Milwaukee, Wisconsin Museums

Milwaukee is located on Lake Michigan’s western shore is the third-most densely populated metropolitan area in the Midwest, after Chicago and Detroit. 

The first Europeans to pass through the area were French Catholic Jesuit missionaries, who were ministering to Native Americans, and fur traders.

In 1818, the French Canadian explorer first settled in the area, and in 1846, the town combined with two neighboring towns to incorporate as the city of Milwaukee.

Large numbers of German immigrants arrived during the late 1840s, with eastern European immigrants arriving in the following decades.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is perhaps Milwaukee’s most prominent cultural attraction amongst Milwaukee’s many other museum attractions.

The Grohmann Museum, at Milwaukee School of Engineering, contains the world’s most comprehensive art collection dedicated to the evolution of human work.

The Haggerty Museum of Art, on the Marquette University campus, houses several classical masterpieces.

The Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum has a terraced garden, an assortment of Renaissance art, and rotating exhibits.

Charles Allis Art Museum, in the Tudor-style mansion, hosts changing exhibits every year.

Virtual Tour of the Museums in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

• Milwaukee Art Museum
• Harley-Davidson Museum
• Grohmann Museum

Highlights Tour of the Museums in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin features 15th- to 20th-century European and 17th- to 20th-century American paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, decorative arts, photographs, and folk art.

The museum’s collection contains about 25,000 works of art and it holds one of the largest collections of works by Georgia O’Keeffe.

Other artists represented include Gustave Caillebotte, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Winslow Homer, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol.

Harley-Davidson Museum

The Harley-Davidson Museum exhibits cover the more than 100-year history of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

The museum’s complex contains more than 450 motorcycles and hundreds of thousands of artifacts from the Harley-Davidson Motor Company’s history.

The museum opened in 2008, in a historically industrial area of Milwaukee. In 2006, the groundbreaking ceremony included a burnout celebration using a Harley-Davidson XL883R Sportster, instead of with the traditional golden shovel.

The museum’s galleries displays are based on historic Harley-Davidson items that tell the company’s story and history, using motorcycles, photographs, posters, advertisements, clothes, trophies, video footage of motorcycling, and interactive exhibits.

Grohmann Museum

The Grohmann Museum houses an art collection dedicated to depicting the evolution of human work. The Museum’s collection contains over 1400 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that represent various forms of work.

The works reflect a variety of artistic styles and subjects that document the evolution of work, from human-power and horsepower to water, steam, and electric power.

Most of the works are by German and Dutch artists, as well as various American, English, and European artists. The collection spans over 400 years of work history from the 17 century.

The early paintings depict people working on the farm or at home. Later works show tradespeople engaged in their work. Later still are images of machines and people of the industrialist mid-18th century to post-World War II.

The Museum has three floors of galleries and a rooftop sculpture garden. It is named in honor of Eckhart Grohmann, a Milwaukee businessman and art collector who donated the “Man at Work” collection.