Quietly directing its assets
Bradley Foundation major backstage player in Milwaukee arts and cultural institutions
In June 2015, there was local outrage when the Milwaukee Art Museum displayed a controversial portrait of Pope Benedict XVI fashioned from 17,000 colored condoms.
The work, titled “Eggs Benedict,” drew the ire of Milwaukee Catholic Archbishop Jerome Listecki, complaints from around 200 people and several museum membership cancellations.
One group that was publicly silent about the controversy was the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the powerful philanthropy organization that over several decades contributed more than $13.6 million to the museum.
Behind the scenes, newly disclosed documents show Bradley Foundation officials met with top leaders at the museum before a special board meeting to register their displeasure about the work. And when those complaints weren’t heeded, the Bradley Foundation quickly acted, rescinding a $90,000 grant to the museum for “general operating purposes.”
While the amount was small by the foundation’s standards, the message was clear: The Bradley Foundation doesn’t write blank checks.
The Bradley Foundation’s quiet, backstage influence is a fact of life for some of Milwaukee’s leading arts and cultural institutions.
The way the foundation wields its enormous resources is revealed in internal documents
that became public after a group calling itself Anonymous Poland hacked Bradley Foundation files last fall. Hundreds of thousands of those records were temporarily placed online and provided to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The documents show: A previously undisclosed $15 million grant over five years from the foundation to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra to back the renovation of the former Warner Grand Theatre on Wisconsin Ave. in downtown Milwaukee. The symphony is seeking to leave its current main venue, the Marcus Center’s Uihlein Hall, and move into a new home at the theater by the fall of 2019.
The foundation continues to fund the Milwaukee Public Museum, but it is monitoring the institution’s path under director Dennis Kois. Questions were raised by staff about Kois’ political leanings and the museum’s endorsement of positions that might conflict with the foundation.
The Bradley Foundation documents provide a window into leading arts institutions, including the Milwaukee Ballet, Florentine Opera Company and Skylight Music Theatre. The grant write-ups, essentially background briefing papers, detail the finances, the players, the hits and the misses.
Nationally, the Bradley Foundation is known for building a conservative infrastructure and promoting school choice and welfare reform. But it has a long tradition of giving to Milwaukee cultural and artistic institutions. The group even provided a $20 million loan, later turned into a grant, to provide a key piece of the financing of Miller Park.
In the wake of the Great Recession, the foundation’s importance to Milwaukee’s culture has grown even stronger as local groups, some stressed economically, seek funds from private donors.
Mark Niehaus, president and executive director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, said the city would be a far different place without the foundation.
“Without the Bradley family, their descendants, and the Bradley Foundation, I don’t know that Miller Park would have got off the ground, that the Milwaukee Art Museum would have got off the ground, and I can tell you, there very likely would not be a Milwaukee Symphony,” he said. “So if you’re looking through the arts and culture lens of Milwaukee, it’s hard to think of any family or entity that has done more for the arts and culture than the Bradley family and foundation.”
Michael Grebe, the Bradley Foundation’s former chief executive, said that during his tenure, with the exception of the “Eggs Benedict” work, he didn’t recall “a single time when the foundation strongly directed an arts group in what they should or shouldn’t do.”
“They come to the foundation, they present their program, the foundation staff and board decide whether to fund it, but really, no interference in the operation of those arts groups,” he said.
Art and history
The conflict between the Bradley Foundation and the Milwaukee Art Museum over “Eggs Benedict” was in many ways the equivalent of a family dispute.
A major part of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s patrimony rests on the collection donated in 1975 by Margaret “Peg” Bradley. Her late husband, Harry Bradley, co-founded the Allen-Bradley Co. In 1942, after the death of his brother Lynde Bradley, he set up what was then a small, local philanthropic organization, the Lynde Bradley Foundation, later called the Allen-Bradley Foundation.
In 1985, the Allen-Bradley Co. was sold to Rockwell Automation for $1.65 billion and a portion of the proceeds boosted the foundation’s assets to $290 million, making it an instant player on the national scene.
In 2015, controversy erupted over the “Eggs Benedict” work. Shorewood artist Niki Johnson said her portrait was inspired by the former pope’s comments on a 2009 visit to Africa in which he suggested that the use of condoms could exacerbate the spread of AIDS. Johnson said she wanted to spark a conversation.
Catholics and others saw the work as disrespectful, and an attack on their faith and its teachings.
Grebe took action that he detailed in a memo to his board of directors. Grebe and Bradley board chair Dennis Kuester met with the incoming and outgoing board chairs at the art museum before a special meeting of the museum’s board.
“Notwithstanding those complaints, MAM intends to carry out its plan to display the object when the museum reopens in the fall,” Grebe wrote.
In fact, the artwork was displayed in the summer in a special exhibition. When the museum’s main galleries reopened in the fall after lengthy refurbishing, the work was not displayed.
“Eggs Benedict,” which remains in the collection, was gifted to the museum by a local collector, Joseph Pabst.
Grebe said the board had approved a $90,000 grant to the museum but that the check hadn’t been issued. The staff recommended the check be rescinded, which a board committee unanimously agreed to at an August 2015 meeting.
The controversy still echoed a year later when the Bradley Foundation approved a $10,000 request from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to support the Pallium Lecture Series. Background papers noted that the series moderator, Deacon Michael Bowen of St. Monica Parish in Whitefish Bay, “penned a letter to the Milwaukee Art Museum that was both scathing and eloquent in its criticism” of the art museum’s decision to display “Eggs Benedict.”
In an interview with the Journal Sentinel, Grebe said the Bradley Foundation board found the artwork “offensive to the community and inconsistent with community standards.”
“We chose to express our displeasure quietly,” he said.
