After years of planning and fundraising to build a new museum, Milwaukee Public Museum officials announced Thursday that they will hold a groundbreaking ceremony for the $240 million project on Tuesday, May 7.
The event will kick off at 1:30 p.m. at the site of the future museum at the corner of Sixth and McKinley streets in the Haymarket neighborhood, near downtown, and will mark a significant milestone in the project, officials said.
The event will include formal remarks from Ellen Censky, MPM president and chief executive officer and local government officials. There will also be performances from local youth groups as stakeholders ceremoniously break ground.
Construction this summer
In the planning stages for the better part of seven years, the project has been promised $45 million in public funding from Milwaukee County and another $40 million from the State of Wisconsin. MPM is responsible for raising the remaining $150 million from private donors. Another $5 million in federal grants are also being pursued, which would get the project to the $240 million mark, but that money has not yet been awarded.
Construction of the building itself is approximately $200 million. The remaining funds for the project will cover the costs to move the collections from the existing building, provide millions for the museum’s endowment – money that would essentially go towards running the new museum – and to pay for project management and the ongoing fundraising campaign.
With at least $80 million in private donations now pledged to the project, which includes a $2 million gift from Herb Kohl Philanthropies announced early this week, the project’s construction and fundraising efforts remain on track, officials say.
Although the May 7 groundbreaking will be largely ceremonial, a spokesperson for the project said Milwaukeeans can expect to see some site preparation beginning as early as this month. Actual construction of the building is slated to begin in mid-June, however most of the work that occurs this summer and coming fall will be underground.
The new museum is slated to open in 2027.
Unlocking county funding
In order to unlock the county funding, and have enough cash on hand to start construction, the museum must raise 90% of the construction budget, or about $185 million, museum officials said. With the state and county funding representing $85 million, that means museum officials will need to have raised about $100 million in private donations before construction can begin in earnest.
Speaking to BizTimes Milwaukee in February, Censky said fundraising efforts were on track. The last time MPM publicly shared its total private donations total was in March, when Censky told a county committee that MPM had raised $80 million in private funds for the new museum project.
Packing up
Although the new museum won’t be opening until at least early 2027, MPM still has tens of thousands of items in storage – items everyday visitors typically don’t see – that must be readied for their move to the future museum or an off-site storage facility.
Kicking off that massive task, collections staff began carefully wrapping and packing the 23,000 items in MPM’s British ceramics collection late last month.
Censky told committee members on Tuesday that MPM hopes to have an off-site storage facility secured by the time construction of the new museum begins this summer.
