Renaissance-era artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, creator of ‘The David,’ The ‘Pieta,’ and frescos painted in the Sistine Chapel, amongst many other works (he was also a poet), famously
MMoCA’s upcoming exhibits showcase the museum’s impressive permanent collection
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection consists of 5,939 objets d’art.
May 5, 2021 9:17 AM Michael Muckian
“Carousel” by Sam Gilliam, 1970
Louis Pasteur once said that fortune favors the prepared mind. That applies to Madison’s once nascent arts scene and a surprise gift given more than a century ago.
In 1913, Florence Shirlaw, widow of landscape artist Walter Shirlaw (a former bank note engraver who helped found and served as president of the Society of American Artists), contacted what was then the Madison Art Association. She’d been donating her late husband’s pieces to museums across the country and wondered if the association would like two of his landscapes. Officials happily accepted the gift, which became the seedlings of one of Madison’s largest troves of hidden artistic treasures.
Madison in the Sixties – In Memoriam, University of Wisconsin
The namesakes of two of the three South East dorms passed away this decade. Economics professor emeritus Edwin E. Witte, former department chair and namesake of the second southeast dorm, died May 20, 1960 at age seventy- three. Witte began his UW career as a teaching assistant in the history department, became an economics lecturer, and worked eleven years as head of the state’s Legislative Reference Bureau. He became a full professor of economics in 1933. Two years later, he was the principal author of the Social Security Act.
George C. Sellery, dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1919 to 1942, namesake of the first dorm, died on his ninetieth birthday, January 21, 1962. A scholar of Renaissance history, Sellery, came to Wisconsin for his doctorate at the invitation of the legendary historian Frederick Jackson Turner. An educational conservative, Sellery was acting president after the regents fired Pr