Milwaukee Art Museum Honors Robert Longo at Art:Forward Gala, Raises $1.2 Million

MILWAUKEE, WI—September 24, 2024—The Milwaukee Art Museum hosted the second annual Art:Forward Gala on Saturday, September 21, honoring artist, filmmaker, and musician Robert Longo, whose exhibition—Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History—opens October 25 in the Museum’s Baker/Rowland Galleries. More than 250 guests attended the fundraising event held in the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion, celebrating Robert Longo’s achievements and career. Hosted by the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Board of Trustees and Contemporary Art Society, the Art:Forward Gala raised $1.2 million in support of the Museum’s renowned contemporary art program.

“Robert Longo’s large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings have cemented him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. The monumentality of the work; his distinctive, painstaking style; and increasingly topical subject matter place him in the formidable company of centuries of great artists,” said Marcelle Polednik, PhD, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director. “We celebrate Robert Longo’s many accomplishments, his remarkable talent, and our shared belief in the inimitable power of art and the artists who create it.”

Guests enjoyed champagne and views of Lake Michigan on the Baumgartner Terrace before taking their seats in the awe-inspiring setting of Windhover Hall for the evening’s program. Following her warm welcome, Marcelle Polednik, PhD, invited documentarian and filmmaker Sophie Chahinian to introduce the event’s guest of honor.

“I’m incredibly humbled by and grateful for this opportunity,” said Robert Longo in his address to the evening’s guests. “What is more important: this is about you and your support for artists. Art is so incredibly important now… thank you on behalf of living artists and artists to come for your support.”

Following a three-course dinner prepared by the Museum’s culinary team, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Margaret Andera recognized Gretchen Bender (1951–2004), Colin Hunt (b. 1973), Jon Kessler (b. 1957), and Billie Zangewa (b. 1973) as the gala’s featured artists—identified by Robert Longo—and introduced a video tribute to the evening’s honoree. Guests bid on singular live auction items like the rare opportunity to illuminate the Museum’s Burke Brise Soleil and participated in a paddle raise, contributing to the evening’s great success.

Near the speaking program’s conclusion, Margaret Andera shared exciting news in regard to Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History.

“I am so very pleased to be able to share with you that thanks in large part to the support extended by key donors, including Sue and Bud Selig, the Museum’s Contemporary Art Society, Pace Gallery, and Robert Longo himself, we are in the process of securing two major acquisitions of Robert’s work for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s collection,” said Margaret Andera, senior curator of contemporary art.

The Museum is in the process of acquiring two drawings that will be on view in Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, which opens to the public on October 25:

• Untitled (State of the Union, Washington DC, USA, February 5, 2019), 2019, depicts former President Trump’s second State of the Union address at which many congresswomen wore white, referencing the suffragette movement. Longo draws particular attention to the more than 100 women serving in the House of Representatives of the 116th Congress.
• Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine; March 14, 2022), 2022, portrays a wedding storefront display of gowns in Donetsk, Ukraine, damaged by bullets from Russian forces. The drawing captures the stark contrast between the delicate beauty of the gowns and the harsh violence of the conflict.

“Both State of the Union and The Three Graces exemplify Longo’s compelling imagery and technical virtuosity, and we are honored to acquire two significant works from such a pivotal moment in the artist’s storied career,” said Margaret Andera.

The two ambitiously scaled, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings will join two lithographs by Robert Longo already in the Museum’s collection: Men in the Cities, Joanna (1983) and Men in the Cities, Larry (1983). The new acquisitions demonstrate the Museum’s continued commitment to collecting the art of its time.

The Art:Forward Gala concluded with Milwaukee’s own DJ Paul H and tracks reminiscent of New York City in the 80s and 90s. Among the Museum supporters in attendance were host committee members Chris and Jennifer Abele, Donna and Donald Baumgartner, Ellen and Joe Checota, Joan Lubar and John Crouch, Sheldon and Marianne Lubar, Kate and Ken Muth, Joel and Caran Quadracci, and Jeff and Gail Yabuki.

2024 Art: Forward Gala Honoree

About Robert Longo
Internationally acclaimed artist Robert Longo (b. 1953) has long explored our media-driven culture. Rising to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, Longo first gained recognition for his Men in the Cities series (1979–1983), which quickly became some of the most recognizable artworks of the decade. Today, he is widely known for his ambitiously scaled, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings that reflect on the construction of symbols of power and authority. Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, the major Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition opening October 25, 2024, will focus on Longo’s work from the last ten years, featuring images he created in response to contemporary global events pictured in the media. Robert Longo is represented in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Broad Museum, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; and Milwaukee Art Museum. He lives and works in New York and is represented by Pace Gallery and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

2024 Art:Forward Gala Featured Artists

The Milwaukee Art Museum and Robert Longo are honored to celebrate featured artists who stand out for their compelling careers and practice.

