Save MPM

06/01/2026

We just published the second Art Worth Saving Deep Dive.
The Bull and Cow Moose diorama at the Milwaukee Public Museum has been standing since 1948. In 1947, a team traveled to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska and came back with a 1,500-pound bull moose — already a legend among local Kenai guides — crates of real Alaskan soil, oil sketches of the landscape, and cinematic footage. Over the next year they built something that has never been replicated.
Four people are documented as its creators. The backdrop was painted directly on the architecture. The soil on the floor is real. The Disposition Plan (File No. 25-586) calls it surplus personal property.
But here is what nobody has been saying out loud:
This diorama was successfully moved before. It was relocated to the current building at 800 W. Wells Street and reopened May 24, 1971. The taxidermy survived intact — needed vacuuming. A new artist painted the backdrop from the original 1947 expedition sketches.
If it was moved once, the question the Disposition Plan has to answer is: why is "haul-away" the answer now?
The full deep dive — expedition, taxidermy process, flora fabrication, the 1971 move, every primary source — is live now.

05/27/2026

Milwaukee paid $10,867,855 for the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1976. That covered the building and the land. The artifacts — over a hundred years of public trust — had no price tag. Not because they were worthless. Because their value was beyond commercial valuation.
Now, a 2025 Disposition Plan filed by MPM, Inc. seeks to sell, donate, or discard those same artifacts — classified as surplus personal property — without a single independent appraisal, and without Milwaukee County Board authorization.
The museum's own Director Emeritus wrote in 1962: "many of these could never be duplicated." He wasn't speaking poetically. He was setting a standard of care. We're asking the County Board to enforce it.
Every prior ownership transfer in this museum's history included a formal acknowledgment of value. The 1883 transfer. The 1976 transfer. This is the first in 144 years where none is required.
Read the full historical record here: https://www.savempm.org/post/the-10m-sale-that-couldn-t-put-a-price-on-history

Fighting to protect the Milwaukee Public Museum's historic dioramas, Streets of Old Milwaukee, and century-built exhibits from destruction. Milwaukee County must answer to the public before these irreplaceable environments are gone forever. Follow. Share.

05/25/2026

We've been doing research.
Not summaries. Not opinions. Primary sources, named creators, documented history — the full story behind the exhibits inside the Milwaukee Public Museum before the building at 800 W. Wells Street closes on January 3, 2027.

Today we're launching the Art Worth Saving Deep Dive series with our first installment: the Seth Thomas Street Clock.

Here's what most people walk past without knowing:

The clock standing outside the museum has been keeping time since 1905. It's one of approximately 200 Seth Thomas street clocks ever manufactured in American history.

In 1907, Milwaukee's "Boy Mayor" sent axe-wielding firemen down Grand Avenue to destroy the city's street clocks. This one escaped because it was on South 16th Street — out of the path of the raid.

In the 1960s a truck knocked it completely flat. Eldred Jensen had it back up within days. An MPM Art Director noticed — wrote Jensen a letter — and that letter is the reason the clock ended up at the museum instead of in a private collection.

In 1988 a retired Rockwell International engineer named Herb Smith volunteered 40 years of expertise and led 20+ people through a full restoration. No contract. No fee.

It is a designated City of Milwaukee Landmark. Its move to the new museum was announced in a comment on a social media post. No press release. No formal public process.

The full story — every phase, every name, every source — is live now.
🔗https://www.savempm.org/post/seth-thomas-street-clock

Did you know this history? Drop a comment.
What should we break down next? Tell us.

05/22/2026

Look at this.
In the early 1950s, a Milwaukee County employee named A.E. Seebach spent more than a year making this wax figure by hand. He was a staff sculptor at the Milwaukee Public Museum — paid by Milwaukee taxpayers, working in a County-owned building, creating original works of art for public education.
MPM, Inc. has now classified his work as a "mannequin."
Not a museum-quality sculptural figure. Not a publicly-funded artifact of historical significance. A mannequin — lumped into a category called "Non-collections items" that ends with the word "Etc." alongside faux food items and office furniture.
That category does not exist anywhere in the 2013 Lease and Management Agreement that governs the museum's operation.
The agreement is specific. "Artifacts" means objects of historical value showing human workmanship, used for exhibition and education. "Personal Property" means equipment, chairs, computers, office supplies. There is no third category. There is no "Etc."
What there is: a PowerPoint slide that places the Masai Warrior grouping, the Kwakiutl wax figures, and the Land of Zanj sculptural busts — works created by County employees, on County time, with County funding — in a column labeled "MPM, Inc.-owned."
A PowerPoint slide is not a legal amendment to a County lease.
These works were made by Milwaukee people, for Milwaukee people, with Milwaukee's money. MPM, Inc. was created four decades after Seebach finished that figure. The organization that manages these assets does not own them. Milwaukee County does. The public does.
We documented the full reclassification, quoted the legal definitions verbatim, and asked fourteen specific questions of Milwaukee County and MPM, Inc. that have not been answered.
Read it. Share it. And if you know someone at the County Board, send it to them directly.
Full post: https://www.savempm.org/post/who-own-s-milwaukee-s-heritage

