Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee (must see)

The museum's history began in 1882 when the Milwaukee Museum of Fine Arts was founded. The museum dissolved six years later. In 1888, the Milwaukee Art Association was created by a group of German panorama artists and local businessmen; its first home was the Layton Art Gallery. In 1911, the Milwaukee Art Institute, another building constructed to hold other exhibitions and collections, was completed. The Milwaukee Art Center (now the Milwaukee Art Museum) was formed when the Milwaukee Art Institute and Layton Art Gallery merged their collections in 1957 and moved into a three-story building underneath the Eero Saarinen-designed Milwaukee County War Memorial.

The museum is home to over 25,000 works of art. Its permanent holdings contain an important collection of Old Masters and 19th-century and 20th-century artwork, as well as some of the nation's best collections of German Expressionism, folk and Haitian art, American decorative arts, and post-1960 American art.

The Milwaukee Art Museum recently gained international recognition with the construction of the white concrete Quadracci Pavilion, designed by Santiago Calatrava, which opened on May 4, 2001. The Quadracci Pavilion was prominently featured in the 2011 blockbuster film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.