World War II ushered in the Atomic Age and the Cold War, but it also had a profound impact on the arts and creative practice. With the advent of portable, 35-millimeter cameras, for the first time photojournalists on battlefields and foreign shores documented the international conflict through a more personal lens. In “Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture...

Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution, “Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran” brings the work of 20 photographers to Milwaukee (at the Haggerty Museum of Art through Jan. 17, 2010). Despite cultural sanctions imposed by the United States, the show, organized by a professor from the University of Minnesota and the curator from...

Best known as a painter of Campbell’s Soup cans and celebrity portraits almost 50 years ago, Andy Warhol and his work seem innocuous nowadays. His iconographic language has become so integrated into contemporary America’s visual landscape that it is easy to overlook his role as one of its architects. But by blurring the lines...

Conceptualism and Minimalism dominated the art world in the 1960s and '70s. In the '80s, however, artists returned to the figure, working expressively and expansively on mammoth canvasses. The Milwaukee Art Museum's Figurative Prints: 1980s Rewind brings together painters from Europe and the United States-more...

With the exception of comparatively younger video artist Cliff Evans, the artists of "Jump Cut Pop" (through Oct. 4) at the Haggerty Museum of Art paved the way for younger image-makers to appropriate and recontextualize the iconography of celebrity, consumerism and Western hegemony, albeit not as conspicuously as Warhol or Lichtenstein. All six artists, whose works...

This year marks the 170th anniversary of the arrival of Germans in Milwaukee, and last weekend the city celebrated with its 29th annual GermanFest. In the years prior to the First and Second World Wars, before sauerkraut became known as "liberty cabbage" and Germany became part of the Triple Alliance and synonymous with Nazism, Germans...

With the July 25 Brady Street Festival set for the near future, one can’t help but take a peek into school the past. For an athletically challenged highschool student from the suburbs, visiting Brady Street in the late 1990s was a welcome alternative to running around on basketball courts.

During the past quarter-century, the exhibition of outsider art has encompassed artists' domestic spaces. Notably, Wisconsin's own Kohler Arts Center...