The Milwaukee Art Museum just picked up $10 million to provide dedicated resources for its drawings and prints collection. Sheldon and Marianne Lubar, Joan Lubar and John Crouch, David and Madeleine Lubar, and Susan Lubar have committed the gift to establish the Lubar Family Center for Drawings and Prints, a new hub built specifically around the museum's enormous holdings of works on paper.
According to a release distributed via PR Newswire, the gift endows four distinct pieces: the Lubar Family Curator of Drawings and Prints, the Lubar Family Paper Conservator, the Lubar Family Fellow in Drawings and Prints, and the Lubar Family Drawings and Prints Exhibition Program. Together, those positions and programs are meant to provide ongoing expertise and care so the collection can be preserved and shared with Milwaukee for generations, per the announcement.
Leading the new center will be Nikki Otten, Ph.D., who has been named the Lubar Family Curator of Drawings and Prints. Otten joined the museum in 2018 and has already built a track record there, organizing Always New: The Posters of Jules Chéret in 2022, LaToya M. Hobbs: Carving Out Time in 2024, and Seeking Revelation: German Romantic Prints and Drawings earlier this year. She holds her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
A Collection That Rarely Sees Daylight
The scale of what's at stake is significant: works on paper make up more than half of the Milwaukee Art Museum's collection of over 35,000 works, spanning more than five centuries. That is a staggering share of the museum's holdings, and much of it has been difficult for the public to see regularly.
That's because works on paper demand a different kind of handling than paintings or sculpture. As BizTimes notes, these pieces often require specialized care because of their sensitivity to light, which limits how long individual pieces can remain on display before they have to rotate back into storage. The new conservator and fellow positions are intended to help manage exactly that kind of specialized, ongoing work.
Family Voices Behind the Gift
Museum director Kim Sajet, who holds the title of Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, framed the value of the medium itself in the announcement, saying drawings reveal artists' thinking while prints show ideas taking shape through skill and experimentation. Marianne Lubar echoed that sentiment, noting that most great artists begin by making drawings, where their ideas take shape, and said she was excited about having a dedicated space in the museum to exhibit works on paper.
Other family members framed their support around different facets of the collection. David Lubar, president and CEO of Lubar & Company, pointed to the historically democratic power of printmaking, saying it has allowed artists to reach wider audiences — citing how Albrecht Dürer and Käthe Kollwitz reached more people through prints than a single painting could ever reach. Joan Lubar, who serves on the museum's board of trustees, said works on paper reward patience and curiosity, while Susan Lubar said she was excited to support exhibition-related work and the collection's continuing role in Milwaukee. Sheldon Lubar, for his part, said simply that the family is proud to support the museum.
Decades of Lubar Family Involvement
The gift, according to the museum, reflects two generations of Lubar family leadership. Sheldon and Marianne Lubar have been involved with the museum for more than 50 years and now serve as life trustees; Sheldon previously served as president of the museum's board and led the fundraising effort that completed funding for the Santiago Calatrava-designed Quadracci Pavilion. Joan Lubar continues that legacy through her current board seat.
The timing lands just over a week after another major local philanthropic commitment to the same institution. On October 28, the Quadracci family, along with the Windhover and Winderful Foundations, committed a $10 million gift to the museum, establishing the Quadracci Pavilion Preservation Endowment Fund, according to a separate PR Newswire release. Between the two gifts, the museum has secured $20 million in new philanthropic support within a matter of days.
Part of a Broader Pattern in Paper Collections
Milwaukee isn't alone in funneling major gifts toward its drawings and prints holdings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced in March 2025 that a donation from collector Jordan Schnitzer would endow a curatorial position in its Department of Drawings and Prints, according to the Met. The Baltimore Museum of Art took a similar path in 2020, when a $5 million gift from Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff helped lead fundraising for a $10 million project establishing a center for its 65,000-object collection of prints, drawings and photographs, per the Baltimore museum.
Milwaukee itself has a history of this kind of targeted giving. Back in 2018, the Herzfeld Foundation committed $3.5 million to endow the museum's Curator of Photography and Media Arts position, which a Milwaukee Art Museum Pressroom release at the time described as the latest in a series of endowed positions at the museum. That same foundation had earlier established the Herzfeld Photography, Print, and Drawing Study Center in 2001, giving visiting scholars and students access to the museum's extensive works-on-paper holdings.
Nikki Otten said the center's planned exhibitions will share different selections from the collection and explore new connections across it. The Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin's largest art institution, sits on a 24-acre lakefront campus and is housed in buildings designed by Santiago Calatrava, Eero Saarinen and David Kahler — a backdrop that will now host a collection decades in the making, with new resources behind it to finally bring more of it into view.
