The Haggerty Museum of Art will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a special two-part exhibition, “The Big 4-0: New Views of the Collection,” featuring over 100 works of art from the museum’s collection presented over the 2024-25 academic year.
Curated by Dr. Kirk Nickel, Marc and Lillian Rojtman Curator of European Art, the installations will feature in the exhibition galleries for fall 2024 and spring 2025, organized into six curated galleries each semester highlighting major works in the Haggerty’s collection. The yearlong celebration will commence with an opening reception on Thursday, Sept. 12, at 6 p.m. at the Haggerty Museum of Art. Registration is available online.
“We are thrilled to launch the Haggerty Museum of Art’s 40th Anniversary with these exhibitions, which reflect the museum’s role as an arts and culture laboratory for the Marquette campus and greater Milwaukee area,” said John McKinnon, who was named director of the Haggerty Museum of Art in May.
Ranging widely within time periods, geographies and artists’ careers, these distinct but conceptually linked spaces reflect the museum’s enduring commitment to the work of modern and contemporary artists, while also featuring a select group of Renaissance and Baroque artworks. The exhibition draws particular attention to the ideas and impulses that have fueled artists through the recent century, including novel approaches to modern materials and processes, political satire, kinetic and op art, migration, photography’s relationship to truth, mail art, and the challenge of representing life after war.
The opening installation, which runs Aug. 23-Dec. 22, 2024, will feature artworks by Mark Bradford, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Enrique Chagoya, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, Keith Haring, Wifredo Lam, Elizabeth Murray, Diego Rivera and Richard Serra. Many of the works on view have benefited from new research and conservation efforts, shedding additional light on their fabrication and display histories, and in some cases, the identity of their maker.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will host a slate of curator-led gallery talks and a lecture series with invited specialists to address works on view in the exhibition.
Support for this exhibition is generously provided by the Emmett J. Doerr Endowment Fund and in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.
At its opening in 1984, the Haggerty Museum of Art was envisioned both as a repository for Marquette’s collection of fine art and as a center for learning through the visual arts in a way that emphasized necessary connections to other disciplines in the humanities and sciences. The Haggerty Museum’s broad and varied collection is the product of passionate art collectors and supporters in the Milwaukee area and beyond, to whom we are exceedingly grateful. Their gifts allow the museum to present the brilliant and inspiring work of artists who speak boldly to their time and place, and to generations to come.
