird, while the hulking concrete bunker to the north is all but ignored. It, after all, will always be there. It is the Permanent Collection.

Do yourself a favor. Create your own event. Do a Folk Art Friday and spend a lunch hour looking at the exquisitely displayed duck decoys in the Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Leave work early and spend an hour sitting among the O’Keefe’s. Take an afternoon and wander through the new Decorative Arts wing, which is one of the most illuminating and beautiful displays I’ve seen, not just of American art history, but of American history . And if you’re feeling a little too sunny and want to touch the dark part of your soul, spend some time in the Specks Gallery among Erich Heckel’s penetrating Expressionist woodcuts (just not too much time).

The beauty of a permanent collection is being able to return to it, take it in small pieces. Like all museums, the art here is assem-bled in groupings and timelines, an attempt to make one grand story of it all, to see everything in its context. But that’s only one way of understanding art. Another way is to experience it, to live with it one piece at a time. There are many pieces I come back to again and again. To the airiness and substance of Cornelia Parker’s “Edge of England,” where a frozen shower of chalk from the Dover Cliffs suggests the evanescence of life and empire. To the rich surfaces and iconic stillness of Nardo di Cione’s “Madonna and Child,” one of the oldest paintings in the museum. To the strange simplicity of Edgar Tolson’s “whittled” scenes of the book of Genesis. Or to bring some color to a dreary day, a room full of Gabrielle Münter or Georgia O’Keefe or Milton Avery.

If you don’t believe me, take a tip from Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley. In a corner of the recently redesigned Bradley Collection, there’s a little pied-à-terre in which you can lounge on appropriately colorful orange couches and watch a few television interviews with the late collector and benefactor. It’s charming to hear her dismiss questions from journalists and curators about her collecting philosophy or method. She followed her instincts – her love of color and her openness to new ideas. (When asked where her collecting eye was taking her next, she simply answers, “Well, it depends on what the modern boys will do next.”) In collecting as in museum-going, there’s always something surprising, something that might take your breath away, just around the next corner. n

Paul Kosidowski is a Milwaukee-based freelancer and culture vulture.