Events

Museum staff share moments from Jewish history via Facebook Live. Tune in Tuesdays at 2:00 PM for a Museum Moment.

Join JMM for an evening of music and art that was funded through the Works Project Administration (WPA). Learn about the ethnomusicologists who captured distinctly American music for posterity including legendary blues/folk musician Lead Belly and explore Library of Congress holdings with Dr. Todd Harvey, Curator of the Alan Lomax Collection at LOC’s American Folklife Center. Groove to Lead Belly’s blues music performed by Fruteland Jackson including ‘Goodnight Irene’ and tour the exhibit that explores the working men and women and their environments as they navigated the Great Depression.

Join David Zucker, director of such classic off-the-wall comedies like Airplane!, The Naked Guns, and Scary Movies, as he discusses his recently published book, Before the Invention of Smiling, described as part family history, part scrapbook, part autobiography and part Zucker's "rantings."

Join Betsy Pease, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University, to learn about the broader context of the New Deal and Depression-era culture in which artwork of the Works Progress Administration was produced, an era that saw a diverse cross-section of Americans use opportunity to redefine their nation and make claims to a rightful place in it.

In the breadth of work created during the Great Depression, the Federal Writers' Project interviewed formerly enslaved people, marking the first major collection of oral histories about slavery in America. Explore this intriguing collection and more, with author Clint Smith, as he discusses his debut work of nonfiction How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, a revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Smith will be in conversation with Reggie Jackson of Nurturing Diversity Partners, a Milwaukee-based organization that provides education, training, and consulting services to foster diversity, inclusion, and equity within institutions and communities.

Join Zhanna Slor, author of At the End of the World, Turn Left, as she discusses her debut novel, a compelling story about identity and how you define “home” set in Milwaukee's eclectic Riverwest neighborhood.

Join Raoul Deal, Senior Lecturer at the Peck School of the Arts and artist in his own right, for a presentation about the work and lives of some of the artists who participated in the Public Works of Art Program and the Federal Arts Project, and embraced the power of art to shape the way we see the world.

Join Stacey Williams-Ng, founder of Black Cat Alley, for a moderated panel discussion featuring three prominent local mural artists who are on the front lines telling the story of our city. Panelists include Daisy Gertel, Reynaldo Hernandez, and Tia Richardson.

In one of the more obscure New Deal programs of the Great Depression, three “Greenbelt Towns” were designed by the US government. Greendale, Wisconsin, is one of those towns. Join Greendale Historical Society to examine Greendale as an outgrowth of public policy and an organic community that eventually evolved to embrace a shopping mall, condominiums, and expensive homes while still preserving much of the architecture and ambiance of the original village. The story is told by Greendale's first residents in their own words.