Original Article by Beth Blair for VacationGals.com

Hotels are a lot like real estate: it’s all about location, cialis location, location. InterContinental Hotel (139 East Kilbourn Ave. Milwaukee, WI, 53202) in downtown

Milwaukee is one hotel that can brag about its neighborhood. Once you’re done admiring the swanky bar in the lobby, gorging yourself with the offered Jelly Belly candies at the front desk, or sipping fruit-infused water, you’ll realize that the InterContinental is an ideal location for your Milwaukee stay. As long as you don’t mind tying on your walking shoes, we’re talking easy strolls to Pabst Theatre, Old World Third Street, Cathedral Square Park, Milwaukee Art and Natural History Museums, 75-acre Henry Maier Festival Park, Lake Michigan, Veterans Park and Milwaukee Public Market. During inclement weather cabs are reliable, and during the summer the Downtown Trolley Loop is a fun transportation option. As for parking, you can easily valet park your car at the hotel (the valet are some of the friendliest and most helpful we’ve ever experienced at a hotel) and leave it there the entire stay.

Here are some highlights my family enjoyed that were within walking distance of this hotel.

1. Riverwalk. Situated along the Milwaukee River, the Riverwalk is lined with restaurants, bars and shops. Every evening we walked to dinner then enjoyed cruising the Riverwalk while the children burned off the last of their energy.

2. Easy access to many restaurants. I mentioned restaurants on the Riverwalk, but there are plenty of other choices in the area including Calderone Club right up the street. Yes, I gushed about this restaurant recently and it really is that good. Afterward, walk off your meal at the Riverwalk or, if you’re visiting in the summer, relax at one of the many outdoor patios and watch the boats cruise the canal.

3. Usinger’s. It’s really not right to visit Milwaukee and not indulge in a gourmet German style Usinger’s sausage or bratwurst (you can find Usinger’s at the airport, too). Since we could see the headquarters from our room, we knew what we need to have for lunch one day. We discovered a little joint located across the street from the factory called, get this, Milwaukee Brat House. Good choice. We ordered Usinger’s brats on pretzel rolls. I opted for the BBT: bacon, bleu cheese, and diced tomato. Hit the spot.

4. Find The Bronze Fonz! Only a short stroll from the InterContinental is bronze statue of the Arthur Fonzarelli (aka: Fonzie or The Fonz) from the classic sitcomHappy Days. Find it on the Riverwalk at 100 E Wells Street.

4. Starbucks is across the street. My husband and I are, as you may already know, big Starbucks fanatics, and lucky for us, our favorite coffee shop was an easy hop, skip and jump away making it easy to start our day, or race, off right.

Grand Geneva: 45 Years of R&R

by Rhonda Mix

View original article for Fox 6

MILWAUKEE (WITI) — We are just a little over three weeks away from Harley-Davidson’s 110th Anniversary. As many as 150, 000 people will be riding into Milwaukee for the anniversary celebration, and that means, it’s all hands on deck for Milwaukee-area hotels!

“We are super excited for this to come,” said Cassie Scrima, Director of Marketing for Marcus Hotels.

Scrima says as many as a thousand employees are getting the three hotels ready for the big bash. The Pfister Hotel, Hilton Milwaukee and the Intercontinental Hotel have special events and promotions for all of their guests.
Fifth Street near Wisconsin Ave. will close to host a beer garden and a bikini bike wash, and all their restaurants, like Miller Time Pub, will have a special drink made for Harley fans.

“We had a couple of people go down to Lynchburg, Tenn. to hand-select a single barrel whiskey from Jack Daniels. We have all those bottles available at all our restaurants,” said Scrima.

As for accommodations, they’ve been booked for months, but Scrima encourages interested guests to check with the hotel because there could be cancellations.

“We do have some waitlists we can put people on for sure,” she said.

Outside of the Downtown area, dozens of hotels are still available. Those can be found on the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association website, which is updated weekly.

