Milwaukee Art
Museum
right on the edge of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, sits a really unique looking structure that looks as
if it should belong to an alien landscape, although it is more
than that, since it houses the magnificent Milwaukee Art Museum
or for short, it is known as MAM, and it was started in 1872,
with numerous organizations being started so that the city could
have its own art gallery. At that time, the city was just little
more than a growing port town with few if any locations to host
an art exhibition of any kind. During the previous nine years,
every effort to construct or start a major art gallery had been
thwarted, although it would host a great exhibition in 1881 at
the Milwaukee Exposition Hall that was the city's major event
venue at that period. Not too much later, Alexander Mitchell
would donate all her collection so that the first permanent art
gallery in the city could be constructed. In 1882, the Milwaukee
Museum of Fine Arts would be founded, although it would be
dissolved within six years, but that same year the Milwaukee Art
Association would be started by a group of German panorama
artists and area businessmen, and their first home would be the
Layton Art Gallery. Today, the museum houses more than 25,000
works of art and within its permanent collection there is a
fabulous collection of old masters, as well as 19th and 20th
century works, American decorative arts, post-1960 American art,
folk and Haitian art and one of the finest collections of German
expressionism. It does have a big amount of Georgia O'Keefe
works and the German expressionist, Gabriele Munter.
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