This is not the first time Racine Art Museum executive director Bruce Pepich has been asked to compare his new building to the attention-grabbing Calatrava addition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, just 20 miles north. “I’m not going to say anything on the record about either of our two suburbs, Milwaukee or Chicago,” he jokes, adding that “Milwaukee created a world-class building that is an attraction in and of itself.” As for the Racine museum, which opened last month on Main Street in a $6.5 million rehab of a 60s renovation of a Civil War-era structure, Pepich says, “You get the ‘wow’ when you walk in here, and then the building steps back and lets all the objects come forward.”
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He’s right. The RAM building–white on white with plenty of windows–looks like a Crate and Barrel store carried to some sublime next level. So it’s not really a surprise to find a window display of big red glass tchotchkes by Dale Chihuly, commissioned for the museum’s opening and smacking of salad bowls on acid. The museum, housed for 60 years in a farmhouse two miles away, has grown to national prominence since a lightbulb went on in Pepich’s head in the early 90s and it began to specialize in baskets aspiring to sculpture, teapots way past functionality, and other objects that defy the separation of craft and fine art. It didn’t hurt that this specialization was exactly the same as that of Racine’s most prominent art collector, Karen Johnson Boyd, a member of the town’s industrial royalty, the S.C. Johnson family. The new building’s galleries are named for her.
But as the museum approached its 50th anniversary, there was a reassessment, says Pepich, who’s been director and curator since 1981. “With two wonderful museums in the big cities on either side of us, we were wondering how to keep from being overlooked. We realized we couldn’t compete with them.” The Art Institute had textiles and the Milwaukee museum had glass, but neither was strong in other craft media, Pepich says. “This is a blue-collar community where people respect things made with the hand. Craft had always been popular with our audience. We thought, ‘This complements rather than competes–let’s just go with it.’” In 1991, Boyd donated 200 works including ceramics, baskets, and jewelry from her own collection to the Wustum. A longtime arts supporter, she had established Perimeter Gallery a decade earlier to give Wisconsin artists visibility in Chicago (and then at a second Perimeter location in New York) and to show craft in a fine art context. Now she was jump-starting a collection that would rapidly outgrow its quarters in a museum that shared her passion.
