Spotlight on Women at Sarah Ball Allis Art Museum

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Charles Allis died in 1918 but his wife Sarah lived until 1945. Their East Side mansion was bequeathed in her will to the City of Milwaukee. “Sarah and Charles shared a love for the arts. Both were avid collectors. They traveled across the U.S. and Europe to auctions and galleries. She continued to build the collection [displayed in the museum] after Charles’ death,” says the museum’s marketing specialist, Caroline Dannecker.

Neither of the Allises were interested in the modernism born in Europe during their lifetimes. “Their collection was more retrospective,” says senior curator Phoenix Brown. “They collected the American schools—the Hudson River School—and art and objects from other parts of the world.”

And so, for the next four and a half months, the Allis Museum will leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st century. The gilt-edged permanent collection is suddenly suffused with conceptual art, “in conversation,” Dannecker says, with each other and issues of feminism and gender.

Actually, it’s a three-way conversation with the mansion itself giving mute testimony for its former inhabitants. Jennifer Chadwick’s Proving is a video projected onto the tile wall above the kitchen stove, its four bread loaves rising with the yeast in real time. “It connects with the Spanish Civil War, critiquing modern painting and its exclusion of women,” Brown says. The art from that war calls Picasso’s heroically dimensioned Guernica to mind, but what about the women of Spain who baked the bread, sewed the clothes, in some cases fought? The omissions of history—starting but not ending with Sarah Ball Allis—provide subtext for the exhibit.

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On the stairwell to the second floor, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s We Get Further Down Our Strange Loop hangs opposite an Islamic prayer rug. We Get Further is an ouroboros quilt of looping patterns and many colors sewn from found materials and daubed with brush strokes. Melissa Dorn turned Sarah’s bathroom into an installation, Fem-Utility Closet 2023, replete with the texture of mops and reappropriated materials household materials. Mounted in Sarah’s bedroom is a big dirty white canvas, Canary in a Coal Mine, by Alissa Chanin-Kolaj , a rebuke to Robert Rauschenberg’ White Paintings with their evocation of modernism’s aspirations of remaking the world as a blank canvas. Canary in a Coal Mine seems to say that it’s too late, there is no blank canvas—the world has been smudged and it’s getting worse.

The exhibition, Dannecker says, “is an entry point into wider conversations that are important to have about feminist identity, queer identity, how they relate and tell their narratives in society.”

For more information, visit charlesallis.org.