Everything has changed since Don Krause opened Art*Bar in March 2004.
The bar. The neighborhood. The city. The country. The world.
Even Krause himself. Now approaching 64, he remembers approaching Art*Bar with a compelling sense of carpe diem.
“9/11 gave many people a feeling they could die any day,” said Krause, “and I decided it was time to do the things I’d never done before.”
After two full years of renovations, Art*Bar Milwaukee opened in mid-March 2004 “walking a fine line between kitsch and crap.” He sought to fill the space with raw, edgy, and unharnessed artistic talent.
Krause was also committed to revitalizing this corner of Riverwest. There were too many boarded-up storefronts, too many vacant properties, and too little people on the street. He considered Art*Bar a way of making a difference – and a way to give back to the community.
“It’s so energizing to try something you’ve never done before,” said Krause, “I can’t wait to turn it on and see what it can do.”
That was then, this is now.
In March 2024, Art*Bar celebrated its 20th anniversary as the heart of a busy block of neighborhood landmarks. Recently, we met with the visionary founder who started it all to learn how this unique space happened, where it’s been, and where it’s going next.
The path to Art*Bar
Don Krause considers himself a lifelong Milwaukeean – he’s even got a “Milwaukee” tattoo in the style of Milwaukee Tool, and has inspired others to get one – but he didn’t always live in Milwaukee.
“I was born and raised near 13th and Harrison, but we moved out of the city during the civil unrest of the late 1960s,” said Krause. “We moved to East Troy when I was in second grade and stayed until junior year, when we moved to Oshkosh. I finished high school there and attended UW-Oshkosh for art studies.”
“Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of friends,” he said. “I was perfectly content playing alone or playing with girls. We skipped rope; we jumped jacks. I was that skinny little geek kid who kept to himself, despite being the middle child of five kids. My sister would take my Tonka Truck and trade me for her E-Z Bake Oven. We were perfectly happy with this exchange. That was one of the first signs we were different from other kids.”
“I was the only boy cheerleader in East Troy, Wisconsin,” laughed Krause. “I was four foot six and skinny as a stick, but I loved all the tumbling, baton twirling, and theatrics of it all. I was always thrown on top of the cheerleader pyramid.” “But behind the scenes, I was most definitely being bullied. I took a lot of heat for being a cheerleader. Fortunately, I had strong older brothers who protected me, but I never really used them against people who bothered me. I just went on with my life.”
Krause’s parents divorced when he was 14, and his mother took a full-time day job. Don, a long-time Betty Crocker fan, began making dinner for the family.
“Everything that had a picture was so easy to replicate,” he said. “So, I really went through that book and challenged myself to make more and more complicated meals. My mother was very supportive, and I was very committed. Some great meals happened in those days. I still have that original cookbook in my kitchen today.”
“When I came out to my mother at age 20, she said, ‘oh honey, I’ve known since you were 10!’”
After leaving school, Krause took a janitor job with Kline’s Department Store, a Cleveland-based chain with small-town locations in 11 states. He quickly climbed the ladder of retail management, making more money than his peers. Soon, he was a department manager overseeing multiple departments, including tabletop and home décor which he loved.
“When I was first coming out, the drinking age was only 18, but there weren’t any gay bars in Oshkosh,” said Krause. “So, I went to Appleton to hang out at the 1101 Club, which became my hangout. Over time, I realized I needed to get out of the Fox Valley. It was time.”
In 1982, he moved to Milwaukee for a retail merchandising job with Astor’s Cards & Gifts. The high-end shop, located on Downer Avenue and in Milwaukee’s finer malls, allowed him to do something creative. He soon advanced to Kohl’s Department Stores doing new store set-ups.
“Kohl’s was still a real department store back then,” he laughed. “They sold everything from candy to electronics to toys to shampoo to swimming pools.”
Shopping downtown with a friend in 1988, Krause had the chance encounter that changed his life forever. While riding an up escalator at Boston Store, they saw a cute guy in a suit and tie heading down on the opposite escalator. His friend elbowed him and said, ‘that guy is checking you out.’