“Right now, it displays 51 properties within a 2-hour drive. We have it broken out between how far it is between 15 minutes to 2 hours,” said President & CEO Trisha Pugal.

Rooms range from one night to week-long stays, depending on the hotel.

Original Article by: by Angelica Duria for Fox 6

MILWAUKEE (WITI) — We are just a little over three weeks away from Harley-Davidson’s 110th Anniversary. As many as 150,000 people will be riding into Milwaukee for the anniversary celebration, and that means, it’s all hands on deck for Milwaukee-area hotels!

“We are super excited for this to come,” said Cassie Scrima, Director of Marketing for Marcus Hotels.

Scrima says as many as a thousand employees are getting the three hotels ready for the big bash. The Pfister Hotel, Hilton Milwaukee and the Intercontinental Hotel have special events and promotions for all of their guests.

Fifth Street near Wisconsin Ave. will close to host a beer garden and a bikini bike wash, and all their restaurants, like Miller Time Pub, will have a special drink made for Harley fans.

“We had a couple of people go down to Lynchburg, Tenn. to hand-select a single barrel whiskey from Jack Daniels. We have all those bottles available at all our restaurants,” said Scrima.

As for accommodations, they’ve been booked for months, but Scrima encourages interested guests to check with the hotel because there could be cancellations.

“We do have some waitlists we can put people on for sure,” she said.

Outside of the Downtown area, dozens of hotels are still available. Those can be found on the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association website, which is updated weekly.

“Right now, it displays 51 properties within a 2-hour drive. We have it broken out between how far it is between 15 minutes to 2 hours,” said President & CEO Trisha Pugal.

Rooms range from one night to week-long stays, depending on the hotel.

MILWAUKEE (WITI) — We are just a little over three weeks away from Harley-Davidson’s 110th Anniversary. As many as 150, 000 people will be riding into Milwaukee for the anniversary celebration, and that means, it’s all hands on deck for Milwaukee-area hotels!

“We are super excited for this to come, ” said Cassie Scrima, Director of Marketing for Marcus Hotels.

Scrima says as many as a thousand employees are getting the three hotels ready for the big bash. The Pfister Hotel, Hilton Milwaukee and the Intercontinental Hotel have special events and promotions for all of their guests.

Fifth Street near Wisconsin Ave. will close to host a beer garden and a bikini bike wash, and all their restaurants, like Miller Time Pub, will have a special drink made for Harley fans.

“We had a couple of people go down to Lynchburg, Tenn. to hand-select a single barrel whiskey from Jack Daniels. We have all those bottles available at all our restaurants,” said Scrima.

As for accommodations, they’ve been booked for months, but Scrima encourages interested guests to check with the hotel because there could be cancellations.

“We do have some waitlists we can put people on for sure,” she said.

Outside of the Downtown area, dozens of hotels are still available. Those can be found on the Wisconsin Hotel & Lodging Association website, which is updated weekly.

“Right now, it displays 51 properties within a 2-hour drive. We have it broken out between how far it is between 15 minutes to 2 hours,” said President & CEO Trisha Pugal.

Rooms range from one night to week-long stays, depending on the hotel.

View original article by Alex Palmer and Kate Mulcrone for SuccessfulMeetings.com

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter might seem like websites one would simply deem Millennial stomping grounds, but many hotels are now flocking to the social media channels to interact with and market to prospective guests. One such property is downtown Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel, which has rise to the forefront of the new social media frontier.

Read More…

Stephanie Barenz won the post of Pfister Artist-In-Residence and moved into her studio space in the storied hotel this past April (see the TCD interview for more about Barenz and her work). Recently, Barenz described the new projects that have emerged from her previous work, dovetailing with her new position.

“When I got the Pfister residency, I was volunteering at St. Marcus, which is my husband’s school, but continuing wouldn’t have worked with my schedule. So I thought we could bring the art students here and then we got thinking of how Zach could get involved. He’s a writing teacher at St. Marcus. We had the idea, from the beginning I think, to give the kids a platform to express themselves. St. Marcus is a very rigorous school with a very rigorous schedule, so often there is not a lot of time for arts.”

