The Big 4-0: An Exhibition Celebrating the Haggerty Museum of Art’s Forty Years

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University presents an exhibition in celebration of its 40th anniversary. Curated by Dr. Kirk Nickel, Marc and Lillian Rojtman Curator of European Art, the show comprises a two-part installation of the exhibition galleries, in fall 2024 and spring 2025, and features well over 100 works of art from the museum’s collections.

Ranging widely within time periods, geographies, and artists’ careers, the exhibition highlights major works in the Haggerty’s collection, organized into six curated galleries each semester. These distinct but conceptually linked 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 + processes, political satire, kinetic and op art, migration, photography’s relationship to truth, mail art, and the challenge of representing life after war. 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, and Richard Serra will appear in the opening installation. Many of the works on view have benefitted from new research and conservation efforts, shedding additional light on their fabrication and display histories, and in some cases, the identity of their maker.

At its opening in 1984, the Haggerty Museum of Art was envisioned both as a repository for Marquette’s collection of fine art and as a center for learning through the visual arts in a way that emphasized necessary connections to other disciplines in the humanities and sciences. Four decades later, the museum reaffirms that commitment to interdisciplinary connection. The Haggerty’s broad and varied collection is the product of passionate art collectors and supporters in the Milwaukee area and beyond, to whom we are exceedingly grateful. Their gifts to the museum allow us to present the brilliant and inspiring work of artists who speak boldly to their time and place, and to generations to come.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will host a slate of curator-led gallery talks and a lecture series with invited specialists to address works on view in the exhibition.

Support for this exhibition is generously provided by the Emmett J. Doerr Endowment Fund and in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.