Since the 1980s, Gallery Night & Day—held four times each year—brought crowds into galleries around the city with a focus on venues in the Historic Third Ward and nearby Downtown areas.
Despite COVID-19, Gallery Night retains the potential to connect gallery owners, artists and people who might otherwise never step into an art gallery. Ruth Lawson, marketing and communications director for the Historic Third Ward, helped to plan and transition the event onto an online format.
As the COVID-19 threat grew it became obvious that the event could not continue as usual thus it moved online. Platforms such as the new Gallery Night MKE app and the Gallery Night MKE website allowed organizers to close the gap between artists, galleries and viewers and create a universally shareable event not limited to physical spaces.
“[The platforms] give us an opportunity to meet them where they are on their phones. Putting it on social media makes is shareable too, and that helps get the message out for these artists as well as the gallery owners,” Lawson says.
Artists and gallery owners sent Gallery MKE pictures and videos that introduce and discuss the art they are displaying, available on the app on July 17 and 18. Lawson encourages people to familiarize themselves with the art being displayed in the Third Ward and across the city through the event and then schedule a meeting with the individual galleries to see the art in person. Many of the galleries are open by appointment. Gallery Night being online allows for virtual relationships before these physical meetings take place.
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“During an actual physical Gallery Night you don’t have that opportunity to actually interface with the gallery owner or the artist...so this is a great way for the artist and the gallery owners to kind of meet—virtually—people who may have been to their gallery but they haven’t had the opportunity to interface with,” she said.
The connections created by the event go beyond creating virtual relationships with individuals and into ensuring that the art community feels inviting and inclusive for everyone in our city.
“It is really an opportunity for everybody from a beginning admirer of art to somebody who’s really looking to add to their collection to interact with artists to interact with gallerists and to be part of Milwaukee,” Lawson says. “It is really important that art is not seen as this thing that only some people can afford or only some people do. We want to be as inclusive possible.
“If I can encourage anybody to do one thing with Gallery Night it is to find some art they like and buy it. It makes a difference to so many people,” she adds.
Gallery Night MKE is hoping to resume in-person events in the fall but is flexible to the changing situation in the world and has not made definitive plans.
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