“We saw a need with the kids to get their stories out there, and that’s where Our Story Arts came from. Joe Kurth, the former GM, was really enthusiastic about bringing an educational program to the Pfister. Since I have my MFA and had taught for a while it seemed like a good fit as to what I could bring to the program that maybe was a little bit different.”

Kayla, a middle school student in the Our Story Arts program, offered her perspective on being at the Pfister: “I was kind of amazed and shocked because I had never been here, but I had fun.” Kayla has learned a lot about art and techniques of drawing so far. She says, “I never knew how to do gesture drawings…I knew how to draw eyes but didn’t have all the details, now I know how to do that better. I can draw a full person if I try.”

The skills developed in figure drawing have been integral to their work on the theme of identity. Barenz notes that this age is a pivotal time for young people. She says, “I’m kind of speaking to what I know and for the students, especially in middle school, the theme of identity is so huge. I remember when I was 12 or 13, just trying to figure out where you fit, and we’ve talked about that. That’s the cool part of the program — we’ll be doing a project and these guys will open up.”

The projects the students have been working on in July involved making self-portraits, and during Gallery Night they will have a table set up to show their work, just as Barenz will show hers in her studio. While looking forward to the event, Kayla admits, “I’m going to be nervous.”

Barenz concurs, “I always get nervous. But nerves are maybe kind of good because they motivate you to work. At least for me (laughs). But that was part of our goal, too, to give the kids an experience so they saw what it was like to be a professional artist. I think that’s another mission of the program: to mentor kids one-on-one, especially the ones who are interested in art, to say you can do this if you want to. Growing up I didn’t have a lot of models for that.”

“I asked the kids when they came in ‘what do you want to learn the most,’ and they said ‘we want to learn how to draw people.’ We’ve done gesture drawings, I’ve taken them through the proportions of the face and the figure, and each facial feature. When I was a kid I just wanted to learn how to draw really well, and impress my friends with it!”

As Barenz and her husband work have teamed up in the program, they bring together creativity from visual and linguistic approaches. This will lend itself to some new endeavors in the coming weeks: “In August we’re collaborating with Molly Snyder, who is the current Pfister Narrator, and her husband (artist and writer) Royal Brevväxling. They’re going to teach them how to make zines. The zine making is a really good example of the writing and art coming together.”

This multidisciplinary approach is a foundational aspect of Barenz’s work, and is borne from her own experiences as a student, a perspective she shares with the young people in the program: “I’m a really strong believer in the fact that art works the ‘creative problem solving muscle.’ I know for me personally in school it helped with test-taking, math, language, all those things.”

In addition to work from Our Story Arts and Barenz’s recent paintings inspired by stories of her travels and those of hotel guests, Pfister Narrator Molly Snyder will be in the studio writing haikus and poems for visitors during Gallery Night. A reception will be held beginning at 9 p.m. in The Rouge with artist and writer present.

From beast-inspired tattoos to brightly colored model trains, from folk art dolls with stories to tell to a feminist impersonation of Barbara Bush, the lineup of exhibitions for the summer Gallery Night & Day is not lacking for originality.

The quarterly, citywide art crawl is Friday evening and Saturday during the day. Of the scores of shows you have to choose from, here are a select few I recommend.

“The Beast Within”
Tory Folliard Gallery, 233 N. Milwaukee St.

If one thinks of tattoos as a sort of “psychic armor,” as artist Fred Stonehouse suggests, then why do animals capture the imaginations of so many tattoo lovers and tattoo artists? Why is it that dragons, eagles and horses slither, soar and gallop across biceps and backs? The artists who are drawn to the language of tattoos probably have something to say on the matter, says Stonehouse, who’s curated an exhibit around the question called “The Beast Within.”

