MILWAUKEE, WI.- The Haggerty Museum of Art is pleased to announce a special 40th anniversary exhibition, The Big 4-0: New Views of the Collection, showcasing exceptional works by nearly 40 artists from the Museum’s collection. For this moment of reflection, the show reconsiders 500 years of art history (1510-2016) through new novel lenses.

The Big 4-0: New Views of the Collection highlights major works from the Haggerty’s collection with fresh interpretations, new research, and several collection items never exhibited before. Featured are 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, Richard Serra, and more.

Six distinct but conceptually linked gallery 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. Many of the works on view have benefitted from new research, shedding additional light on their fabrication and display histories, and in some cases, the identity of their maker.

This Fall’s The Big 4-0 is the first of a two-part installation of the exhibition galleries. The second part, opening in Spring 2025, will feature a completely new display to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the Museum’s collection. In combination, the Fall and Spring anniversary exhibitions will feature more than 100 works of art. Both installations are curated by Dr. Kirk Nickel, Marc and Lillian Rojtman Curator of European Art.

Three additional shows round out the season’s offerings:

"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." explains newly appointed Director John McKinnon.

Affirmation/Transformation: Fandom Created considers “creation” as the line between casual enjoyment and fandom. Using pieces from the Haggerty Museum of Art’s permanent collection, this exhibition looks at the types of things that fans are inspired to create and asks the viewer whether these fan creations are affirmational or transformational—that is, do they affirm the fan object as it is, or transform it into something new? Do fan creations uphold the canon of the original content, or do they take only what they need and leave the rest behind? Is it possible that all fan creations hold both at the same time?

This interactive exhibition seres as a foundational component for the dissertation of Kate Rose, English Literature PhD Canidate at Marquette University. The pieces included in Affirmation/Transformation are available to online fan communities and fans are invited to use them as inspiration in their own affirmational or transformational creations. Many of these will be on display as a part of the exhibition on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art. Through the collection and display of these works, as well as through future interviews with fan creators, this dissertation questions the arbitrary boundary that academics have created between affirmational and transformational fandom and compares academic treatment of fan activities against the ways that these same activities are treated in fan communities.

Material Muses: Medieval Devotional Culture and its Afterlives considers how artists since the end of the Middle Ages (ca. 500–1500 CE) have looked back to the art from this period as inspiration for creating “authentic” devotional objects of their own time. This exhibition features the Joan of Arc Chapel, at the heart of the Marquette University campus, and pulls from the collections of the Haggerty Museum of Art and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in an exploration of the allure of medieval material as it converses with and energizes post-medieval religious narratives.

Material Muses was curated by Abby R. Armstrong Check, Claire Kilgore and Tania Kolarik, PhD candidates in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

SOS Color Code 2024 is an indoor and outdoor installation by Luftwerk, the Chicago-based artist team of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. Using the universal languages of Morse code and color theory, SOS Color Code 2024 transforms the international signal of distress into a sign of solidarity and connectedness.

Luftwerk collaborated with design studio Normal to create the outdoor component of the project that is comprised of three-flags placed in front of the Museum, while the indoor component pairs a painted mural with a display of changing colored lights. Dots and dashes of Morse code representing the letters S (three dots) O (three dashes) S (three dots), appear on the flags and in the mural creating a playful visual excursion while investigating color as a system of language and symbols and a marker of emotion. Visually, the SOS pattern is an effective distress signal, an ambigram that can be read upside down or right side up.

SOS Color Code 2024 was scheduled to coincide with the 2024 presidential election and the International Day of Democracy. Celebrated around the world on September 15th each year, the International Day of Democracy was established through a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly in 2007, with the aim of encouraging governments to strengthen and consolidate democracy.