Wisconsin has more art than you probably know. A fresh collaboration helps you find it

So how about for an art museum?

Madison’s two major art museums — the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW-Madison campus and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on State Street — have joined forces with 14 other institutions statewide in hopes you’ll hit the road this fall and visit their galleries along the way.

The group has launched “Wisconsin Art Destinations,” billed as the Midwest’s first art museum-based collective, and designed to tempt travelers and day-trippers with museums that are widely diverse in location, architecture and mission. The project’s website, wisconsinartdestinations.com, suggests three weekend itineraries that visitors can follow, with recommendations for not only stunning art exhibitions but also uniquely Wisconsin hotels and restaurants nearby.

The museums themselves vary widely. In Manitowoc, there’s the picturesque Rahr-West Art Museum, housed in a former 19th-century Victorian mansion. In Milwaukee County stands the splendid Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, a 50-year member of the National Register of Historic Places with a Renaissance Garden. Near Sheboygan, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s new Art Preserve is a first in the world, focusing entirely on work from art environments.

The effort is funded by a $40,000 grant from the Wisconsin Department of Tourism for “destination marketing,” and the campaign will be promoted both across the state and into the Chicago metro area, said Aaron Sherer, executive director of the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh.

“It’s really drawing attention to our institutions themselves, our art museums, but also to their surrounding areas,” he said. “So when we say ‘art destination,’ we mean the art museum but we also mean the community — (with) restaurants, shops, nature and other things to experience in each of our communities.”

“Day 3” of a three-day, “Southern Route” for Wisconsin travelers, for example, includes a suggested trip to Madison, where visitors are told they might stay at the Edgewater hotel, shop at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, dine at Graze and enjoy a Wisconsin old fashioned at the Old Fashioned restaurant after a day of visiting the Chazen and MMOCA. Days 1 and 2 include visits to art museums in Racine and Milwaukee.

Collaborative effort

The multi-museum collaboration grew out of an effort to connect. After many years working solo, statewide art museum directors started getting together periodically several years ago and kept those meetings through the COVID-19 pandemic, said Sherer, now a facilitator for the group.

Wisconsin Art Destinations, which he calls a “collective brand,” grew out of those meetings.

“While each of us has developed our own audiences, our audiences are not necessarily aware of other” unique art museums throughout the state, he said. “If you were an art lover in, say, Chicago or Madison, and you wanted to go see other art museums in Wisconsin, you would have to do a lot of work to know what art museums existed, and where. There just wasn’t a website that was grouping us together and saying, ‘Yes, these are Wisconsin’s professionally run art museums. We all have art collections, we all do changing-art exhibitions, we have professional curatorial staff who think about being creative in what we’re offering.’ We just wanted to make it easier for people to find us.”

The website for Wisconsin Art Destinations “is a great way to consolidate” information about all of the state’s art museums, said Chazen Museum of Art director Amy Gilman.

“And from my own perspective, it shines a light on some amazing museums and collections that don’t get as much attention as those of us who are associated with a giant university,” Gilman said. “It’s great to be a part of it, and it also raises the profile of some of these other museums, who are terrific.”

Some of the notables on Gilman’s list include the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh, located on a four-acre, Tudor Revival-style country estate, the modern Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, and the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah. (“If you haven’t been, it’s also quite marvelous,” she advised.)

‘Rediscovering home’

Paul Baker Prindle, the Gabriele Haberland Director of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, said that the idea behind Wisconsin Art Destinations might be rooted in an enjoyment of “rediscovering home” that came about as people started making shorter trips during the pandemic.

“What’s so wonderful about this initiative is that not only is it about encouraging local tourism and getting to know your own home, but I think it’s also this opportunity for arts organizations across the state to get to know each other as well,” he said. “We work in such different regional areas within the state, and being able to come together like this is really great.”

In Madison, the Chazen Museum, located at 750 University Ave., serves students but also welcomes the public to its many gallery spaces with free admission and programming. While the museum doesn’t track visitor demographics, some 200,000 people visit the Chazen each year, Gilman said, and in summer when many UW-Madison students are gone, the museum stays busy with both local and out-of-town visitors.

Baker Prindle, who holds degrees from UW-Madison and Edgewood College, took the helm at MMOCA just three months ago after serving as director of an art museum in California. He noted that three Los Angeles-area art museums recently formed a coalition to jointly own, manage and acquire works from LA artists.

The three museums “just came out in the national press talking about how they’re collaborating to collect art and share it among themselves in Los Angeles. It’s called MAC3,” Baker Prindle said. “So I think (collaborating) is a national trend. And of course, like always, Wisconsin was ahead of the trend.”