Grebe added, “At one point, people suggested we were engaging in censorship. We were not. We never questioned the museum’s right to display whatever piece of art they choose. But we feel we have the right not to support them. We don’t have to fund them. And that’s all we were saying.”
Relations remain intact between the foundation and the museum.
“As you know, the museum has had a long, personal and productive relationship with the Bradley Foundation, its leadership and trustees,” Donald W. Layden, Jr., president of the Milwaukee Art Museum board, said in a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Sometimes friends disagree. Fortunately, we have a strong relationship and we look forward to many years of continued support from the Bradley Foundation and we appreciate the thoughtful way they have engaged with us over the past year.”
Music and money
When the Bradley Foundation decided in 2015 to quietly kick in $15 million for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s capital campaign for a new home, the move signaled that the orchestra was securely back in the foundation’s good graces.
Just two years earlier, in 2013, it was a far different story. With the orchestra facing a $1.8 million deficit, the Bradley Foundation turned down the orchestra’s grant requests. It was a stunning move from a philanthropy that had piled in millions of dollars to the orchestra over the years, but a sign that the Bradley Foundation would no longer bail out the symphony unless changes to the business model were made.
Niehaus, the symphony’s executive director, said the crisis was decades in the making and became exacerbated after the Great Recession. He said the Bradley Foundation and other major donors were “tired of” the structural problems facing the symphony’s revenue stream.
“So were we,” Niehaus said.
Niehaus said that by rejecting the orchestra’s $325,000 request in 2013, the Bradley Foundation was sending a “huge signal.”
“They were singing the same song of a lot of other people,” he said.
The symphony reached a labor agreement with the players that reduced the size of the orchestra and then embarked on a $5 million capital campaign. By January 2014, the Bradley Foundation was back on board, awarding $650,000 to the symphony contingent on the success of the capital campaign.
“At no point did the Bradley Foundation exert control over us to try to tell us to go to some specific reality,” Niehaus said. “It was clear to all of us, because the numbers don’t lie, we had to make the changes we did and be aspirational in what we’re doing.”
By 2016, a foundation background-paper lauded as a “brilliant move,” the “unconventional choice of orchestra trumpet player Mark Niehaus to lead the symphony.”
The background paper said Niehaus’ “passion for the symphony, his work ethic, and most important, his relationships with his colleagues, have helped to create trust between management and labor that has held the organization together through hard times.”
“The MSO has added more changes to streamline its business model and keep its promises to its supporters,” the paper said. “Once again it has held the line on union contract increases, collaborating with the union to negotiate a new cost-neutral contract for the coming year.”
It was Niehaus and symphony board chairman Andy Nunemaker who made the pitch to the Bradley Foundation to join the capital campaign for the new home. The Bradley Foundation’s $15 million gift is currently the project’s largest. The money is contingent on the symphony getting pledges of around $53 million, or 75% of the project’s cost. Niehaus said more than $47 million has been raised.
Science and politics
The Milwaukee Public Museum is one of the area’s more popular attractions, a repository of natural and cultural history that draws 600,000 people a year. And over the years, the Bradley Foundation has poured in more than $7.2 million to the museum, including $1 million in 2013 to help retire debt.
In 2014, a new president joined the museum, Whitefish Bay native Kois, who was long associated with helping run art museums.
“If it weren’t for the Bradley Foundation, there might not be an MPM today,” Kois said. “They stepped forward with other donors to help save the museum following the museum’s challenges back in 2004, and have remained one of our major supporters since.”
Over three years, background briefing documents from the Bradley Foundation detail how the
organization sized up Kois. The foundation provided the museum $150,000 in annual grants in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
A 2014 Bradley Foundation briefing paper simply noted Kois’ credentials.
The next year, the paper noted strides the institution had made under museum board chair and former president Jay Williams, who “has succeeded in making the Museum a going concern.”
But there was a note of caution.
“While this is a relief to all who treasure MPM as a community asset, the Foundation should remain attuned to subtle changes in its operating philosophy that have been signaled in multiple interactions between MPM and Bradley staff,” the paper said. “Kois and his senior staff have made it clear they believe it is MPM’s role to act as a convener of community conversations, offering an historic context in which to elucidate contemporary issues.”
“This could play out in a benign way; it seems likelier that it will lead, eventually, to the institution’s endorsement of cultural trends that are antithetical to the Foundation’s values,” the paper said.
What those cultural trends are, was not spelled out in the document.
In 2016, the foundation said: “Kois’ experience and enthusiasm seem to have infused new energy into an institution that had been languishing for some time. By all accounts, he is a competent leader who has earned the trust of other community leaders, and his devotion to finding ways to make MPM interesting to new and younger audiences is to be admired.”
But the paper warned of Kois: “His political agenda, however, remains murky. The Foundation should continue to be watchful for MPM’s endorsement of positions that conflict with the Foundation’s mission. MPM’s strategic plan and the inaugural activities of the new Center for Biodiversity and Environment could be viewed as gauges of Kois’ intentions.”
Kois told the Journal Sentinel that he was “neither surprised nor bothered by” the Bradley Foundation’s observations.
“Every donor to MPM has a political viewpoint, I’d wager,” he said. “Yet no donor — the Bradley Foundation included — has ever asked us to consider changing what we present to suit their own views. The museum’s mission is to present evidence-based science and exhibits, and I’m pleased to know that the Foundation has supported that mission despite the occasional reservations expressed in the documents.”
Rick Graber, president and chief executive officer of the Bradley Foundation, said the documents were not intended to be made public, but they were part of an internal private vetting process. He said they showed “increasing confidence” in the job being done by Kois.
“The bottom line is we continue to be a strong supporter of the Public Museum,” he said. “We continue to believe it is an important part of our community.”