MAM Events

Slow Art Saturday: “Homelands: Mnë’nának, Māēnāēwah, Tešišik”
2025-06-21 10:30 - 11:30 (America/Chicago) | Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI, 53202, United States
The Ross-Pain Gallery, Level 2, Gallery K223
Join us in Homelands: Mnë’nának, Māēnāēwah, Tešišik to explore a single work of art in depth in this program that encourages presence and promotes well-being. A reinstallation of the former “American West” gallery, Homelands reinterprets historical works and foregrounds contemporary Native art, centering Indigenous voices and honoring the region’s cultural roots through themes of land and water.
Slow Art Saturday is facilitated by Amy Kirschke, Barbara Brown Lee Senior Director of Learning and Engagement at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Special guests include the co-curators of Homelands, Kendra Greendeer, PhD, Ho-Chunk Nation Ihlenfeld Curator of Collaborative and Community Exhibitions at the Weisman Art Museum, and Chyna Bounds, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.
Homelands is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Drop-In Tour: Music and Art
2025-06-21 14:00 - 15:00, 2025-06-28 14:00 - 15:00
While the lakefront comes alive during Milwaukee’s favorite music festival, stop into the Museum for a tour of artworks with musical connections. This tour will satisfy the senses while you visit our comfortably air-conditioned galleries. This tour embarks from Windhover Hall, near the admissions desks.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.
Image: Raoul Dufy (French, 1877–1953), Red Orchestra (Le concert rouge) (detail), 1946–49. Oil on canvas. 39 3/8 × 31 7/8 in. (100.01 × 80.96 cm). Gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley, M1959.379. Photo by John R. Glembin ©2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Gallery Talk: “Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts”
2025-06-26 12:00 - 13:00
Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts
Join Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts and the exhibition curator, for an in-depth exploration of the themes and topics in the exhibition Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts. This is the most comprehensive exhibition in a decade of works by Shirreff and showcases more than 40 recent works, including installations specific to the Museum.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.

Image: Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975), Cuttings (detail), 2018. Cyanotype photogram and muslin over panel. 80 × 70 in. Christine A. Symchych and James P. McNulty. Image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York. © Erin Shirreff

Story Time in the Galleries
2025-06-28 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-07-05 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-07-12 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-07-19 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-07-26 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-08-02 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-08-09 10:30 - 11:00, 2025-08-16 10:30 - 11:00 and 3 more dates
Every Saturday morning, join us in the galleries to hear a story and make art together. Meet in Windhover Hall near the admission desks at 10:30 a.m. and travel with the reader through the galleries. Then, listen to a story in front of a work of art before creating an artwork inspired by what you have seen and heard.
This event is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission for kids 12 and under is free. Tickets are available at the door or online.

Sponsored by
Four-Four Foundation
Anonymous donor

Yoga at the Museum
2025-07-05 08:00 - 09:00
Begin your Saturday with a calming 60-minute all-levels yoga class amid the serenity of the Quadracci Pavilion and stunning views of Lake Michigan.
Doors open at 7 a.m. and class begins at 8 a.m. Arrive early with your yoga mat to settle into the space before the class starts.
After class, extend your visit to the café and store, which open early, at 9 a.m. Parking is available in the Calatrava underground garage; enjoy a $5 rate when you exit before 10 a.m.
Online in advance, general admission tickets are $15 and Museum Member tickets are $5. At the door, tickets are $20 for general admission and $10 for Members. Not a Member? Join today!
Buy tickets →

Drop-In Tour: Celebrating American Artists
2025-07-05 14:00 - 15:00, 2025-07-12 14:00 - 15:00, 2025-07-19 14:00 - 15:00, 2025-07-26 14:00 - 15:00
Throughout July, enjoy a guided tour of the collection that features American stories, places, and people. The Museum’s extensive collection of American art captures a wide array of perspectives and experiences to consider and celebrate. Join the tour in Windhover Hall near the admissions desks.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.
Image: William James Glackens (American, 1870–1938). Breezy Day, Tugboats, New York Harbor, ca. 1910. Oil on canvas. 26 x 31 3/4 in. (66.04 x 80.65 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Abert and Mrs. Barbara Abert Tooman, M1974.230. Photo by John Nienhuis; Dedra Walls

Curator Tour and Reception: “The Brilliance of the Spanish World”
2025-07-16 17:30 - 19:30
Open to Partner level Members and above
Toast the final weeks of The Brilliance of the Spanish World with fellow Members at an after-hours cocktail reception in Windhover Hall, followed by a tour of the exhibition with Tanya Paul, Isabel and Alfred Bader Curator of European Art.
RSVP by July 2 to rsvp@mam.org or 414-224-3259.
RSVP now →
Not a Partner level Member? Join today or upgrade your membership for access to this and other exclusive events. Call the membership team at 414-224-3259.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to our exhibition sponsors.

