Milwaukee Public Museum
The Milwaukee Public Museum is a natural and human history museum located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The museum was chartered in 1882 and opened to the public in 1884; it is a not-for-profit organization operated by the Milwaukee Public Museum, Inc. MPM has three floors of exhibits and the first Dome Theater in Wisconsin.
History
The German-English Academy
MPM was one of several major American museums that were established in the late 19th century. Although it was officially chartered in 1882, its existence can be traced back to 1851, to the founding of the German-English Academy in Milwaukee. The Academy's principal, Peter Engelmann, encouraged student field trips, many of which collected various specimens—organic, geological, and archaeological in nature—which were kept at the Academy. Later, alumni and others donated various specimens of historical and ethnological interest to the collection.By 1857, interest in the Academy's collection had grown to such an extent that Engelmann organized a natural history society to manage and expand the collection. Eventually, the collection, which had come to be informally called "The Museum", grew to exceed the Academy's ability to accommodate it. August Stirn, a city alderman and member of the national history society, obtained legislation from the state legislature for the City of Milwaukee to accept the collection and take the measures necessary to establish "a free public museum".
Early years
The newly formed Board of Trustees hired Carl Doerflinger to be the museum's first director and rented space to place exhibits. The Milwaukee Public Museum opened to the public on May 24, 1884. Doerflinger placed emphasis on using MPM's exhibits for study and research as well as for public education, until he resigned in 1888. He also urged the city to purchase land on which a building could be constructed to house both the museum and the Milwaukee Public Library; the new building was completed in 1898.In 1890, Carl Akeley, a taxidermist and biologist noted as the "father of modern taxidermy" completed the first complete museum habitat diorama in the world, depicting a muskrat colony.
Henry L. Ward was hired as MPM's fourth director in 1902; previously, the museum had focused solely on the natural sciences: this was changed when Ward began the creation of a History Museum. To further this goal, Samuel A. Barrett, the recipient of the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by the University of California, was selected to head an anthropology-history department.
Barrett later succeeded Ward and led the museum through the Great Depression of the 1930s. Barrett made use of the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs to keep the museum running and to create employment beyond the previous basic staff.
Modern history
Construction on MPM's current building was begun in 1960 and completed in 1962. The current site is at 800 W. Wells Street, a block north of the old Museum-Library building, still the home of the Milwaukee Central Library, which continued to house exhibits until 1966.A controversy over the imposition of admittance fees on visitors who were not residents of the City of Milwaukee led to the museum being sold by the City to Milwaukee County in 1976. In 1992, amid assertions that the Museum was on the verge of bankruptcy and might have to be sold or completely privatized, a compromise was reached in which the museum's nominal ownership was retained by the county, but all operating control was handed over to Milwaukee Public Museum, Inc., a not-for-profit controlled by local business interests such as Miller Brewing. Employee wages and benefits were slashed, but private donations expanded and the county's share of costs was diminished.
In 2006, charges were filed against former museum chief financial officer Terry Gaouette, following the revelation that the museum was several million dollars in the red, a fact that allegedly had been hidden for years via illegal money transfers. Gaouette pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor charge of falsifying a financial report, and his CPA license was restored in 2010.
In 2010, the Milwaukee Public Museum appointed a new director Jay B. Williams, formerly of PrivateBank. He has focused on fundraising and improving repeat traffic.
In 2014, MPM hired Dennis Kois as President and CEO. Kois resigned from the Museum in 2018 for personal reasons, following the museum board's investigation of an alleged affair between Kois and a staff member. Ellen Censky has been named the interim President and CEO while the MPM Board of Directors undertakes a nationwide search for the position.
The Museum continues to plan for its future and is investigating whether to construct a new museum building downtown to replace the 60-year-old, county-owned building it currently occupies.
Exhibits
The Milwaukee Public Museum houses both permanent and traveling exhibits.Permanent exhibits
The first major exhibit in the current Museum to be completed was "Streets of Old Milwaukee", which opened in January 1965. It is one of the more popular exhibits in MPM, and it is estimated that several million people have visited it since its completion.Currently, MPM holds seventeen permanent exhibits:
- Africa depicts, in four separate dioramas, the savanna and its wildlife, a watering hole, a Maasai lion hunt and the wildlife of a bamboo forest.
- Arctic is a set of dioramas of the natives, both animal and human, of the Arctic.
