What’s going on?

Michael H. Lord is back in business, or at least it looks that way as the doors to his sort-of gallery space were open during spring Gallery Night and Day. Not that you need reminding, but Lord was sent packing to prison for various mistakes. Poet John Tyson is still incarcerated and will be for awhile, but his poems are posted by a friend via Old Man Prison Poet. Marilyn Karos, the Whitefish Bay matron and art dealer who went to Club Fed is out and about.

What’s going on with our art institutions? No less than four new executive directors have filled the holes at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Charles Allis/Villa Terrace, and UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts. Money is tight now and institutions are vying with many venues trying to raise dollars, so you have to know it’s a major headache. Elly Pick is the new executive director at the Allis/Villa pairing, and she came to our town from West Bend where she helped jump start the building program for the yet-to-be-realized expanded Museum of Wisconsin Art. That was a surprise, as she was a lynch-pin in their organization. Two hopeful galleries closed recently, Brooks Barrow in the Third Ward and Mike Brenner’s snappy Hotcakes, though the latter is forging ahead to spearhead MARN, the Milwaukee Artists Resource Network.

I swung by the assemblage-of-rust-sculpture in Catalano Park near MIAD recently, thinking perhaps I’d like it instead of hating it. If anything, it looks worse than ever. Speaking of bad, the New Land Enterprises parking garage on Downer is another disaster worth noting. It’s big, ugly and there. Deal with it.