The Milwaukee Art Museum announced on November 5 that Sheldon and Marianne Lubar, together with Joan Lubar and John Crouch, David and Madeleine Lubar, and Susan Lubar, have committed $10 million to establish the Lubar Family Center for Drawings and Prints.
Works on paper are the quiet bulk of the museum. They span more than five centuries and make up over half of a collection of more than 35,000 works, yet they spend most of their lives in storage, because light damages them. The Lubar gift is aimed squarely at that problem. It endows four things by name: 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.
“I am really excited to know there will be a dedicated space in the Museum to exhibit works on paper,” said Marianne Lubar, a museum Life Trustee. “Most great artists start by making drawings. It’s where you see their ideas take shape before anything else. Our family has spent so many hours with these works over the years, and we believe they deserve to be seen and celebrated.”
The Staff Arrives With the Gift
The museum named Nikki Otten as the first Lubar Family Curator of Drawings and Prints. Otten joined the museum in 2018 and has organized exhibitions including 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 in 2026. She earned her master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Otten explained why the rotation of works on paper never stops. “Because works on paper are sensitive to light, they can only be on view for limited periods before returning to storage to rest,” she said. “Each exhibition offers an opportunity to share different selections and explore new connections across the collection. This gift supports the research and specialized care that make those experiences possible.”
Kim Sajet, the museum’s Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director, described what the family understood about the collection. “A drawing can bring us close to an artist’s thinking, while a print reveals how an idea takes shape through extraordinary skill and experimentation,” Sajet said. “The Lubar family understands the value of these works and the expertise needed to care for and share them.”
Fifty Years in One Building
The gift is the latest chapter in a long family record at the museum, which The Social Register follows in its Art coverage. Sheldon and Marianne Lubar have been involved for more than 50 years and serve as Life Trustees. Sheldon Lubar served as president of the museum’s board and led the fundraising effort that completed funding for the Santiago Calatrava designed Quadracci Pavilion, the white winged building on Milwaukee’s lakefront that opened in 2001. Their daughter Joan serves on the board of Trustees.
“Great cities need great institutions,” Sheldon Lubar said. “We’re proud to support the Milwaukee Art Museum as Milwaukee’s great institution.”
His children spoke about the works themselves. “Some of my earliest memories of this Museum are of standing in front of drawings with my mother and being told to look closer,” Joan Lubar said. “That’s what works on paper ask of you. They reward patience and curiosity.”
David Lubar, president and CEO of Lubar & Company, made the case for prints as the people’s medium. “Through printmaking, artists like Albrecht Dürer and Käthe Kollwitz could reach far more people than a single painting ever could,” he said. “That’s what moves me about this collection, and it’s what this gift is about, too: making sure these works keep reaching people in Milwaukee for generations.”
The museum, Wisconsin’s largest art institution, sits on a 24-acre lakefront campus in buildings by Calatrava, Eero Saarinen and David Kahler. With a curator, a conservator and a fellow now endowed in one stroke, the drawings and prints that spent decades resting in storage have a funded reason to come out, a few rooms at a time, for as long as the endowment holds.
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