Stonehouse, who usually is on the walls rather than in the curator seat, is one of our state’s more fascinating and devilish artists — and minds. The show he’s put together includes work and artists he knows well. I would be shocked if it was not a raucous, mind-blowing affair and perhaps the place to be on Gallery Night, with so many of the artists in attendance. Who wouldn’t want to meet Fred’s friends? (Friday 11 to 9 p.m., Saturday 11 to 4 p.m.)

“Waste Not”
Portrait Society Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo St.

Wisconsin is considered a “hot bed” of both self-taught art, hand-built environments and a certain inventiveness with reclaimed materials. With this in mind, gallery owner Deb Brehmer has put together a show of five artists, two who are largely unknown.

“Is it our isolation, our respect for the idiosyncratic and handmade, or the long hours of solitude during winter months that foster this condition of invention?” Brehmer asks in her gallery statement. “Who knows? But it is an unassailable truth that the state breeds artists who productively and often privately work outside of conventional, professional systems.”

As a bit of an aside, there are also a couple of Bernard Gilardi works that Deb shared with me in recent days that feel so poignant and timely to our moment, as we grapple with the meaning of George Zimmerman’s acquittal and the words of President Barack Obama last week. Look for them. You’ll know them when you see them. Friday 5 to 9 p.m. and Saturday noon to 5 p.m.

Stephanie Barenz
Pfister Hotel, 424 E. Wisconsin Ave.

Since a beloved professor shared it with her a decade ago, Stephanie Barenz has always had this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke pinned up in her art studios: “One ought to wait and gather a sense and sweetness a whole life long and a long life, if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough) — they are experiences.” These days, Barenz’s studio is at the Pfister Hotel, where she is the artist in residence. She’s having what Rilke called essential “unexpected meetings,” conversations with hotel guests and people she’s getting to know at the hotel. These things have fueled a deeply personal and expansive painting, “Gathering Sense and Sweetness” that is about a sense of home that has little to do with a place with walls or an address. (Friday 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday throughout the day.)

“Aberrance and Artifice”
Haggerty Museum of Art, 13th & Clybourn streets

The term “grotesque” these days tends to refer to something, well, pretty gross. In truth, the meaning of the word has not always been so simple and so fixed. As an artistic idea and the history of art, in fact, it’s been pretty mutable. The nearly 30 works of art in this show, including photographs, paintings, drawings and sculpture, are by contemporary artists who plumb the depths of the grotesque. Through these works, the complexities — the distortions, fascinations, dread, desire, earthiness, immateriality and humor — are rooted out. The work is from the Norton Collection at the Haggerty, drawn together by collectors Peter and Eileen Norton. The show is one of a series of exhibitions that will close after this weekend. (Friday 10 to 9 p.m., Saturday 10 to 4:30 p.m.)

“Mighline Phase I”
Sensorium, 326 N. Water St., 2nd Floor

Inspired by the High Line in New York — an elevated park on an old rail spur that allows people to experience the city from a different perspective — artist Michael Kautzer is constructing an architectural installation in this gallery. And he’s bringing his model trains, which promise to become an exercise in shifting color and shape. (Friday 5 to 9 p.m.)

Martha Wilson and Steve Rowell
Inova, 2155 N. Prospect Ave.

Inova is hosting a major survey for Martha Wilson, a performance artist and feminist whose work explores the role of women in society with incredible humor, poignancy and authenticity. Wilson also was the founding director of Franklin Furnace, a New York-based venue for progressive and avant-garde art practices. A sampling of artifacts from groundbreaking Franklin Furnace projects is on view. Also up is a new video and sound installation by Steve Rowell. (Friday 5 to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 5 p.m.)

MARN Mentors Exhibition
Vanguard Sculpture Services, 3374 W. Hopkins St.

The Milwaukee Artist Resource Network has for years been pairing established artists and emerging ones, to engage in a yearlong dialogue and mentorship. It’s one of the best things MARN does. The year culminates in an exhibition featuring work by both mentors and their protégés. Friday 5 to 9 p.m., Saturday 10 to 4 p.m.

