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Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum 700 N 12th St - Wausau, WI 54403.

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North Central Wisconsin's premier and only full-service art museum features rotating collections and temporary exhibitions, a sculpture garden, dynamic educational programs, and the Art Park, the museum's interactive family gallery that will delight visitors of all ages. Works of art change more often than the seasons. Regardless of the weather, enjoy the beauty of nature in the sculpture garden and galleries featuring artworks from the museum's collection, which focus on art from nature and set the global standard for bird-themed art. The museum is housed in an English Cotswold style residence and since it opened in 1976 all the fully accessible facilities have been expanded several times. Constantly changing exhibition themes enliven programs for all age groups and levels. Admission is always free.  Learn more

With its mission is to boost lives through art, the Vivien Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art repository frequently strives for excellence in providing audiences with quality art experiences through the Museum’s collection, ever-changing exhibitions, and education schemes for all ages. The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, within the heart of Wausau, Wisconsin, is thought for its internationally acclaimed Birds in Art exhibition, that opens every fall on the weekend once Labor Day. All-new avian-themed interpretations in original paintings, sculptures, and graphics are bound to inspire in endless ways. The inaugural exhibition that helped launch the Museum’s gap in 1976 developed to become the Woodson Art Museum’s flagship and internationally far-famed Birds in Art exhibition.

Both the repository and also the community have their roots within the lumber industry. Wausau is close amongst lake-dotted, rolling farmlands ANd woodlands, intersected by the Wisconsin River, that outline north central Wisconsin’s natural beauty.  In 1973, John E. Forester and Alice W. Forester given an English Tudor home and four-acre estate to be the community’s solely art museum, one that will continuously be liberated to all. the house was restored and a two-story gallery additional before the Museum’s Gregorian calendar month 1976 debut.  A second two-story gallery was added in 1987; a replacement main entrance was added in 1997; and a 9,000-square-foot addition was completed in 2012.

The Yawkey and Woodson families, who were distinguished in Wausau’s business, cultural, and philanthropic affairs for nearly a century, needed to boost the lives of others with art.  Their generosity and love of art and nature established what has become the Museum’s guiding spirit – the wedding of art and nature.  Art of the wildlife is that the guiding spirit behind the paintings, works on paper, and sculpture within the Museum’s collection, that sets the quality for vertebrate art.

The Museum’s lush gardens and grounds and also the Margaret Woodson Fisher Sculpture Garden feature a range of artworks, as well as Steven Siegel’s site-specific Let’s fan out, completed in 2011; Deborah Butterfield’s Kua; Nell Gwynne Murrill’s Upsidedown Dog; and Kent Ullberg’s Rites of Spring.  The Woodson, that is licensed by the yankee Alliance of Museums, remains the region’s solely art museum.  Check out Rib Mountain State Park

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