Racine Art Museum and RAM's Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts | |
Established | November 16, 1941 |
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Location | Racine, Wisconsin |
Type | Contemporary craft |
Visitors | 60,000 per year (2017) [1] |
Director | Bruce W. Pepich (2018) |
Curator | Lena Vigna (2018) |
Public transit access | Ryde Racine |
Website | www |
The Racine Art Museum (RAM) and RAM's Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts are located in Racine, Wisconsin, U.S. The museum holds the largest and most significant contemporary craft collection in North America, with more than 9,500 objects from nationally and internationally recognized artists. The Racine Art Museum's mission is to exhibit, collect, preserve, and educate in the contemporary visual arts. Its goal is to elevate the stature of craft to fine arts by presenting contemporary crafts alongside paintings and sculptures.
Jennie E. Wustum, widow of Charles A. Wustum, died on December 3, 1938, and left their house, property and a small trust fund to the City of Racine, Wisconsin, for the creation of a public art museum and park. The 12-acre (0.049 km2) property was on the edge of town, across the street from the J & W Horlicks malted milk factory. The Italianate mansion was of brick construction with a cupola on top. [2] [3]
A city ordinance creating the Wustum Museum and Park Commission was passed in 1940, [4] and in 1941, the property became the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts. The museum's grand opening was on November 16, 1941, and Sylvester Jerry was named the first director. [5] [6] The first exhibit was 96 paintings by Wisconsin artists, followed by a collection of contemporary lithographs from the Redfern Gallery in London, and watercolors by Midwestern artists. [7]
The museum's permanent collection began with a donation of 294 Works Progress Administration (WPA) artworks including textiles from the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, and paintings, photographs, and block prints from Wisconsin- and New York-based artists. Jerry, who was a supervisor for the WPA Art Program before joining the museum, arranged a 99-year lease for the collection which contained works by artists such as lithographer Mabel Dwight, painter Rufino Tamayo, and photographers Brett Weston and Bernice Abbott. [8] [9] The WPA works continue to be shown in occasional exhibitions, the latest in 2017. [10]
In the 1980s, the museum began to focus on crafts by American artists. Karen Johnson Boyd was a major benefactor to the museum donating over 1750 items including 200 objects in 1991 that included works by Wendell Castle, [11] Dale Chihuly, [12] Lia Cook, Albert Paley, and Toshiko Takaezu. [13] The high quality of these items encouraged donations from others collectors creating the largest collection of contemporary craft in North America. [1]
In 2000, the museum expanded into downtown Racine by moving into an historic building donated by the M&I Bank of Racine. The renovation of the 1874 bank building, which was designed by Brininstool & Lynch of Chicago, involved the installation of a translucent acrylic shell around the upper two floors of the existing limestone building. The acrylic panels were 18 inches off the surface of the building; they allowed the colors of the limestone to show through during the day and were illuminated at night. The new building increased the museum's space from 15,500 to 40,000 sq ft (1,440 to 3,720 m2) and included a sculpture garden, an art library, and large storefront windows used for displays. [14] [15] The interior of the building was gutted to create exhibition space including a double-height gallery for larger objects. [16]
The $6.5 million funding for the renovation included a gift of $2.7 million from S.C. Johnson of Racine. Additional funds were used to upgrade the original museum which was retained for educational purposes and regional art displays. [16]
RAM's permanent collection features more than 9,500 artworks from internationally recognized artists such as Wendell Castle, Dale Chihuly, Lia Cook, Arline Fisch, Joel Philip Myers, Albert Paley, Toshiko Takaezu, and Claire Zeisler.
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture".
Racine is a city in and the county seat of Racine County, Wisconsin, United States. It is located on the shore of Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Root River, situated 22 miles (35 km) south of Milwaukee and 60 miles (97 km) north of Chicago. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 77,816, making it the fifth-most populous city in Wisconsin. It is the principal city of the Racine metropolitan statistical area. The Racine metropolitan area is, in turn, counted as part of the greater Milwaukee combined statistical area.
The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression. According to American Heritage, “Something like 400,000 easel paintings, murals, prints, posters, and renderings were produced by WPA artists during the eight years of the project’s existence, virtually free of government pressure to control subject matter, interpretation, or style.”
Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator whose oeuvre spanned a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She is noted for her pioneering work in ceramics and has played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu was known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects. Instead she explored clay's potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts in a manner that places her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
Charles Cowles is an American art dealer and a collector of contemporary art. Cowles was also a curator of Fine Art at the Seattle Art Museum from 1975 until 1979.
The Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House, formerly The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, was integrated into the Honolulu Museum of Art under this name. It was the only museum in the state of Hawaii devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The Contemporary Museum had two venues: in residential Honolulu at the historic Spalding House, and downtown Honolulu at First Hawaiian Center. All venues continue to be open to the public.
The Museum of Contemporary Craft (1937-2016) in Portland, Oregon was the oldest continuously-running craft institution on the west coast of the United States until its closure in 2016. The museum's mission was "to enliven and expand the understanding of craft and the museum experience." It was known as one of the few centers in the United States to focus on the relationships between art and craft, programming robust shows exploring a wide variety of artists, materials and techniques.
Boris Bally is an American artist and metal smith in Providence, Rhode Island.
Leza Marie McVey (1907–1984) was an American ceramist and weaver. She is known for her large hand-built organic forms.
Dan Owen Dailey is an American artist and educator, known for his sculpture. With the support of a team of artists and crafts people, he creates sculptures and functional objects in glass and metal. He has taught at many glass programs and is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he founded the glass program.
Maija (Majlis) Grotell was an influential Finnish-American ceramic artist and educator. She is often described as the "Mother of American Ceramics."
Lee Weiss was an American painter known for her watercolors.
The Arizona State University Art Museum is an art museum operated by Arizona State University, located on its main campus in Tempe, Arizona. The Art Museum has some 12,000 objects in its permanent collection and describes its primary focuses as contemporary art, including new media and "innovative methods of presentation"; crafts, with an emphasis on American ceramics; historic and contemporary prints; art from Arizona and the Southwestern United States, with an emphasis on Latino artists, and art of the Americas, with one historic American pieces and modernist and contemporary Latin American works.
Bruce W. Pepich is an expert in American and international craft, and executive director and curator of collections at the Racine Art Museum (RAM) and Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts (Wustum) in Racine, Wisconsin. In Pepich's time at RAM, the contemporary craft collection has increased in size from 253 pieces to almost 10,000 pieces in 2018, one of the largest collections in the United States. Pepich is an Honorary Fellow of the American Craft Council (ACC), in recognition of his contributions to the field of contemporary American crafts.
Martha Nessler Hayden is an American artist, known for Modernist landscape painting and artist books. Hayden lives and works in Sharon, Wisconsin, in a historic Victorian home.
The Hunterdon Art Museum, previously known as the Hunterdon Art Center and the Hunterdon Museum of Art, is located in a historic stone mill at 7 Lower Center Street in Clinton, New Jersey. It was founded in 1952 when it purchased Dunham's Mill, the Stone Mill, for use as an art museum. The museum emphasizes that it is a "center for art, craft & design" and presents exhibitions featuring both local and national artists. The stone mill was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 for its significance in commerce and industry.
Edwin Bassett Knutesen was an American painter born in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Theodore "Ted" Czebotar was an American Regionalist painter active in Wisconsin and New York in the mid-20th century.