In the American imagination, the road trip has long held the promise of open skies and self-discovery. But a smaller — read: easier! — journey heading north from Chicago, the Midwest offers a subtler kind of drama. No canyons, no coasts, just quiet vistas of prairie, glacial lakes, a heavy dose of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Though rarely positioned at the center of contemporary art, the Midwest’s creative history is rooted in agriculture, domestic skill and self-taught ingenuity. Artist-built environments, visionary architecture and singular craft collections reflect a region where space is abundant and the instinct to fill it is generational.
This first edition in WBEZ’s summer art road trip series traces that legacy, moving from Racine to Milwaukee to Sheboygan. It offers a different kind of pilgrimage, one where art lives as much in supper clubs and side yards as in museums. But from the Chicago area, it’s a trip that’s doable, affordable and altogether eye-opening.
Racine: the soul of craft
Racine may not announce itself as an art destination, but for those steeped in contemporary craft, it’s an essential beginning. The Racine Art Museum (RAM) holds the largest collection of contemporary craft in the country — bold ceramics, fiber works, wood and glass, all housed in a bright, minimalist building near the lakefront.
“There’s this incredible legacy of Objects: USA here,” said Shoshana Resnikoff, the Demmer Curator of 20th and 21st Century Design at the Milwaukee Art Museum, referring to the groundbreaking touring exhibition that traveled the country from 1969 to 1972. The show was sponsored by SC Johnson — the man, not just the company — who purchased much of the work and donated pieces to institutions around the country, including a significant number to his hometown museum in Racine.
The museum’s holdings include works by ceramicists Toshiko Takaezu, Mara Superior and Viola Frey, all artists who expanded the language of their medium. Frey’s monumental clay figures, in particular, possess a quiet gravity, asserting presence while underscoring the emotional weight of material.
South of downtown stands another landmark: the SC Johnson Administration Building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1936. Open to the public on Sundays, the building is one of the rare opportunities to experience Wright’s vision for nondomestic space. “You have a sense of being in a forest,” said Resnikoff, describing the lily padlike columns and glass tube ceilings that diffuse natural light. “He designed a truly humanistic working environment for a man who never actually worked in an office.”
Milwaukee: City of architecture, folk art and frozen custard
Forty minutes north of Racine, Milwaukee’s lakefront hums with its own cultural charge. At the Milwaukee Art Museum, Santiago Calatrava’s soaring brise soleil captures attention, but according to Resnikoff, the quieter design details offer just as much insight.
“The museum is like a rabbit’s warren,” she said. “But if you look down, the floors tell you where you are.” White marble marks the Calatrava addition; parquet, the 1957 Saarinen wing; end-grain wood, the 1970s Kahler expansion.
One of the museum’s most beloved — but often overlooked — spaces is the folk art mezzanine, a gallery filled with hand-carved figures, whirligigs and self-taught masterworks collected over generations. “It’s beloved by Milwaukee school kids,” Resnikoff noted. “And it just feels like a Milwaukee collection — even though it’s national in scope.”
While there, take a spin through the newly opened exhibit “Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts,” which offers the most comprehensive look at the multidisciplinary Montreal-based artist’s work in a decade. The show features more than 40 recent sculptures, photographs, videos and site-specific installations that highlight Shirreff’s distinctive ability to manipulate materials — foam, paper, bronze — and perspective.
Outside the museum, if you need a bite, both Kopp’s and Leon’s offer butter burgers and sculptural-grade custard. Meanwhile, the South Shore Terrace beer garden in Bay View, located in a former bathhouse, serves bratwurst and brews with one of the city’s best skyline views.
In the suburb of Fox Point, the Mary Nohl House offers a different kind of landmark. Often dubbed the “witch’s house” by local folklore, the lakeside cottage stands as one of Wisconsin’s most distinctive examples of artist-built environment. Nohl transformed the home and yard into a total artwork covering walls in mosaics, constructing sculptures from concrete and driftwood, and embedding personal iconography throughout.
“She wanted the world around her to be different, so she made it so,” Resnikoff said. “Every surface is intentional. Every object tells you something about how she saw the world. The house itself is an artwork.” Visits remain limited, but even a roadside glimpse suggests its singularity.
Sheboygan: Where there’s art in the everyday
As the third and final stop on the trip, Sheboygan marks a crescendo in the journey — a smaller city where Midwestern modesty meets maximalist art. Anchored by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and the sprawling, 160-acre Art Preserve, Sheboygan offers a layered look at American visual culture: part gallery, part living archive.
This summer, the Arts Center presents a major exhibition by Pao Houa Her, a Hmong American photographer whose work captures refugee resettlement through images that blend memory and myth. Born in Laos and raised in Minnesota, Her’s mid-career survey, The Imaginative Landscape (open through Aug. 31), unfolds not just inside the Kohler museum but across the city of Sheboygan. A poppy-covered backdrop fills a karaoke bar. Portraits of Hmong elders hang in the county courthouse. “It’s personal and universal at the same time,” said Jodi Throckmorton, the Arts Center’s chief curator. “It’s work that brings awareness to a group of people that we need to have more awareness of. It speaks to this moment.” To find the seven neighborhood sites, pick up an exhibition map provided by the Kohler Museum.
Elsewhere at the Art Preserve, which opened in 2021, more than 30 artist-built environments stand whole. The preserve houses the singular collection the center has built over nearly 40 years, transforming the Wisconsin museum into a nationally significant hub for outsider art.
One of Throckmorton’s favorite artist environments, Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machine, a suspended matrix of foil, magnets and copper wire, attempts to harness natural energy for healing. “There’s something energetic happening in that space,” Throckmorton said of Blagdon’s room. “Every time I walk through, I feel it.” There’s also the reconstructed home collection of Imagist Ray Yoshida, packed with flea market finds and outsider art, which provides insight into one of Chicago’s most influential visual thinkers.
For those traveling on a Thursday, the Kohler Center also hosts free weekly concerts on the City Green. (Consider: The Lost Bayou Ramblers on June 26 or Melanie Charles on July 10.) “I was so shocked when I came here,” said Throckmorton. “I’ve worked at museums that had concerts and maybe 100 people show up. But here? It’s three to five thousand.”
Finally, after a long day of art adventuring, unwind at Wisconsin supper club Majerle’s Black River Grill in nearby Black River, where roasted chicken and brandy Old Fashioneds are served in a wood-paneled dining room that looks out onto the forest. Supper clubs — once rural roadhouses and Prohibition-era hideaways — evolved into a midcentury Wisconsin institution: part steakhouse, part social club and, always decorated with a robust relish tray, a celebrated local art form unto itself.
Bonus: For a night away, consider returning to Milwaukee for the night. Located on the historic Burnham Block, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s rare American System-Built Homes offers both public tours and overnight stays. Designed in the 1910s as part of Wright’s vision for affordable, well-crafted housing, the restored Model B1 is also open for Saturday tours.
Elly Fishman is a journalist and author whose work explores immigration, incarceration and American culture, including the arts. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, WBEZ Chicago, among others. She is currently working on her second book, forthcoming from HarperCollins.