“What the world needs now,” Hal David and Burt Bacharach wrote in 1965, “is love, sweet love.” The sentiment stands but, faute de mieux, Milwaukeeans can make do with another world-class art gallery. UW-Milwaukee’s new Emile H. Mathis Gallery, located in Mitchell Hall, Room 170, adds 2,400 square feet of state-of-the-art exhibition space to house the treasures of the university’s art collection. “Legacies: ReVisioning the UWM Art Collection” sets a high bar with a selection of the most salivation-inducing works by sanctified figures including Rembrandt van Rijn, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Robert Rauschenberg, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Edgar Degas and Joan Miró.
The gallery derives its name and funding from Emile H. Mathis II, a Racine-based connoisseur, collector, conservationist, framer, dealer and philanthropist who died in 2012. In addition to a multimillion dollar donation, which made the gallery’s construction possible, Mathis donated his collection of more than 1,700 prints spanning 500 years and more than 600 pieces of African art from the 19th and 20th centuries.