05/21/2026

Nobody condemned the habitat dioramas.
At a Milwaukee County committee meeting on September 2, 2025, they weren't debated, celebrated, or mourned. They were categorized. And the category they landed in is the one from which nothing returns.
Here's how it works in three steps.
If it's attached to the building, it belongs to Milwaukee County — but as a building fixture, not a museum holding. It follows the building's disposition plan, not the preservation pipeline.
If it can't be moved without being destroyed, it was never accessioned. Museums don't catalog things they'd have to damage to relocate. The very scale and permanence that makes these dioramas extraordinary — the fact that they were built into the building, designed as total environments — is now the precise reason they cannot be saved. Their greatness is their liability.
The one that's movable is the one that's saved. One diorama is confirmed for the new building. The Akeley — the one small enough to pack. The rest are confirmed, by omission, to be staying behind.
This is the architecture of loss. Not a villain. Not a conspiracy. Just three bureaucratic categories stacked on top of one another until the conclusion becomes inevitable and everyone responsible can say, with a clear conscience, that they followed the rules.
The Dioramas are simultaneously philosophically inconvenient and procedurally unprotected. The new vision doesn't want them. The rulebook offers no mechanism to save them.
Milwaukee has a habit of losing things it cannot figure out how to keep. The Dioramas do not have to be next.
Read the full post at the link below.
https://www.savempm.org/post/the-un-wanted-step-children

05/20/2026

SHOUT OUT to the community member who helped surface this article and the underlying disposition details. This is exactly why independent research and public documentation matter right now.

📌 Here’s the post:

𝗪𝗵𝗼 𝗞𝗲𝗲𝗽𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆?

Found this article from January 2026. Read it carefully.

Milwaukee Record did a detailed breakdown of MPM’s “Plan for Disposition” — the process for handling objects that do not move to the new museum.

According to the plan:

• MPM keeps what it wants
• County departments get first consideration
• Then peer museums
• Then nonprofits
• Then exhibit fabrication companies
• Then finally…the public

That means Milwaukee taxpayers — who funded and supported this institution for generations — are effectively last in line to purchase items connected to their own public museum.

And one major question still remains unclear to many residents:

Who keeps the proceeds from any future sales?

This is bigger than nostalgia. It’s a public asset and public trust question.

You already paid for it once. Now the public may have to bid to get pieces of it back.

Article:

Please enjoy the “Plan for Disposition of the Milwaukee Public Museum’s Surplus Personal Property and Milwaukee County fixtures.”

05/19/2026

In 2018, the Milwaukee Public Museum laid off its in-house artists and taxidermists. They were not replaced.
The last exhibit built using that tradition — the tradition that ran from Carl Akeley's muskrat diorama in 1890 through the Crow Indian Bison Hunt in 1966 through thirty years of Ken Kratz painting backgrounds — was Crossroads of Civilization, which opened in 2015.
The building at 800 West Wells closes January 3, 2027. Milwaukee County's Disposition Plan calls for demolition with no funded plan to move what's inside. Not transfer it. Destroy it.
The Streets of Old Milwaukee. The European Village. The Dall Sheep group, built by six people who flew to Alaska to get the light right. The Crow Indian Bison Hunt — once the largest open diorama in the world. The backgrounds Ken Kratz spent thirty years painting. All of it.
Part Three of The Hands That Built It — the final installment — is live now at SaveMPM.org. It names what is at stake, documents what the current leadership has and hasn't done, and ends with what can still happen if enough people say so.
County documents can be amended. But the window is closing.

https://www.savempm.org/post/hands-that-built-it-part-3

05/18/2026

We just launched a new group and we want you in it.

SaveMPM: Art Worth Saving is dedicated to the murals, dioramas, and artists of the Milwaukee Public Museum — and to making sure the public knows what is at risk before the building at 800 W. Wells Street closes January 3, 2027.

The artists who built this museum gave entire careers to one building in one city. Charles Porteus. Ken Kratz. Sylvester Sowinski. Walter Pelzer. Owen Gromme. Their work is still inside that building right now. Hand-built. Painted on walls. Irreplaceable.

The Disposition Plan describes the end of the disposal pipeline in its own words:

"discard, destruction, or contracted haul-away."

This group is where we document what exists, honor the people who built it, and push for public transparency before irreversible decisions are made.

Join us here 👇
https://www.facebook.com/share/g/18bSL9roRB/

Share this post. Invite someone who needs to know this story. Every voice matters and we have less than a year.

📖 savempm.org

05/14/2026

In the late 1950s, the Milwaukee Public Museum sent six people to Alaska.
Not to collect. To get the light right.
They traveled to two mountain ranges to document exactly what a Dall sheep habitat looked like — the rock, the vegetation, the quality of the air at altitude — so the diorama they built would be true, not just good. It opened in October 1960. It has stood for more than sixty years.
That same standard produced, in 1966, what was reputed to be the largest open diorama in the world: the Crow Indian Bison Hunt. No glass. No barrier. You stand at the edge of it and the hunt is happening.
Part Two of The Hands That Built It is live now at SaveMPM.org — covering the directors, taxidermists, sculptors, and painters who took the Milwaukee Style from an idea to an internationally recognized approach to museum design. Forty-seven wax human figures, built one at a time by hand. Thirty years of painted backgrounds. A city block you can walk into. The largest African habitat environments ever built in an American museum.
All of it is still there. At 800 West Wells Street.
Read it at the link below.
https://wix.to/x5GcKuD

Walter Pelzer. Ken Kratz. Sylvester Sowinski. William Schultz. They built the largest open diorama in the world, the Streets of Old Milwaukee, and 47 human figures by hand. Part Two of their story.

05/14/2026

These are our five requests — to the Governor, to the County Board, to the Wisconsin Attorney General, and to the public.

Wisconsin AG review of the Disposition Plan
Independent inventory and appraisal before any disposal
Federal WPA legal review before demolition
Funded relocation evaluation before January 3, 2027
Public transparency before irreversible decisions are made

None of these is a radical ask. All of them are standard public accountability measures. None of them has happened yet.
findyourcountysupervisor.com · savempm.org