“There’s this moment in the middle where two escalators meet,” said Krause, “and you pass someone face to face while heading in opposite directions. In that little triangle of space, I looked at this man and said, ‘WTF are you looking at?” Hey, I was 28 with a 28-inch waist, and I thought I was being cute. Before he could even react, we passed him by.”
Krause and his friend jumped onto the down escalator to find the man – but he was gone.
A year later, the man approached him at La Cage and asked if he remembered that moment. Krause responded again, “WTF are you looking at?”
“We laughed, because it was so ridiculous,” said Krause. “He said, I’m breaking up with my boyfriend of five years, and gave me his card. I told him, ‘Don’t call me until it’s over.’ And he did call me. John and I got together -- and we’re still together after 35 years.”
“We’re living proof. Love at first sight really does happen.”
As the Kohl’s job lost its luster, Krause sought something to spark his creative spirit. He joined the team at the new Marshall Field’s at Grand Avenue, doing everything from building window displays to managing two floors of the operation. When the Dayton Hudson Corporation (now the Target Corporation) bought Marshall Field’s, things began to change fast. His position was eliminated in a cost-cutting measure, so he took a new role as design center manager at Builder’s Square.
“This role catapulted me into doing interior design on a grander scale,” he said, “and that led me to Ethan Allen, where I spent nine years as an interior decorator.”
In 1998, Krause won Interior Decorator of the Year for the United States – one of the highest honors in the industry. Although perfectly positioned for a long and rewarding career, he had no idea that his life would soon change forever.
A man with a plan
The trauma of September 11, 2001, left many Americans realizing how short, fragile, and uncertain life could be. Don was one of them.
“I realized life was too short,” he said. “I’d wanted to create a bar for years, and I knew I had the design talent to create something cool. I was 41 years old, and I knew I had the energy for it. So, there was vision, there was motivation and there was passion from the start. I gave myself a goal: find a building.”
One night, he was attending a house party five doors down from the bar. Overlooking the property from a second-story balcony, he asked his friend, “what’s going on with that building?”
Prior to Art*Bar, 722 E. Burleigh had been a long-forgotten Mexican restaurant, vegan restaurant Sage, upstart café Lava Java, and finally, Sweet Black Coffee. Businesses were churning so frequently at this address that nobody really knew what to expect next. And now, the fire-damaged building had been boarded up for over a year.
“I was bluntly told you don’t want that thing,” Krause remembers. “But I did, I really did. I sent a message to the owner saying I wanted to buy his place. They insisted it wasn’t for sale.” “On New Year’s Day, 2002, they called back and said, ‘we’re ready to sell.’ I can only imagine 9/11 influenced them too.”
Krause and his business partner quickly purchased the building with 50/50 ownership. However, the business was entirely his. There was still some renovation work happening from the fire, and the insurance money hadn’t quite settled yet. Over the next two years, he worked hard to rebuild, upgrade, and redesign the building.
“I didn’t tell anyone what I was working on,” he said. “It was better not to have outside influences and opinions, no matter how well-intended. When you’re doing something creative and original for yourself, you must stay focused. I could sell people all day on what to do with their homes, but I didn’t want to be sold to. I wanted to do it for myself.”
“To be honest, I didn’t know anything about owning a bar,” said Krause. “But I did realize that all the product in a bar is the same product at every other bar. The atmosphere is what you’re creating, and I wanted to create an atmosphere that was unlike any other.”
Krause thanks his role models for inspiring him: Bob Schmidt at the M&M Club, Bill Wardlow at Triangle and Fluid, Corey Grubb and George Prentice at La Cage, Sal Zizzo at the Trysting Place Pub.
The politics of clubbing
Art*Bar Milwaukee opened at a very transitional time in nightlife history. Wisconsin’s smoking ban was still six years away, but some bars had started imposing in-house bans of their own. Krause was a non-smoker whose father had died of smoking-related causes, but he recognized that people like to smoke when they drink. He made significant investments in an HVAC air exchange system to ensure non-smokers and smokers could mingle without feeling suffocated.
Second, he didn’t want to operate a “gay bar.” Despite being openly gay and partnered himself, he had witnessed the culture change happening on the coasts, where gay people could feel safe in bars that weren’t explicitly “gay.”
