Warehouse Art Museum Won’t Reopen
After a temporary shut-down in 2023, museum now closed for good, its founders say.
1635 W. St. Paul Ave. Photo by Graham Kilmer Jan. 29, 2024.
The Warehouse Art Museum will not reopen.
The museum opened in 2018 and closed at the end of 2023. Initially, the museum founders — Jan Serr and John Shannon — planned to reopen in a new location. It was announced Monday that the museum will not reopen in a physical space.
Instead, the museum’s core collection, the Serr & Shannon Collection, will become available for loan to other institutions and for academic research. Images of the collection and past exhibitions will also remain on the website, the museum wrote in a letter to supporters Monday.
“While this chapter of a physical space closes, we see this not as a goodbye, but a see you later,” the museum wrote.
Visual artist Serr and her husband, retired businessman John Shannon opened the Warehouse Art Museum (WAM) at 1635 W. St. Paul Ave. It is the same building where Shannon runs Guardian Fine Art Services, providing secure storage and transportation for valuable works of art.
The museum was created to exhibit modern and contemporary art, showcasing the “personal vision and values” of Serr and Shannon, both patrons of the arts in Milwaukee.
With 4,000 feet of gallery space, the museum managed to hold 12 exhibition each with 100 works. But it only ever amounted to a fraction of the 7,000 works in the collection. They were also all temporary; the gallery did not have enough space for permanent exhibits. The last year it was open, WAM held exhibitions of photography; hand made objects ranging from pottery to furniture; and an exhibition focused on the work of Milwaukee-born painter Ruth Grotenrath.
“Every visitor, artist, academic, curator, and staff member contributed immeasurably to this remarkable journey,” Serr and Shannon wrote in their farewell to museum supporters. “At WAM, Serr & Shannon practiced what they believe and live, that all the arts are connected––the visual, performing, and literary arts.”
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I suppose it’s not surprising that it’s closing since I didn’t know it existed in the first place.