Join Dr. Cordula Grewe, professor of art history at Indiana University Bloomington, Stephanie O’Rourke, senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and Nikki Otten, associate curator of prints and drawings and curator of Seeking Revelation: German Romantic Prints and Drawings, for a guided exploration of works in the exhibition. Through close looking and thoughtful discussion, this intimate gallery experience invites participants to slow down, reflect, and engage with the German Romantics’ enduring search for meaning.
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.
About the experts
Dr. Cordula Grewe specializes in modern European art, with research spanning visual piety, word-image relationships, aesthetics, and art as politics. She is the author of several books, including Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009), The Nazarenes: Romantic Avant-garde and the Art of the Concept (2015), Wilhelm Schadow (1788–1862): Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde (2017), and The Arabesque from Kant to Comics (2021), as well as edited essay collections on museums and print culture. Her current research explores modern theo-aesthetics, the body as medium, and art in the Third Reich. She is also writing a nonfiction memoir, Mink in Flames, examining immigration, intergenerational trauma, and the American Dream.
Stephanie O’Rourke is a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, particularly in relation to resource extraction, scientific knowledge, and media technologies. She is a Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Stephanie is the author of two books: Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and the prize-winning Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently a Mid-Career Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and she was previously a professeur invité at the Sorbonne and a Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art. She holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Columbia University.
Nikki Otten is Associate Curator of prints and drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum where she is responsible for a collection of works on paper that spans the 15th to the 21st century. Since arriving at the Museum in 2018, she has curated the major exhibitions Currents 39: LaToya M. Hobbs, Carving Out Time (2024), Always New: The Posters of Jules Chéret (2022), and Landfall Press: Five Decades of Printmaking (2019). She has also organized several rotations of American and European art drawn from the Museum’s collection. Previously, Nikki held fellowships and internships at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Minnesota.
