MILWAUKEE, WIS.- The Milwaukee Art Museum’s newest exhibition, Framing a Decade: Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings, 2001–2011, highlights a selection of the nearly three thousand works new to the Museum’s prints and drawings collection since 2001, when the Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion opened to the public. The exhibition is on view in Koss Gallery, December 9, 2010–April 3, 2011, and spans over four centuries of pictorial achievement in Europe and North America.

Celebrating what has been accomplished in ten years, Framing a Decade showcases approximately fifty drawings, etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts that have come into the Museum’s collection either to enrich areas of strength or to broaden the scope of its Collection. Old Masters through to artists working today are represented, including Callot, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Klimt, Nolde, Kirchner, Picasso, Schiele, Francis, LeWitt, Bruce, Frankenthaler, Nauman, and more.

“This exhibition highlights the richness and breadth of some of the finest and rarest prints and drawings the Museum has acquired in the past decade,” said Mary Weaver Chapin, associate curator of prints and drawings. “Framing a Decade is an invigorating, visual experience of some of the world’s most famous artists.”

Framing a Decade also honors the donors and Members who helped make these acquisitions possible. In the past ten years, the Museum has acquired major gifts from the Maurice and Esther Leah Ritz and the Warrington Colescott collections, and has received a recent donation of over 500 prints from the Sam Francis Foundation.

“Many thanks go out to countless individuals and organizations for the works on view in this magnificent exhibition of prints and drawings,” said Daniel Keegan, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum. “The entire Museum extends its gratitude to the generous gifts and bequests over the years that make exhibitions like this possible. With the approaching ten-year anniversary of the Santiago Calatrava–designed Quadracci Pavilion, this decade-long snapshot of prints and drawings could not be a better complement to our celebration.”

Framing a Decade: Acquisitions of Prints and Drawings, 2001–2011 features gifts from countless individuals and from the Maurice and Esther Leah Ritz Collection; the Hockerman Charitable Trust; the Sam Francis Foundation, California; and the Landfall Press Archive, gift of Jack Lemon.