Some art lovers might ascend the staircase inside the glass wedge of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, gaze out onto State Street and assume they are inside a brand-new museum. But while MMoCA’s impressive state-of-the-art space, designed by architect Cesar Pelli, opened in 2006, it’s the culmination for an organization whose commitment to visual arts in Madison goes back over a century.
In 1901, the Madison Art Association was founded by a small volunteer community group. For its first 60 years, it had no permanent home, using borrowed spaces to present art exhibitions and classes. In 1959, the association launched what is now Art Fair on the Square, beginning as a modest event in the Brookwood Shopping Center on Midvale Blvd. (where Dorn Ace Hardware now sits) before moving to the Capitol Square in 1964.
Also that year, the group incorporated as a private non-profit, the Madison Art Center, and moved into its first home in the former Lincoln School on Lake Mendota. Sixteen years later, the center relocated into what was then the Madison Civic Center on State Street, When plans for the new Overture Center for the Arts were announced to replace the civic center, the art center was promised a spot in the new facility.
The center renamed itself the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art to reflect the new facility, and in 2006 opened in its current 51,500-square-foot space, which includes a rooftop sculpture garden, 230-person lecture center, and study center. MMoCA serves an estimated 150,000 patrons per year and has over 5,000 pieces in its permanent collection, and in addition to exhibitions offers educational programs and movie screenings.
In 2022, MMoCA came under fire for its handling of an incident at the Wisconsin Triennial, an exhibition of Wisconsin artists, in which artist Lilada Gee’s work was vandalized by visitors. Gee and other Black women artists in the exhibition said they felt poorly supported by the museum and called on former director Christina Brungardt to resign. Brungardt stepped down in October 2023.