About Gretchen Bender
Gretchen Bender (1951–2004) was an influential figure in late 20th-century American art as a member of the Pictures Generation and a key observer of the effects of the inundation of mass media on the human experience. She adopted cutting-edge technologies, moving from silkscreens and photographs to video, broadcast media, and computer graphics. For her, it was not enough for appropriation strategies to only recontextualize images; they also had to be hyper-current and immediately relevant so as to subvert, and affect, the culture as it was developing. Twenty years after her death, Bender’s works still function to critique the violence and spectacle in mass communications, as well as the loss of empathy and political agency in the age of corporate media. Simultaneously entertaining and critical, her works continue the irrelevancy in today’s privatized and multi-screened cultural landscape—in many ways, even predicting its development.

About Colin Hunt
Colin Hunt paints primarily in the medium of egg tempera and watercolor, rendering mysterious and intricate images of the natural world. His work centers on ecology as a way to recast traditions of portraiture as landscape, veering from conventions of each. Neither place nor person, the paintings represent a collective intertwining of memory, death, and the afterlife. His process and aesthetic concerns reflect formal ideas about how what’s missing can reorder perception, and how the personal experience of grief can exist communally, in people and in the earth itself. Hunt received his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous museums and galleries, including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Teckningsmuseet, Sweden; the Brooklyn Museum; and the National Academy of Design. In 2011, he was the inaugural resident at the Galveston Artist Residency in Galveston, Texas.

About Jon Kessler
Born in 1957 in Yonkers, New York, Jon Kessler is best known for his kinetic sculptures made with motors, surveillance cameras, and found objects. He has been showing his work regularly in the United States and abroad since his first exhibition at Artist’s Space in 1983. In 2005, his immersive installation The Palace at 4 AM was exhibited at MoMA/PS1 and travelled to the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, and ZKM, Karlsruhe and is permanently installed at the Phoenix Kulturstiftung/Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg. His newest sculptures are “balancing acts” that address the fragility of our little planet. Bronze, brass, ceramics, stainless steel, and found porcelain figurines combine to form works that comment on ecological collapse and environmental precariousness. Recent activity includes the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; L’Ennemi de Mon Ennemi at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Guangzhou Triennial. He is a Professor of Art at Columbia University where he has taught since 1994. He plays guitar in several art bands.

About Billie Zangewa
Billie Zangewa was born in Blantyre, Malawi, and lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. She creates intricate collages composed of hand-stitched fragments of raw silk. These figurative compositions explore contemporary intersectional identity in an attempt to challenge the historical stereotype, objectification, and exploitation of the black female form. Beginning her career in the fashion and advertising industries, Zangewa employs her understanding of textiles to portray personal and universal experiences through domestic interiors, urban landscapes, and portraiture. Her earliest works were embroideries on found fabrics depicting remembered botanical scenes and animals from Botswana, where the artist was raised, but she soon transitioned to creating cityscapes, focusing on her experience as a woman in the city of Johannesburg and her personal relationships. These works explored her experience of the male gaze, leading her to begin to think more critically about how women view themselves and what the visualization of the female gaze, through self-portraiture, could look like.

Image captions: Photo of Colin Hunt and Robert Longo by Front Room Studios courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum • Robert Longo (American, b. 1953), Untitled (State of the Union, Washington DC, USA, February 5, 2019), 2019. Charcoal on mounted paper. 96 x 146 in. (243.84 x 371.84 cm). Courtesy of the artist • Robert Longo (American, b. 1953), Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine; March 14, 2022), 2022. Charcoal on mounted paper. 96 x 147 in. (243.84 x 373.38 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery

About the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Milwaukee Art Museum is an essential destination for art and architecture and a vital cultural resource that connects visitors to dynamic art experiences and one another. Housed in iconic buildings by Santiago Calatrava, Eero Saarinen, and David Kahler on a 24-acre lakefront campus, the Museum is Wisconsin’s largest art institution and home to both broad and deep collections, with exceptional holdings in American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts; conceptual and minimalist art; prints and drawings; European art from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century; photography and new media; modern and contemporary design; folk and self-taught art; and twentieth-century Haitian art. A bold symbol of Milwaukee’s ambition and forward-thinking vision, the Museum is a place for community building, education, and celebration that fosters creativity, free speech, and critical discourse for audiences of all ages and backgrounds. For more information, visit mam.org.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.