David Barnett Marks an Anniversary with ‘56 Years, 56 Artworks’

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“It’s hard to believe it’s been 56 years,” David Burnett says. To celebrate nearly six decades in the increasingly challenging art business, the David Barnett Gallery’s exhibition, “56 Years, 56 Artworks,” is a sampling of artists featured in previous shows as well as a display of Barnett’s own enthusiasm as a collector.

The Barnett Gallery opened in 1966 in the basement of the Patrician Apartments on 21st and Wisconsin. “I couldn’t afford to rent a space so I convinced my dad [the building’s owner] to give me three years of free rent in exchange for remodeling the basement storage space,” Barnett recalls.

He was a 19-year-old art student who launched his gallery with only $186 in working capital (around $1,500 in today’s money). Barnett remained in the basement until 1985 when he bought his dream house, the Button Mansion (1024 E. State St.). The historic building, standing since 1875, remains the site of his gallery 17 years later.

“It’s tough sledding when there’s no snow,” Barnett says. He attributes his survival to “passion and persistence.” In recent years, much of the revenue comes from Internet sales, especially through 1stDibs. His gallery was included in Michelle Madden’s book 111 Places in Milwaukee That You Must Not Miss and has attracted international notice. As if on cue, a couple from Vienna stroll into Barnett’s office during our interview, exclaiming “Marvelous! Marvelous!”

The Barnett Gallery is crowded with art, the walls covered in paintings and prints and spare spaces occupied by sculptural objects. “56 Years, 56 Artworks” fills the building’s Central and East galleries. Barnett scurries around the rooms, eagerly identifying pieces, starting with one by Joseph Rozman, the first artist to receive a solo show at Barnett (January 1967) along with a fellow UW-Milwaukee art student from the ‘60s, Aya Meisters (living now in New York). Schomer Lichtner’s merrily painted Cow & Ballerina represent the UWM instructors Barnett once knew.

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Some of the “56 Artworks” have special local interest. In Joseph Ferrara’s dark and kinetic watercolor, The Free Press (1957), a Black man peers into the Journal Building on Fourth and State, watching the whirring presses through the plate glass windows. The exhibit includes work by relatively obscure artists, such as a whimsical contemporary acrylic by Canada’s Karen Hoepting, and works by acclaimed modern masters, with lithographs by Marc Chagall and Rene Magritte, woodcuts by Wassily Kandinsky and Milton Avery and a Pablo Picasso drawing.

“56 Artworks” travels the globe for John Stuart Curry’s gawking cruel faces in Cockfight in Cuba (1946), and Haitian artist Prospere Pierre Louis’ Sun Totem, whose masterfully detailed iconography embodies Haiti’s syncretistic convergence of West Africa with Roman Catholicism. Looming in a corner is a tall carved wooden fetish from 1930s Congo staring down a roomful of contemporary stone carvings from Zimbabwe.

 Barnett has also been a voice in the community. Years ago, he was a member of Mayor Henry Maier’s arts council and he was recently elected to the board of the UWM Foundation. “I feel very lucky,” he says. “My goal was never to make a lot of money. The creative process is what drives me.”