Image: Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664), Saint Lucy (detail), ca. 1630. H 206 × W 125 × D 7 cm. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

Expert Series: "The Brilliance of the Spanish World: El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán"
2025-07-24 18:15 - 19:15
Hear from a panel of art historians and experts for a conversation about Spanish painting moderated by Tanya Paul, Isabel and Alfred Bader Curator of European Art and curator of the exhibition The Brilliance of the Spanish World: El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.

Meet the experts
Laura Bass is associate professor of Hispanic Studies and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research focuses on early modern Spain, with particular attention to the intersections of literature, visual culture, and religious life. She is the author of The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (Pennsylvania State University Press), which received the Eleanor Tufts Prize for outstanding work on Iberian art. Her current project, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and co-authored with art historian Tanya Tiffany, is a scholarly edition and translation of the Vida (spiritual autobiography) of Estefanía de la Encarnación, a 17th-century Spanish painter, nun, and mystical author. Bass has published widely on topics such as civic identity in baroque Madrid, visual and literary cultures of the Spanish court, and the relationship between art and religious experience.

Rosario I. Granados is the Marilynn Thoma Curator, Art of the Spanish Americas, at the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin. There she has organized the exhibitions Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-Century Mexico in 2019, and Painted Cloth: Ritual and Fashion in Colonial Latin America in 2022, in addition to seven thematic rotations of the permanent galleries. She is currently developing a show of photography of colonial Mexican architecture that will open in December 2025. Before coming to the Blanton in 2016, she taught undergraduate and graduate seminars on Religion, Gender Studies, Cultural Heritage, and Latin American Art at the University of Chicago and Skidmore College. She holds a PhD from Harvard University, an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA from Universidad Iberoamericana.

Tanya Tiffany is professor and chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her first book, Diego Velázquez’s Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville, was published in 2012 and received an honorable mention for the Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies. Among her other publications, she has co-edited a collection of essays, Velázquez Re-Examined: Theory, History, Poetry, and Theatre (2017). In collaboration with Laura Bass, Tiffany is currently completing a translation and bilingual edition of the manuscript Vida of the painter-nun Estefanía de la Encarnación (ca. 1597–1665): the only known autobiography by an early modern woman artist. The project has been awarded a Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the book is slated to be published as part of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Tiffany is also a member of a research project funded by the Spanish government and headed by María Cruz de Carlos Varona, which focuses on artistic agency among Habsburg women (AGENART, La agencia artística de las mujeres de la Casa de Austria 1532–1700 [ref. PID2020-116100GB-I00]).

The Expert Series welcomes renowned artists, scholars, and cultural activators to the Museum for expansive dialogues that dive deeper into an exhibition, artist, or theme.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.

Program sponsor
Milwaukee Art Museum’s Fine Arts Society

Image: Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664), Saint Emerentiana (details), ca. 1635–1640. Oil on canvas. 171.5 × 105.5 cm. Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

Yoga at the Museum
2025-08-02 08:00 - 09:00, 2025-09-06 08:00 - 09:00
Begin your Saturday with a calming 60-minute all-levels yoga class amid the serenity of the Quadracci Pavilion and stunning views of Lake Michigan.
Class begins at 8 a.m. Arrive as early as 7 a.m. with your yoga mat to settle into the space before the class starts.
After class, extend your visit to the café and store, which open early, at 9 a.m. Parking is available in the Calatrava underground garage; enjoy a $5 rate when you exit before 10 a.m.
Online in advance, general admission tickets are $20 and Museum Member tickets are $10. At the door, tickets are $25 for general admission and $15 for Members. Not a Member? Join today!
Buy tickets →

Member Mingle + Artist Talk: Erin Shirreff
2025-08-07 17:00 - 19:15
Open to all Members
Join us for an evening of friendship and creative insights featuring a special opportunity to hear from Montreal-based artist Erin Shirreff. Before her artist talk, start your evening with a Member-only social hour in Windhover Hall. At 6 p.m., find a seat in Lubar Auditorium to hear Shirreff discuss her boundary-crossing studio practice—which blends photography, sculpture, and video—and her artworks on view in Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts.
5–6 p.m. Member Mingle in Windhover Hall
Cash bar, one complimentary beverage for Art Advocate Members and above
6:15–7:15 p.m. Artist Talk in Lubar Auditorium
Seating is first come, first served.
RSVP for the Mingle →

Questions? Contact Membership at membership@mam.org or 414-224-3284.
Not a Member?
Join today →

Image: Photo by Front Room Studios

Artist Talk: Erin Shirreff
2025-08-07 18:15 - 19:15
Lubar Auditorium
Join us for the next event in our Artist Talk series, featuring internationally renowned contemporary artist Erin Shirreff. Hear from Shirreff as she delves into her boundary-crossing studio practice—which blends photography, sculpture, and video—and her artworks on view in Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts. This is the most comprehensive exhibition in a decade of works by Shirreff and showcases more than 40 recent works, including installations specific to the Museum.
Seating for this event is first come, first served. Artist Talks are included with Museum admission and are free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.
The Artist Talk series welcomes emerging, mid-career, and established artists to share what it means to live creatively. Discussing motivation, medium, and technique, artists will reveal how and why their work expresses their emotions and ideas.
About Erin Shirreff
Erin Shirreff (b.1975, British Columbia, Canada) lives and works in Montreal. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been held at SITE Santa Fe, NM (2024); the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2021–22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Shirreff earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2005.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.

