Photo by Kevin J. Miyazaki
Villa Terrace Art Museum
The Villa Terrace Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Villa Terrace, Milwaukee’s decorative arts museum and “Renaissance garden,” is celebrating its centennial in July with a big show over the lakefront. Not fireworks (been there, seen that), but a drone show filling the sky with colors forming segueing images of Villa Terrace’s architecture and landscape.
“The drones will cover an area the size of a football field over the lake, flying in unison,” says Megan Holbrook, chair of the museum’s centennial committee. The July 10 spectacle will be visible to anyone on the lakefront. Three hundred-fifty ticketed guests inside Villa Terrace can also take part in what Holbrook describes as a “family-friendly party” with a treasure hunt and glow-in-the-dark activities for children. A WMSE DJ simulcasting from Villa Terrace will provide the musical soundtrack.
One suspects that Villa Terrace’s original owners would approve. The museum was originally a private mansion called Sopra Mare, owned by Lloyd and Agnes Smith of the A.O. Smiths. They fell in love with a villa they spotted while traveling in northern Italy and commissioned Milwaukee-Chicago architect David Adler to create an Italian-Spanish inspired villa overlooking Lake Michigan. Blink on a warm summer day and you could mistake it for the Mediterranean.
Completed in 1924, the mansion was a family home before it was donated to Milwaukee County in the 1960s. Not unlike the English castles that became part of Britain’s National Trust, the house and gardens were opened to the public. “It was a time of change when a lot of larger homes were difficult to keep up and staff,” Holbrook says. Owner Agnes Curtis (nee Smith) “didn’t want it torn down and redeveloped.”
In the years since, a friends group has helped maintain and renovate the grounds, raising over $1 million at the turn of this century to restore the overgrown gardens that roll down the hillside toward Lincoln Memorial Drive. Since then, the friends and the museum have collaborated with community groups to ensure free admission to underserved Milwaukeeans and are working to make the building and grounds easily accessible to handicapped visitors.
Other events will follow the drone show to mark Villa Terrace’s centennial. Artists Day on July 11 will include an arts and crafts fair in the courtyard and great hall, plein air painters at their easels in the gardens and art classes organized by Arts@Large. “It’s a chance for us to support Milwaukee’s arts community and remind people that Villa Terrace is about the arts,” Holbrook says. The centennial fundraising gala will follow on July 13 with music by Donna Woodall, Mark Davis and Arron Crook.
|
|
For tickets and more information, visit villaterrace100.com
