The least-noticed part of the Milwaukee Public Museum’s rebranding could turn out to be the most problematic.
By now, you may have heard that the museum will drop both “Milwaukee” and “Public” from its name when it moves into its new building in 2027. The future museum will be known as the “Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin,” which museum leadership says will highlight its “shared statewide natural and cultural history and identity.”
The museum also says jettisoning the word “public” reflects its evolution into a nonprofit institution that will own its new building, even though the county will continue to own its collection and provide some operating funding.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Gov. Tony Evers signaled renaming was ahead in 2021, when the Legislature approved his request to contribute $40 million toward construction of what he called the “Wisconsin Museum of Nature and Culture.” The state funding represents one-sixth of the project’s $240 million budget, matched by $45 million from the county, $1 million in other public dollars and projections of $150 million in private donations and up to $5 million in federal grants.
But what wasn’t expected was the new name for the entire complex. The future museum’s campus — including not just the museum proper but also the Daniel Soref Planetarium, the Puelicher Butterfly Vivarium, Bucyrus Rooftop Terrace, parking garage and outdoor areas — will be labeled the “Milwaukee Museum Center.”
And if that name sounds familiar, it’s because the Milwaukee Art Museum has rebranded the former O’Donnell Park as Museum Center Park. Built into the lakefront bluff, the structure features green space atop a parking garage, with a park pavilion that houses the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum.
In addition to Betty Brinn, the garage supplements underground and surface parking areas at both the art museum and Discovery World. With those three institutions nearby, the site could be considered a center of museums.
But if future Nature & Culture Museum visitors ask their GPS for “museum center parking” and are guided to the Museum Center Park garage on the lakefront, they would find a much longer walk than they expected to the Milwaukee Museum Center in the Haymarket neighborhood just north of Fiserv Forum.
Did that occur to MPM leadership? Did they even know about O’Donnell Park’s under-the-radar renaming? Did MPM and MAM staff confer about the issue before MPM’s rebranding announcement? Do either or both have any plans to address potential confusion?
We don’t know. Neither museum directly responded to any of those questions.
Through a spokesperson, MPM President Ellen Censky says, “We understand that it will take time for our community to get used to the name (of both the museum and the complex) … As we continue our brand’s rollout and provide our community with updates on the museum’s development, we will continue using repetition and intentional engagement to build meaningful recognition. As for any confusion, we feel confident that our distinct identity, mission, and long-standing presence in the community will set us apart. And of course, many people simply call us ‘the Museum’ – a name we’re proud to have earned and happy to continue hearing.”
But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Museums are all about the provenance, or as superhero fans call it, the origin story. And that’s where Censky, the longtime museum veteran, reveals a plot twist.
“In fact, our current building used to be marked the Museum Center,” Censky says. She provided a photo of a former sign, which lists the center’s tenants as MPM, the planetarium (named in 2006) and the Humphrey IMAX Dome Theater (added in 1996). MPM staff says the complex name dates at least as far back as 2004.
However, as Censky notes, that sign was taken off the county-owned building in 2014, when the “Woodland Indian and Whistling Swans” sculpture was moved to the east side of the main entrance. That means the sign was gone before MAM formed a nonprofit entity called Museum Center Park Inc. to buy O’Donnell Park from the county in 2017.
Asked for comment, a MAM spokesperson referred a reporter’s questions to colleagues who did not respond by deadline. That was exactly what happened when Milwaukee Magazine previously asked when and why O’Donnell Park was rebranded.
So where is the true center of Milwaukee museums? MPM’s current building also used to house Discovery World, from 1995 until the science museum moved to its own building in 2006. And Betty Brinn was originally slated to move to the future MPM complex, but backed out in 2022.
But the Milwaukee Public Library was the previous home of both MPM (from 1898 until the current building opened as a city institution in 1962) and Discovery World (from 1984 to 1995). Plus the library operated the Charles Allis Art Museum from 1957 until the former mansion was transferred to the county in 1979.
The Central Library never has called itself a museum center. But it could rightfully claim the title of Mother of Museums.
