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= Warehouse Art Museum = The Warehouse Art Museum (WAM), formerly known as The Warehouse, is a private art museum located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Founded in 2018 by private collectors Jan Serr and John Shannon, the museum holds 3-5 exhibitions each year composed primarily from work in the museum’s permanent collection.

Location
From 2018-2023, WAM occupied the ground floor of a historic five-story concrete and brick warehouse in Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley Neighborhood. The 4,000 SF space was renovated to include LED lighting and display walls while retaining original elements of the building’s industrial past, like concrete columns and flooring.

In January of 2024, WAM announced that the museum would be moving to a new location and plans to reopen to the public in 2025.

Collection
WAM’s permanent collection, also known as the Serr & Shannon Collection, is built from the personal collection of museum founders Jan Serr and John Shannon. For over 50 years, the couple has curated their collection based on their shared interests and connections.

As of 2024, WAM lists that its permanent collection includes over 7,000 modern and contemporary works. Of these more than 7,000 pieces, approximately 2,000 are Serr’s own work. Both residents of Wisconsin, Serr and Shannon's collection includes many significant Wisconsin artists, while their travels have brought together works by contemporary artists from China, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and more. Dominant themes of the collection include self-portraits, monotypes, and contemporary craft.

Käthe Kollwitz’s 1921 work titled Self-Portrait is considered to be the first piece added to the museum's collection. Serr, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at the time of it's aquisition, discovered the piece when an art dealer from Chicago displayed it during a visit to one of her courses. Serr approached the dealer after class to purchase the etching, adding the first piece of artwork and the first portrait to the collection. The first joint acquisition occurred in approximately 1980 with the purchase of an Alex Katz lithograph, Supurb Lillies (Maravell 62). As of 2024, new work is still regularly added to the collection.

Concentrations
In November 2018, WAM’s inaugural exhibition, Concentrations, curated by the museum's first staff curator, Laura Sims Peck, opened to the public. This exhibition highlighted eight major concentrations from within the permanent collection, including photography, monotypes, and portraiture. Described by the curator, “each concentration offers a glimpse into the minds of the collectors and highlights the breadth of the collection.” The exhibition included over 70 pieces, including work by Keith Haring, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Sally Mann, and more.

On Belonging: Works by Lois Bielefeld and Nirmal Raja
On Belonging marked the first WAM exhibition not drawn from the permanent collection. This 2019 exhibition was the result of a photographic and video collaboration between Wisconsin-based artists Lois Bielefeld and Nirmal Raja. Over the course of their collaboration, resulting in two bodies of work. In one project, the artists examined the visual understanding of race and place, investigating what it means to appear different in various historical, economic, ethnic, racial, and religious spaces around Milwaukee in portraits. In the other, the artists use performance-based photography and video installation to ask visitors to consider their relationships to history, and "what does it mean to be American?"

Carve, Cast, and Coil: International Sculpture
Returning to the permanent collection, Carve, Cast, and Coil: International Sculpture featured works by 20 artists from 12 countries on five continents. As described by Peck, “Traditional sculptural mediums, such as bronze, wood, and stone, juxtaposed barbed wire and houseplants. Materials found in craft, such as bamboo and ceramic, formed complex and elegant shapes. Works are carved, cast, and coiled—and burned and welded and woven and more—to create unique forms that push the limits of the materials from which they are made.” This exhibition primarily celebrated diverse approaches to sculpture; however, some works were also accompanied by drawings or paintings by the same artists.

Artists included Hanne Braun, Bruno Cidra, Stephen De Staebler, Ruth Duckworth, Fawzia Khan, Dietrich Klinge, June Leaf, Pamela Mei Yee Leung, Truman Lowe, Reuben Nakian, David Nash, Mimmo Paladino, Manolo Paz, Alejandro Santiago, Peter Bongani Shange, Tom Shannon, Kenzie Shiokava, Terry Turrell, Joel Urruty, and Jiro Yonezawa.

Jan Serr: A Painter’s Photographs of India
With a decades-long career exhibiting nationally and internationally, Jan Serr: A Painter’s Photographs of India was Milwaukee-based painter and printmaker Jan Serr’s first solo exhibition dedicated to her photographic work. Presenting an entirely new body of work, photographs from northern and southern India depicted painterly scenes filled with bright colors, busy streets, and serene landscapes. Photography from WAM’s existing permanent collection was also displayed in dialogue with Serr’s work.

On the Nature of Wisconsin
On the Nature of Wisconsin was, as guest curator Annemarie Sawkins described it, “a celebration of Wisconsin artists and their relationship with the natural world.” Focused on a state known for its freshwater, forests, and parks, this exhibition examined the connections artists have made and observed with these surroundings and included works depicting sweeping landscapes, farm life, plants, animals, and objects exemplifying natural forms. It's run disrupted by COVID-19, the show extended it's originally scheduled dates, opening in January 2020, closing briefly from March-June 2020, and reopening to small, private tours in July of 2020.