“We’d lived through so much change and progress and transformation,” said Krause, “and now we could go anywhere, not just places with pride flags outside. Our message was that everyone can be comfortable in their own skin at Art*Bar. We advertised that message in gay and straight publications to ensure our space was all-inclusive. We were always mixed, from the start, and our customers came from all walks of life. Art*Bar was a place where you could see the real diversity of Riverwest: gay, straight, black, white, brown, old, young, male, female, nonbinary. We became a place where trans folx felt safe to be.”
That isn’t to say Krause hasn’t tried to be inclusive. For years, he operated a popular Thursday “gay night” offering high end cocktails served by popular bartender Jimmy Balistrieri. He’s sponsored LGBTQ sports teams and endless LGBTQ community causes. But these were just one community he supported, not the only one.
“We had to get people out of their usual spots to try something new,” said Krause. “I know people from the neighborhood would make Art*Bar their first stop and/or last stop when they went out. Nowadays, I can honestly say there’s always someone gay in the building, no matter what, whether its customers or employees, and it’s just part of the mix.”
“We never felt any pressure from the community to define ourselves,’ said Krause. “We were listed in the gay bar guides – usually the first on the list under letter A – and we did some shows that were controversial even for the LGBTQ community. People soon came to understand we weren’t playing within the usual boundaries. We were undefinable.”
“That’s something about the creative class,” said Krause. “Creatives are a broad class that comes from all walks of life, but in the right space, like minds always come together. Creatives are the best people because they don’t see the world in black and white, they don’t feel the need to judge or label, they don’t always need things defined for them. As artists, we’re familiar with being outcasts our entire life. Being around creatives makes it easy for others to openly be themselves.”
“Creating a place for everybody can be tough,” he said. “I know it’s hokey, but what we really needed to happen here was ‘can’t we all just get along.’ And we did.”
But Krause has created a space not just comfortable for all kinds of people – but all kinds of canines, too.
“One rainy morning, I saw someone tying their dog up outside in a downpour,” said Krause. “I didn’t feel good about that. I said, bring them inside. Once people realized they could bring their dogs inside, they were wowed. We were one of the first – and maybe the first – to allow canine companions inside the bar. Eventually, the Health Department caught wind of this, and came to check things out. But you’ll notice the dogs are still here today.”
It’s all about the art
In a tavern town, it might be easy to forget that Art*Bar is a fully functional art gallery. In fact, they’ve sold over $1 million in art over the past 20 years – a remarkable sales volume for this operating model.
“We’ve always felt it was important for the artist to be compensated for their work,” said Krause, “and so we only take 20% commission on sales. The artist retains 80%. I think we’re one of the fairest art galleries in the state. Some charge upwards of 50% -- and to think, when we got started, we were only charging 10% which barely covered the costs of the installation.”
When Art*Bar first opened, Krause sought out raw, crude, edgy talent to fill his walls, and he certainly found them.
“We’ve pushed the envelope further and further every year,” said Krause. “Of course, we’ve done shows on tattoos, piercings, and body work, but we’ve also done many shows on the male nude form. You never see those, although you see female nudes often. Sure, the art made some straight men feel a little destabilized, but that was the effect we wanted: to challenge the status quo. To operate outside the boundaries of a traditional gallery.”
“One year, we had a fairy tale magic Christmas tree made of Barbie dolls in pink and white. The tree rotated and it went all the way to the ceiling. At one point, I had over six hundred Barbie dolls on display, long before there was a Barbie movie. Sadly, they got a bit funky in the basement, so only one hundred remain today.”
Art*Bar has done shows based on fabrics, ceramics, metal, photography, and every medium imaginable. They’ve partnered with artist organizations local, regional, and national. And yet, Don’s favorite show remains Halloween Fear.
“This year is Fear 20,” said Krause, “and these bloody, Goth-y, horror shows are still so popular with our customers. Our artists love the challenge of bringing Halloween Fear to life. They’re forever finding new ways to shock the audience. We’re talking goblins, pumpkins, exploding babies, alien vaginas…. Sometimes it’s hard even for me to look at.” “When people ask, ‘why would I want something like that in my house?’ I know we’ve won,” said Krause.