- Asia includes depictions of a Japanese garden and a market in Old Delhi, India, as well as collections of Chinese art and other displays from Thailand, Tibet and Myanmar.
- Bugs Alive! features live specimens of thirteen species of insect, crustacean, arachnid, centipede and millipede from Africa, Australia, Central America and Madagascar.
- Crossroads of Civilization explores how the ancient civilizations in Asia, Europe, and Africa formed a cultural epicenter and came together to form a physical and intellectual crossroads. This exhibit opened March 15, 2015, and is the first permanent exhibit the MPM has installed in over a decade.
- European Village is a recreation of homes and shops from thirty-three European cultures as they might have appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Exploring Life on Earth explains the process of life, displays representations of various environments, past and present and allows the visitor to experience the laboratories and collections used by museum scientists.
- Living Oceans is a large diorama of ocean life, into which the visitor descends through various levels of the ocean, from the shallows into the darker waters inhabited by various species of luminous fish. The exhibit also features a collection of mollusk shells and the historical uses of marine life.
- North American Indians features a scene from a modern powwow, histories of the relations between Native Americans and Europeans, a diorama of a buffalo hunt and a southwestern pueblo village through which visitors can walk; examples of weavings and beadwork by Wisconsin Woodland Indians are also on display.
- Pacific Islands contains displays from various Pacific islands, including Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Easter Island.
- Pre-Columbian Americas contains displays illustrating the origin of the Native Americans, as well as the cultures of various Mesoamerican civilizations, including the Aztecs, Maya and Olmecs, and Central Andean civilizations, such as the Inca.
- The Puelicher Butterfly Wing allows visitors to walk through a greenhouse-enclosed garden wherein live butterflies fly freely, often landing on the hands or shoulders of the visitors. There are also displayed the pupae of future butterflies.
- Rain Forest is a model of the ecosystem of a tropical rainforest through which visitors can walk.
- A Sense of Wonder contains more than 1,000 specimens from the museum's collection of six million artifacts, including the skeleton of a humpback whale.
- South & Middle America contains a diorama of a Guatemalan marketplace and other scenes, ranging from the Maya Lowlands to the Andes.
- Streets of Old Milwaukee contains models, about three-quarters of life-size, of shops and houses, fully furnished, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the city's early pioneer businesses, such as Schlitz Beer, Northwestern Mutual and Conrad Schmitt Studios are included. Gottfried Schloemer's first gasoline automobile is also on display here. The Streets of Old Milwaukee was renovated and expanded in 2015, reopening on December 11 of that year.
- The Third Planet depicts the concept of plate tectonics and includes dioramas of how the Wisconsin area would have appeared in various geological eras, going as far back as 400 million years when the region was a shallow sea. The exhibit also displays life-size models of various species of dinosaurs. The exhibit underwent a refresh in early 2017 within the "Hell Creek" display.
The Milwaukee Public Museum also hosts special travelling exhibitions which are only available for viewing for limited times. One of the most famous, and popular, in recent years was Saint Peter and the Vatican: Legacy of the Popes, a travelling exhibition which made three stops in North America, the last of which was at MPM in early 2006. The exhibition featured 300 works of art from the collections of Vatican museums.
Research and collections
Totaling 4 million artifacts, research and collections at the Milwaukee Public Museum include:- the Anthropology Department, which contains approximately 120,000 artifacts.
- the Botany Department includes a greenhouse on the museum roof, scanning electron microscope and modern DNA laboratory. A herbarium collection, now over 250,000 specimens, was started by the German-English Academy in 1852. The original 5,000 specimens were transferred in 1857 to the Wisconsin Natural History Society and then to the museum in 1883.
- the Conservation Department.
- the Geology Department has a large variety of minerals and fossils, along with a research staff.
- Historical and cultural artifacts including the Dietz typewriter, Dietz bicycle, and the Rudolph J. Nunnemacher arms collections.
- Invertebrate zoology.
- a Photograph Collection including 6,000 images from the Sumner W. Matteson Collection, 8,000 from the Brandon DeCou collection, and photographs of Wisconsin Indians taken by museum staff.
- a Reference Library containing over 100,000 volumes of natural history interest.
- the Registration Department to inventory museum collections.
- Vertebrate zoology.
- a 14,500-year-old woolly mammoth skeleton donated to the museum. The real bones are too fragile and are preserved for research, but a fiberglass replica set is on display at the museum.
- a collection of thousands of bird eggs, which is currently being digitally archived
Footnotes