Noon Hour Curator's Tour with Annemarie Sawkins

Take a guided tour of "Rediscovering Ruth Grotenrath" with Guest Curator, Annemarie Sawkins.

About the Exhibition: Ruth Grotenrath was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1912, the same year John Cage was born in Los Angeles, California and Jackson Pollock in Cody, Wyoming. In 1933, age 21, Grotenrath received a BA in art history from the Wisconsin State Teachers College (now UWM). She also graduated to adulthood in the worst days of the Great Depression.

WAM’s exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective of her work. It begins with black-and-white images made for the 1929 Riverside High School yearbook. The exhibition includes early social realism for the Work Progress Administration (WPA), textile designs, and numerous still lifes. Most of the exhibition features Grotenrath’s invention of a unique, personal art, for which she is known and remembered.

Grotenrath learned from Frank Lloyd Wright’s love of Japanese art, meeting him with her husband and fellow-artist Schomer Lichtner in 1934. She was inspired by her visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with its collection of Japanese prints and exhibitions of European modernists such as Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. She also drew from her personal study of Japanese art and philosophy, including a two-month visit to Japan in 1965.

This exhibition features work from the Layton Collection at MIAD, the Milwaukee Public Library, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Racine Art Museum, and the Warehouse Art Museum along with select private lenders. The exhibition is curated by Annemarie Sawkins, PhD, co-author of A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art (2021).

Open Now - March 31, 2023

About WAM: The Warehouse Art Museum (WAM) is located at 1635 W. St. Paul Ave, Milwaukee. Exhibitions, performances, and lectures are based on The Warehouse Art Museum’s permanent collection of over 7,300 modern and contemporary works on paper, paintings, photography and sculpture. The collection is available for scholars, students and art enthusiasts, and works are available for institutional loans. For more information, please visit wammke.org or call 414-252-0677.

Admission to WAM is always free. Masks are required.

Host or Publisher Mia Dreher