Exhibit floors inside the
Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin — the new museum being built to replace the current
Milwaukee Public Museum — are starting to take shape as the building’s construction progresses.
Exterior construction work is expected to be completed by the end of the year. The museum is set to open in 2027.
Inside the museum, the central “light well,” an open space spanning 82 feet from the ground to the skylight, has also been realized.
“It’s just so exciting to see it all become a reality,” Milwaukee Public Museum president and CEO
Ellen Censky said. “We’ve been planning for a long time. 2016 was when we first started, and we had a lot of people say, ‘It’s never going to happen.’ To actually see it come out of the ground is so exciting.”
MPM will move into the new museum in the first half of 2027. About half a million of 4 million total items have been packed for the move so far, Censky said.
Construction began at the site, located at the corner of Sixth and McKinley streets in the Haymarket neighborhood adjacent to downtown Milwaukee, last summer. Minneapolis-based construction firm
M.A. Mortenson Co. and Butler-based
ALLCON are leading the construction project.
The $240 million future museum project is receiving $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. As of a February announcement, MPM had raised $105 million in private donations. Fundraising for the project will continue into 2027.
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