Milwaukee Public Museum Changes Its Name

Rendering of new museum viewed from the west side of N. 6th St. Rendering by Kahler Slater.

The Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) officially announced it will name its new museum the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin.

MPM has spent the past few years working on the $240 million development of a new museum at the corner N. 6th Street and W. McKinley Avenue. Construction on the five-story, 200,000-square-foot facility got underway in 2023 and is expected to finish in 2027.  The new name is also accompanied by a new logo, which incorporates the silhouette of the new Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin.

“Our new museum’s name, the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin, honors the work we’ve been doing for nearly 150 years—sharing the intertwined stories of our natural world and the diverse cultures that shape it,” said Ellen Censky, MPM president and CEO. “Our longstanding mission will continue to ring true through the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin’s galleries as we invite in guests from across Wisconsin and beyond to celebrate and spark curiosity about our shared history, all in one space.”

The new name has been a poorly kept secret since MPM sought public financing from the state in 2021. Funding for a “Wisconsin Museum of Nature and Culture” showed up in state budget documents. That may have helped MPM secure $40 million from the Republican-led state Legislature. Less than a year later, the Milwaukee County Board approved $45 million for the project.

Some Milwaukee County supervisors lamented the loss of the name, which provided recognition for Milwaukee and the museum’s public origins for most of its history.

“We cannot have the word public on the museum,” Censky told supervisors in 2022. “And the reason for that is we are a separate 501(c)(3) and not a governmental agency. Having the word public in the name confuses people as to where the finding is coming from.”

Unlike the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin will not be publicly owned. A private entity was created to develop the project, and once constructed ownership will be transferred to a new entity called Wisconsin Museum of Nature and Culture Inc., a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit, that will succeed MPM Inc. It will, however, continue to store and display its collections — all still owned by Milwaukee County.

The financing deal between MPM and the county dropped annual public operating support from $3.5 million to just $1 million annually. The funding is to be used to store and maintain the public collections. But it’s expected Milwaukee County residents will begin paying higher property taxes to pay down the debt used by the county to finance the project.

“There is the question, what’s in the name. Well, there is something very important in the name: it states what the values are behind a museum, or any institution,” Sup. Steven Shea said at the time. “There is a lot of public money going into this project, this institution.”

The museum was owned and operated by the City of Milwaukee for most of its history, from 1882 to 1976. City taxpayers have, historically, been the museum’s primary backers. The city paid for the entire cost of the current museum built in the early 1960s. The public collection was also largely built up during the 94 years that the city owned the museum.

The city transferred it to the county under then-Mayor Henry Maier. The county privatized its operations less than two decades later after it struggled to foot the bill, which brought MPM Inc. in to run the museum and collect donations to support.

The new name could, in part, be yet another response to the institution’s long-term funding challenges, helping it more easily draw resources from the Wisconsin Legislature and from donors around the state, as Urban Milwaukee reported in 2022.

Indeed, the museum’s audience is already mostly drawn from outside Milwaukee County. By 2013, fewer than 50% of the museum’s patrons came from Milwaukee County.

The new name will also better reflect the mission and content in the museum.

“The Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin’s galleries and exhibits will highlight how the natural world has shaped human experience—and how people, in turn, have influenced the natural world—making its new name an authentic reflection of the work and stories MPM has always shared,” the museum said in a statement Tuesday.

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