Milwaukee Art Museum
Urban farming, the Great Lakes and Wisconsin art and its artists are all topics that fill the frames and set the sculptor’s wheel in motion with upcoming Milwaukee-area art exhibits.
“Growing Place: A Visual Study of Urban Farming”
MSOE’s Grohmann Museum features one of the latest trends to emerge worldwide, and it began right here in Milwaukee. Urban farming has become the latest method to feed growing populations and redevelop vacant, blighted urban areas. Will Allen founded the Growing Power urban farm in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, and the exhibit (which runs through April 28) focuses on Milwaukee and how urban farming has expanded to other cities, such as New Orleans and Detroit and to places like Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Here’s a chance to look at the past, present and future of growing food in cities. Check out the Gallery Night Event on Friday, Jan. 18, 5-9 p.m.
“Alexis Rockman: The Great Lakes Cycle”
Artist Alexis Rockman began a research tour of the Great Lakes region in 2013, resulting in a cycle of five oil, alkyd and acrylic paintings that measure six feet by 12 feet. His focus is on the changes—ranging from physical to ecological—that have affected the Great Lakes throughout the centuries. Rockman has called his work “natural-history psychedelia,” with a surreal sense of realism-meets-theatricality as if Salvador Dalí decided to paint outdoors. But his social observations and commentary are stark and foreboding; the rise of industrialism and how it affects the land and water are examined, as is human invasion—quite literally, with a crashed, submerged airplane. Plenty to ponder while considering the fate of our Great Lakes. At the Haggerty Museum of Art Feb. 8-May 19.
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“Bouguereau & America”
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) was one of the most popular artists during America’s Gilded Age, a time when consumption and capitalism became fashionable. Owning a Bouguereau was a sign you were on top. From the late-1860s to the early-1900s, his popularity grew steadily for his realistic genre paintings, steeped in tradition and dismissed by the Impressionist avant-gardists. Forty of the French academic painter’s works will be on display in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Baker/Rowland Galleries Feb. 15-May 12. This is the first major Bouguereau exhibition since the 1980s, when a revival of figure painting reignited interest in the artist who was deemed one of the most significant salon painters of his generation.
There are also several ongoing exhibitions you can still catch during the first several months of the new year.
“Fore and Aft: A Vitreous View of Time”
The art of glass and sculpture is featured in the works of three Wisconsin artists: Eoin Breadon, Beth Lipman and Jeremy Popelka, who explore the relationship between glass and light, form and time using architectonic forms, Dutch still lives and Irish storytelling for inspiration. Through March 31 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend.
“Forward 2018: A Survey of Wisconsin Art Now”
This is a statewide, juried exhibition featuring artwork created by Wisconsin artists. Out of 458 submitted works, 45 were chosen to represent Wisconsin art today. The exhibition goes on through April 14 at the Charles Allis Art Museum.
“House of Risk”/ “Play (things)”
Two exhibits concurrently running through Jan. 27 at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum are “House of Risk,” which looks at the histories, materials and textures of the Villa’s rooms; and “Play (things),” which examines how rules affect the world of architecture and how they can be rewritten to create new ideas in both form and production.
