A weathered century-old building on Milwaukee's West Vliet Street is getting new life as a gallery for the kind of art that spills off the walls. Matt Kuhlman, a Milwaukee artist, purchased the 116-year-old mixed-use commercial and residential building at 3718 W. Vliet St. in 2024 and has spent the two years since reworking it into Oxbow Projects, a commercial art gallery and reception venue he plans to open on the building's first floor.
Property records reviewed by Xome show the 3,476-square-foot property sold on November 1, 2024, for $155,000. The building was built in 1908 and expanded the following year. It includes a ground-floor commercial storefront, an upstairs three-bedroom apartment, and a 2.5-car garage, and was assessed at $156,900 in 2025, according to the same records. As detailed in Urban Milwaukee, Kuhlman has spent the past two years updating the historic property to meet modern building codes, renovating its walls, floors, and ceilings while building ADA-compliant bathrooms.
From MIAD Grant to Hands-On Renovation
Kuhlman earned a Master of Fine Arts from UW-Milwaukee, where he said the program gave him time and space to explore his thesis in an exhibition setting, per the Urban Milwaukee report. His academic credentials got a boost in January 2024, when the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design named him a recipient of the 2023/24 Ruth Arts + MIAD Artist Grant while he served as an adjunct fine arts faculty member there, according to a statement from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. The grant program distributed $75,000 from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts to support independent artist projects that year.
Kuhlman presented a February 2024 solo exhibition titled Interstitium at Abel Contemporary Gallery that combined video, drawing, and mobile sculpture, with perception as a feature of the installation. He also brought spatial wall drawings to The Real Tinsel, an artist-run gallery in Milwaukee's Walker's Point neighborhood, in spring 2022, according to his official website — experience that has shaped how he's approaching Oxbow Projects.
Trade Skills Meet Artistic Vision
The hands-on renovation work isn't new territory for Kuhlman. He established Meadowlark Painting at the start of 2024, running a commercial interior, exterior, and drywall painting company across southeastern Wisconsin after six years working in the painting industry, according to the company's own site. That background is showing up in the building itself — Kuhlman is changing the exterior paint color from deep red to a vibrant sunshine yellow, and per Urban Milwaukee's reporting, he'll hang the drywall himself in the coming months.
Kuhlman wants artists to actively create environments for people to enter, rather than simply hang finished work on a wall, Urban Milwaukee reports. He's specifically interested in partnering with artists who create immersive environmental and spatial works, including large-scale installations, sculptural forms, and projection art, and he says he's already lined up several artists for the gallery's opening shows. “Artists do not have to leave Milwaukee to make something happen,” Kuhlman said, according to the outlet.
A Gallery Built to Build Community
Oxbow Projects is slated to open in spring 2027 with a plan to host rotating six-week shows, each featuring opening and closing receptions for artists and visitors. Kuhlman wants the gallery to show art people do not ordinarily see, and he's framed the project as something bigger than a single storefront — he wants Oxbow Projects to help build community, according to Urban Milwaukee's reporting. He plans to continue promoting the gallery in the coming months as he finishes the renovation.
A proposed Art Intersection MKE development has also been covered by Urban Milwaukee.
A Corridor Already Showing Signs of Life
Oxbow Projects will also be joining a strip that already has small business staying power. Hoodline reported in September that longtime boutique JazzyRae' Jewels & Accessories, owned by Johnraé Stowers, hosts an annual Divas Brunch event that draws 500 to 600 attendees; the 2026 event was set to take place on Marquette University's campus. Nearby, Washington Heights is an adjacent neighborhood.
For Kuhlman, turning a century-old storefront sunshine yellow is as much a statement about staying put as it is about art. With the drywall still to go up and a spring 2027 opening on the horizon, Oxbow Projects is shaping up as one more sign that West Vliet Street's commercial strip is finding new uses for its old bones.
