On a typical Gallery Night & Day, it’s the artwork inside the frame that captures attention. But this summer’s Gallery Night & Day will relate the stories behind the artwork, presenting an unseen but important facet of visual art. Reginald Baylor Studio recently moved to the lower level of the Marshall Building in the Third Ward, which is where Baylor now creates his canvases that portray bright interiors. For Gallery Night, Reginald Baylor Studio collaborates with ArtMail Milwaukee for the benefit of the Milwaukee High School of the Arts (MHSA) and the Catch . . .

This week two of the city’s favorite art galleries host openings with innovative touches, including Peltz Gallery on Knapp Street and Tory Folliard in the Historic Third Ward. Starting July 25, at 6 p.m., the walls of Peltz’s vintage Victorian building will be covered in what gallery owner Cissie Peltz describes as “feminine splendor.” Peltz hosts its “18th Annual Remarkable Women Show” that includes . . .

A sublime new exhibit, “Moulthrop Generations: Turned Wood Bowls by Ed, Philip and Matt Moulthrop,” arrives at the Racine Art Museum, the first venue to show the work of three generations of the Moulthrop family in one gallery. Seventy sculptural and sensuous vessels made of wood indigenous to the southeastern region of the United States are presented through Sept. 14. After earning an MFA in architecture from Princeton University, which led him to teach at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Ed Moulthrop (1916-2003) formally began the family’s wood-turning tradition in the 1970s. He even designed and constructed his own tools—another legacy that his son and grandson continue. Each of them shared the vision of fashioning extraordinary vessels from trees felled by lightning, or those destined for landfills or chipboards (known as trash trees) . . .

When an artist is successful, the assembled whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When a curator is successful, the whole is not necessarily greater, but creates tension and visual dialogue among artists seeing the same formal element in different ways. At Katie Gingrass Gallery, pastel artist Jody dePew McLeane and wood sculptor Joel Hunnicutt use the classical corpulence of the empty vessel—perhaps the world's oldest and most universally functional art form—to create “Relative Spaces.”

Our long summer days present an opportunity to experience art en plein air, where light and shadow add a sensuous dimension to artwork and create a subtle context through which it can be interpreted. This concept can be seen in the “Focus on Figures” exhibit at the Grohmann Museum, located on the campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE). The museum’s “Rooftop Grand Opening” features a dozen 9-foot-high sculptures that replicate smaller bronze statues from the permanent “Man at Work” collection.

The 21st-century landscape and how artists choose to represent it is continually being transformed. Two intimate exhibitions this week use landscapes to document changing urban and rural environments. Both shows cultivate serious questions through their thought-provoking images...

Are you seeking some peace and quiet after listening to fireworks blast across our horizon? If so, the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum (2220 N. Terrace Ave.) is the place to be, particularly in July, when the Renaissance Garden reaches its full beauty and the west-facing Mercury Court explodes with color in this 1923 Italian-Renaissance-style villa...

A new exhibit at Tory Folliard Gallery explores wildlife in the African Serengeti. The portraits showcased in “Marion Coffey: Kenya and Tanzania Safari” unleash the untamed and vibrant personalities of wild animals that roam on foreign soils yet are rarely seen outside of cages in America. Through broad applications of textural paint, Coffey captures the essence of these animals in a procession of colors displaying sunset oranges, flamingo pinks and royal purples. Brave brush strokes create the lines of the giraffe’s mouth, an irregular set of circles on the cheetah or a curve of an elephant’s tusk . . .

Arthur Thrall prepares for his upcoming exhibition from his second floor studio on Milwaukee’s East Side. With sure footsteps he walks from his printmaking room where his motorized press and English engraving tools rest, to his painting room where an unfinished watercolor patiently waits on a wooden easel. Thrall, a printmaker and painter for 60 years, faithfully produces new artwork that will be on view beginning July 2 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MWA) in the exhibit “Arthur Thrall: The Sensuous Line.”

The Milwaukee art community showcases the 46th annual Lakefront Festival of Arts this weekend. The event, organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Friends of Art, exhibits an array of exceptionally talented individuals from June 20 to June 22. This nationally acclaimed juried festival features more than 170 artists, including Wisconsin’s Arthur Bartkowiak, Mike Dretzka, Shelby Keefe, Kim Koch, Deone Jahnke, Katie Musolff, Mark Porter and Micheal Santini . . .