Program sponsors
Milwaukee Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Society
Milwaukee Art Museum’s Photography Council

Image: Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975), Inside times (detail), 2020. Cyanotype photogram and fabric over panels (diptych). 80 × 120 in. Courtesy of the artist; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York. © Erin Shirreff

Unveiling Celebration: Bus Mural by ArtXpress Teen Interns
2025-08-24 15:00 - 17:00
Windhover Hall and Baumgartner Terrace
Join us in celebrating the creativity and community advocacy of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s ArtXpress teen interns! Be among the first to view the mural they created during their four-week internship. Hear firsthand accounts of their creative journey and explore the galleries on their tours.

Lineup
3–3:30 p.m. Refreshments
3:30 p.m. Bus mural reveal
4:30–5 p.m. Remarks and closing

The ArtXpress Internship empowers Milwaukee teens to voice social issues through art. Over four weeks, the interns developed their artistic talents, received guidance from seasoned professionals, and participated in critical discourse around power, equity, and social justice. Following its debut, the Milwaukee County Transit System bus showcasing the mural will travel the city streets for four months, sharing their powerful message with the community.

Sponsored by

RBC Wealth Management
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board, with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Haberman Local Luminaries: “Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts”
2025-08-28 18:15 - 19:15
Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts
Join notable Milwaukee voices from the fields of art, education, and language as they reflect on the works in Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts. Through their varied lenses, we’ll explore themes of transformation, perception, and the spaces between seeing and understanding. Rooted in mixed media, Shirreff’s work invites us to slow down, to notice what shifts across materials and moments, and to reflect on what is preserved, altered, or lost in translation. Together, we’ll consider how both art and language mediate our experience of the world and reveal the complexity beneath its surface.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.

Meet the luminaries
Amy Kirschke leads the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Learning and Engagement team to serve over 200,000 participants annually through family, teen, school, docent, and adult programs—at the Museum, in the community, and online. Since 2012, Amy has hosted Slow Art Saturdays in the Musuem’s galleries, exploring a single work of art in each hour-long session through close looking and facilitated dialogue. She holds her MSEd in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College of Education in New York and her MS in Design Studies and Material Culture and BA in Cultural Geography/Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Fatima Laster is a self-taught interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and owner/operator of 5 Points Art Gallery + Studios. With a Black American vantage point, Laster’s independent and communal practice broaches social-political subject matter (i.e. racism, sexism, classism, cultural appropriation, housing/land appropriation/displacement also known as “gentrification”, etc.), producing resistance art imbued with humor or irony in an attempt to disarmingly reveal rejected or overlooked perspectives and people. Laster’s honors include the Museum of Wisconsin Art 2022 Biennial, the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial Guest Curator, the 2023 Mary L. Nohl Fellow, and the 2024 Milwaukee Arts Board Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year.
Lorena Terando is Professor of Translation & Interpreting Studies at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She was a staff member of the United Nations English Translation Service, taught in New York University’s translation program, and translates and interprets on a freelance basis. Terando earned her PhD in Comparative Literature and Translation at the State University of NY in Binghamton, and her Maîtrise en Traduction at l’Université de Mons-Hainaut in Belgium. She focuses on empathy, exploring representations of memory and pain in language. She has translated Spiral of Silence (2019) and My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary (2004), testimonies of Colombian women in situations of conflict. Her current projects include Stories of the Crossing, a collection of oral testimonials of immigrants’ journeys as they cross the border into the United States; and Smokescreens, a translation of Olga Behar’s testimonial account of the storming of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá

Haberman Local Luminaries takes place annually and honors the late F. William Haberman, former president of the Herzfeld Foundation.
The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.

Sponsored by
Milwaukee Art Museum’s Photography Council
Image: Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975), Fig. 5 (detail), 2017. Archival pigment print. 43½ × 57½ × 3¼ in. Christine A. Symchych and James P. McNulty. Image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York. © Erin Shirreff

Drop-In Tours: Architecture and Collection Highlights
2025-08-30 14:00 - 15:00, 2025-08-31 14:00 - 15:00
Discover works in the collection and highlights about the Museum’s architecture during a one-hour tour with a Museum docent. Join the tour in Windhover Hall, near the Museum’s main entrance and admissions desks.
This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door and online.
