May 12th

I am in America’s Dairyland and enjoyed an eclectic set of activities today.

I took a few pictures at Miller Field – if the Milwaukee Brewers had won the 7th game against the Dodgers, the Red Sox would have played in the World Series in this stadium. Then I went to the Mitchell Park Botanical Gardens, which are in three large domes – tropical, desert and show domes.

Milwaukee Art Museum has a large and diverse permanent collection, some of which I saw. There were two interesting special exhibits. William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French painter of history, portrait and genre works. He came a little before the Impressionists and was eclipsed by them but was very popular among American collectors. Sara Kwynar is a Canadian artist still in her 30’s with paintings and videos highlighting the continuing emphasis on the physical appearance of women.

The Jewish Milwaukee Museum showed a film interviewing about 10 women who had been in the partisan resistance movement during WWII. Then an amazing exhibit of Faye Schulman, a Polish teenage girl who took the only known photographs of partisans. At the bottom of her picture below she wrote “I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof”.

My last stop was the Octagon House, designed and built in the 1850’s – with a lot of advanced features – by John Richards, a native of Lanesboro Massachusetts who went to Wisconsin territory to run grist mills. Each floor has four large square rooms and four smaller miscellaneous triangular rooms to make the geometry work.

Today’s song is Bruce again – “Cadillac Ranch”, which has the line “Drivin’ alone through the Wisconsin night”.