I Am a Story: Self-Portraits
Featuring over 80 self-portraits by 54 artists from 10 countries, this COVID-19 era exhibition, curated by Nicholas Pipho, allowed visitors to, as described by Shannon, “stand as close as you like to these people, even though they are not wearing masks,” to observe a significant concentration of self-portraiture work from the WAM Collection. Work spanned a variety of mediums and included pieces by Cindy Sherman, Jim Dine, David Hockney, and Carrie Mae Weems. A pop-up exhibition presented by COPA (Coalition of Photographic Arts) titled I WITNESS: Photographic Portraiture joined the exhibition during its final month.

Shari Urquhart: MUSN'T TOUCH
In conjunction with the Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Warehouse Art Museum presented more than 30 "monumental tapestries" from artist Shari Urquhart’s 40-year career together for the first time. Curated by Deb Brehmer, the exhibition at the Portrait Society Gallery, which represents her estate, focused on narrative textiles and related watercolor paintings. WAM’s portion of the show outlined her historic trajectory by presenting a chronology of the three distinct bodies of work.

Art Japan: 2021-1921
Art Japan: 2021-1921 was an exhibition curated by Annemarie Sawkins that celebrated internationally renowned artists from Japan. Work included over 120 woodblock prints, etchings, lithographs, calligraphy, drawings, photography, ceramics, basketry, and textiles, all from the permanent collection of the Warehouse Art Museum. The exhibit welcomed guests like Japanese Consul General Kenichi Okada. Art Japan was the second of a trilogy of exhibitions on the art of Asia, the first being Jan Serr: A Painter’s Photographs of India (2019 and the third being, CHINA: Then & Now – Jan Serr in 2021.

CHINA: Then & Now - Jan Serr
The second photography show for Jan Serr and the third part of WAM’s trilogy of exhibitions focusing on the art of Asia, CHINA: Then & Now – Jan Serr once again brought together a new collection of painterly photographs from the artist. Filled with large-scale installations, visitors walked from the ultra-modern streets of urban China to quaint, historic neighborhoods, and finally, into the natural world and sprawling gardens, showing the passing of time. In addition to Serr’s photographs, the exhibition included a painting of the Tiananmen Square massacre and an original video illustrated by Serr. Other works included two large figurative ceramics by Pamela Leung, which had never been exhibited in the U.S. before, hand-colored brass rubbings, and other Chinese objects from the permanent collection.

The Secret Garden
Inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved novel, The Secret Garden offered visitors a refuge from Wisconsin’s harsh winter months with an explosion of color, fantasy, and imagination through multi-media works depicting nature's beauty. WAM’s first family-friendly exhibition, The Secret Garden brought together work from WAM’s collection with work commissioned by the museum, including local muralists, painters, and photographers.

William Kentridge: See for Yourself
William Kentridge: See for Yourself was the artist’s first solo exhibition in Wisconsin. Curated by Melanie Herzog, this exhibition featured prints, drawings, films, sculptures, and more from 47 years of the artist’s career, placing emphasis on Kentridge’s interactive practice. In addition to the exhibition, WAM sponsored a variety of related events, including an artist talk from William Kentridge and the U.S. debut of three plays performed by Kentridge’s own performance troupe, The Centre for the Less Good Idea. WAM also sponsored a cine concert, Flat on your back on the dry wintry grass, composed by close collaborator Phillip Miller and based on the poetry of Eliza Kentridge, that was performed in collaboratively with South African musicians and local ensemble, Present Music.

Rediscovering Ruth Grotenrath: All Things Belong to This Earth
Rediscovering Ruth Grotenrath: All Things Belong to This Earth marked the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist. Starting from images Grotenrath made for the 1929 Riverside High School yearbook and including her work in early social realism for the Work Progress Administration (WPA), textile designs, and numerous still lifes, and award winning prints, the exhibit included pieces spanning the entirety of the artists' long career. Curated by Annemarie Sawkins, select work from the Guido Brink Fine Art Collection at MIAD, the Milwaukee Public Library, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Racine Art Museum, and private lenders were displayed alongside the large selection of works from WAM’s permanent collection.

Objects of Substance
Objects of Substance served as a continuation of a lineage of exhibitions beginning in the late 1960s in the United States and beyond by asking visitors to look anew at handcrafted objects made by artists using materials that have long been associated with utilitarian craft traditions. Exhibiting pieces in clay, fiber, glass, wood, metal, and more, Objects of Substance showcased more than 100 works of art by some of the leading artists of the American studio craft movement and the contemporary object makers who continue their legacy.

PAUSE/CONNECT: Photography from the WAM Collection
Curated by Lisa Hostetler, Pause/Connect gathered a broad range of international photography, including works by Uta Barth, Margaret Bourke-White, Helen Levitt, Richard Rinaldi, and more, from the museum’s collection into WAM’s third photography exhibition. Arranged in thematic groups, the work encompassed a variety of approaches to the media, opening conversations across history, geography, and sensibility.