Museum Unveils Future Exhibit All About Wisconsin

Driftless Area – Wisconsin Dells. Sketch by Thinc Design.

The Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) revealed a Wisconsin-centric gallery Thursday that will be featured in its new home.

The “Wisconsin Journey” gallery will feature a series of exhibits designed to showcase some of the unique natural and cultural features of the state. It’s the second new gallery the museum has unveiled as part of a promotional campaign for the new museum.

Four exhibits planned for the new gallery were unveiled Thursday.

The exhibits are named for some of the state’s regions and natural features: Driftless, Prairie, Apostle Islands and Northwoods.

“The final gallery will include many more exhibits, collections items and opportunities to learn,” said the museum in a statement.

The prior gallery announced, “Time Travel,” is to be largely comprised of items and exhibits already on display at the current museum. “The Wisconsin Journey gallery is a bit different in that it is mostly new,” said Ellen Censky, MPM Inc. president and CEO, during Thursday’s virtual event.

The new $240 million museum is planned for the northeast corner of N. 6th St. and W. McKinley Ave. Plans for the facility show a five-story, 200,000-square-foot museum designed to resemble the Mill Bluff in Wisconsin’s Mill Bluff State Park. The floor plan would be based on the three rivers that make up the Milwaukee Estuary (Milwaukee, Kinnickinnic, Menomonee). It’s expected that the museum will open by 2026.

The next future museum exhibit, “Milwaukee Revealed,” will be unveiled on April 14, known as Milwaukee Day for the city’s area code (414).

Driftless

The “Driftless” section, named for the Driftless Area of western Wisconsin, will showcase the unique geological and natural features of this corner of the state unique for not being shaped by pre-historic glaciers.

“Visitors will be able to explore waterways through a tactile map of Wisconsin’s most significant rivers, the Mississippi and Wisconsin, to better understand how the region’s watery highways have connected people to the land, and to each other, for millennia,” MPM said.

There will also be an exhibit dedicated to the unique natural features of the Wisconsin Dells and its “distinctive Cambrian sandstone formations.”

An immersive exhibit called the “Lead Mine Look-In” will “make visitors feel like they are in a dark lead mine” and tell the story of the state’s mining history and how it connects to its natural resources. It will also explain how Wisconsin was named the Badger State for the lead miners that “sheltered in dens, reminiscent of badgers’ burrows (or ‘setts’), dug into southwestern Wisconsin hillsides.”

Prairie

This section will feature the “Praireland Bison Display” with a Bison specimen currently shown at the public museum. But this new exhibit will teach visitors about “the animal’s role as a keystone species, including how that role has changed over time, Indigenous connections, extirpation of the species in Wisconsin and ongoing restoration efforts.”

This section of the gallery will also contain a connection to the Hebior Mammoth display found in the previously unveiled “Time Travel” gallery with a new exhibit called the “Hebior Mammoth Dig Site.”

“The Hebior Mammoth Dig Site exhibit will be a core scene in the gallery’s Prairie area, demonstrating to visitors how the giant Mammoth bones emerged from the dirt – as if just discovered by John Hebior – and asking questions about what the soil and its contents can teach us about life in Wisconsin,” MPM said.

Apostle Islands

An immersive Apostle Islands exhibit will juxtapose the summer and winter conditions of these islands’ natural features, with the caves of the rocky Devils Island will be reproduced in both seasons.

The exhibit will also feature migratory birds suspended from the ceiling as if in flight. “The story of migration will carry through all of Wisconsin Journey, and visitors may notice more migratory birds soaring around other sections of Wisconsin Journey and throughout other galleries of the Future Museum, too,” MPM said.

Northwoods

This area of the gallery will feature an exhibit called “Natural Cycles in the Northwoods,” depicting a natural feature of Wisconsin during each season of the year and telling the story of some of the region’s indigenous peoples.

“Exhibits will display the landscapes and plant, animal and human communities that make the region such a distinct place and will highlight those who best know the Northwoods, sharing unique stories, memories and understandings they have of the region.”

Choreographed lighting and soundscapes will create an immersive experience showing how plants and animals respond to the changing seasons.

Sketches

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