User:Nbrasch/Milwaukee Art Museum

Location and Visit
Located on the lakefront, the Milwaukee Art Museum is one of the largest art museums in the United States. Aside from it's galleries, the museum includes a cafe, named Cafe Calatrava, with views of Lake Michigan and a gift shop.

Hours
Normal operating hours for MAM are Tues-Wed and Fri-Sun 10am to 5pm, Thurs 10am to 8pm.

Origins
Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions. Over the span of at least nine years, all attempts to build a major art gallery had failed. Shortly after that year, Alexander Mitchell donated all of his collection to constructing Milwaukee's first permanent art gallery in the city's history. In 1888, the Milwaukee Art Association was created by a group of German panorama artists and local businessmen. The same year, British-born businessman Frederick Layton built, endowed and provided artwork for the Layton Art Gallery, now demolished. In 1911, the Milwaukee Art Institute, another building constructed to hold other exhibitions and collections, was completed, adjacent to the Layton Art Gallery.

The Milwaukee Art Museum was founded in 1888 and is purported to be Milwaukee's first art gallery. That claim is disputed by the Layton Art Gallery, which opened the same year. The Milwaukee Art Center, now the Milwaukee Art Museum, was formed when the Milwaukee Art Institute and Layton Art Gallery merged their collections in 1957 and moved into the newly built Eero Saarinen-designed Milwaukee County War Memorial.

Kahler and Calatrava Buildings
In the latter half of the 20th century, the museum came to include the War Memorial Center in 1957 as well as the brutalist Kahler Building (1975) designed by David Kahler and the Quadracci Pavilion (2001) created by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The Quadracci Pavilion contains a movable, wing-like brise soleil that opens up for a wingspan of 217 ft during the day, folding over the tall, arched structure at night or during inclement weather. The pavilion received the 2004 Outstanding Structure Award from the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering. This iconic building, often referred to as "the Calatrava", is used in the museum logo.

2015 Shields Building
In November 2015, the museum opened a $34 million expansion funded jointly by a museum capital campaign and by Milwaukee County. The new building, the Shields Building, designed by Milwaukee architect James Shields of HGA, provides an additional 30,000 square feet for art, including a section devoted to light-based media, photography, and video installation. The building includes a new atrium and lakefront-facing entry point for visitors and was designed with cantilevered elements and concrete columns to complement, respectively, the existing Calatrava and Kahler structures on the site. The final design emerged after a lengthy process that included the main architect's departure because of design disputes and his return to the project.

Governance
(above to replace MAM Wikipage's current "Management" heading)

In Popular Culture
An exterior shot of the Milwaukee Art Museum was used in the Nickelodeon TV show iCarly. The episode "iSpace Out" uses an image of the Calatrava building as the headquarters for a fictional organization called "SpaceCations".