“Interface”
Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, 839 N. 5th St.
This is a diverse group exhibition featuring video artists from around the country who explore human gesture and the ways we communicate. The show closes after the weekend. Friday 5 to 9 p.m., Saturday noon to 5 p.m.

“Urban(wood) Encounter”
Design Within Reach, 167 N. Broadway.
Come and see furniture fashioned from wood recovered in the urban environment. The furniture show, organized by Wudeward Urban Forest Products, presents environmentally friendly objects by local designers. Friday 5 to 9 p.m., Saturday 10 to 5 p.m.

“We are one, we are many (Somos uno, somos muchos)”
Arts@Large, 908 S. 5th St.
The diversity of Latino art are on display in this exhibit, which includes sculpture, multimedia work, photograph and installation. Student-created work includes shadow boxes that tell the story of immigration and video and audio stories for community members. Friday 5 to 8pm, Saturday 11 to 4pm.

Empty Bowls Exhibit
Pop-Up Gallery, 225 E. St. Paul Ave.

Alterra Coffee is coming to the Third Ward and offering up its not-yet-open cafe to celebrate Milwaukee Empty Bowls, an organization that combats hunger by raising funds for food pantries and meal programs in the area. The non-profit group will show work by 15 of its favorite artists, including Stephanie Bartz, Melissa Dorn Richards, Klaus Zunker, Jean Smaglik Wells and Kendal Poster. (Friday 5 to 9 p.m.)

“Remarkable Women” exhibit
Peltz Gallery, 1119 E. Knapp St.

The idea of an exhibition dedicated entirely to the work of women seems downright old fashioned today, but the “Remarkable Women” exhibit at the Peltz Gallery is such a tradition that it would be sad to see it go. The showcase of female artists, now in its 24th year, will be the first without the gallery’s own remarkable woman, former owner Cissie Peltz, who passed away earlier this year. For the first time, work by the late gallerist, who was an illustrator and cartoonist, will be up on the walls, too. Of the other work on view, I loved the colorful textile sculptures by Sonji Hunt, which seem to engage with Anne Kingsbury’s nearby self-portrait as a juggler. A series of folk art dolls made from painted muslin fabric and found notions by Della Wells, each with its own handwritten “story” attached, sit together on a shelf. Evelyn Patricia Terry contributed mixed-media collages from her series “Playing the Race Card.” A lovely painting by Carol Pylant stuns over the mantel, a place of honor in this de facto memorial exhibit. (Friday 6 to 9:30 p.m., Saturday 11 to 4 p.m.)

“BED”
Habitat for Humanity ReStore, 420 S. 1st St.

Teaming up with Native Dogg and Friends of the MADACC, this new shop will exhibit dog beds handmade from repurposed materials. At least a quarter of the materials come right from the ReStore, in fact. Plus, pet-friendly event will be host to furry chums who can peruse the cushy beds. Sometimes you just need to scratch someone’s ears in the midst of Gallery Night. Purchases benefit Habitat for Humanity. Friday 5 to 9 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.  to 4 p.m.

“Question Bridge”
Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive

It was just a week ago that President Barack Obama gave an unexpected speech about being black in America. As the U.S. public wrestled with the meaning of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, Obama spoke both expansively and personally about race. He said Trayvon Martin could have been him 35 years ago. He talked about being followed in a store. He talked about hearing car doors lock as he crossed a street. As it turns out, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s slate of summer shows seem to have stumbled squarely into the heart of American social debate. I’d especially recommend “Question Bridge,” which feels as connected to our political moment as anything I’ve seen at the museum in a while. Part art project, part documentary film innovation, it is a remarkably constructed and honest dialogue about what it means to be a black man in America today. You’ll also want to see “Wisconsin 30” and the feature show “30 Americans.” (Saturday 10 to 5 p.m. General admission applies.)

Learn more about the Event