Another favorite show is Tiny Art, which offers “snackable” sized, lower-priced artwork.
“Everything is smaller than 8”x8” and priced under $100,” said Krause. “And it’s so popular that people demand it year over year. I like to do things once and move on. But once Mary Louise Schumacher (art critic, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) wrote about it as her favorite show, it’s been happening every year since. Even with items selling for under $100, the show often exceeds $70,000 in sales.”
In 2014, Art*Bar launched a neighborhood rummage sale on the sidewalk outside the bar. Today, the Great Riverwest Rummage Sale and Flea Market offers over 180 vendors, three music stages, eight food trucks, and a chill community setting twice per year.
“It’s really become a phenomenon,” said Krause. “We go three blocks in each direction and could easily go another block in each direction. We’re already at a point where we don’t have any vendor space left!”
You take the good, you take the bad
On the first or second day of business, Art*Bar got an unexpected welcome gift.
Someone threw a brick through the window during open hours. It landed under the pool table, where Krause retrieved it for safekeeping.
“People asked, ‘why would you want that?” said Krause. “I knew this was an instrument of hate, and I wanted to take away its power. But it’s my brick now. And I’m still here. I survived that moment, and it only made me more resilient. And I still have that brick today.”
Word had gotten out that Art*Bar was gay-owned and operated, and some people weren’t very happy about it. Krause remembers protestors lining up across the street during a show opening. He remembers receiving ugly hate mail of the “God Hates Fags” variety. He remembers online hate posts about his pop-up events.
“I never thought it was all that unusual to be gay,” said Krause, “and then I realized that some people just don’t like gay people. Maybe I was naïve.”
“You look at these people’s profiles and they’re not even local,” he said. “Why are people bothering us from faraway places? Why would you waste time on this? I don’t understand that kind of hate. These letters looked like old church ladies handwrote them. But why would anyone spread this anger and hate?”
And then there was the shooting.
In June 2005, a patio customer was confronted by a fourteen-year-old kid with a gun. Without a second thought, Krause got into the middle of it and broke up the attempted robbery.
“I said, ‘you can go now, just go.’ And he shot me anyway. He would have shot me again, but the gun jammed while I was already on the ground.”
Krause was shot at point blank range, and the bullet went through his gall bladder and liver before ricocheting, hitting a vertebra, and becoming lodged in his spine. The bullet missed an artery by a half inch.
“It was otherwise an especially joyful night, as I remember it,” said Krause. “One of our bartenders was leaving for Los Angeles and this was his last shift. He was from New Zealand, and I loved his accent. All our employees were there to see him off. And I walk in, yelling, ‘I was shot, I was shot.’ They all started laughing, thinking I was joking, because it was just so random. And then I collapsed. I was laying on my back, staring at the ceiling, and thinking ‘I built this place and now I’m going to die here.’
Krause was rushed to the emergency room before he experienced significant blood loss. While he was hospitalized for four days, he fortunately did not experience any permanent paralysis or disfigurement. Today, the bullet remains in his body, cauterized, and fused to his spine in a location too dangerous to pursue.
“I woke up in the hospital and saw myself on the news, being shot in security camera footage at night,” said Krause. “This was before most cell phones had cameras, so the footage was so black, grainy, and fuzzy compared to now.”
After the attack, the shooter fled the scene of the crime. He was not apprehended until two years later, when Krause saw him on the news after killing someone else. The shooter was later sentenced to 40 years in prison for that crime.
“They wanted to go back and rehash everything, but I said no,” said Krause. “I was at peace by then. I survived it – only to come back stronger. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and I still don’t really want to talk about it now.”
“I do remember eating watermelon during my recovery,” he said. “And I started to cry because it tasted so good. It seems so silly now, but I felt so lucky to be alive, just so damn lucky. It was one of those moments where you realize you should be dead right now.”
Art*Bar saw tremendous support immediately after the shooting. The Mayor, alderman, media personalities, and neighborhood leaders visited the bar to speak out against the violence.
“The bar had the biggest day of the year, when I wasn’t even there,” said Krause. “There were so many flowers in my hospital room that they triggered my allergies at the worst possible time. I joked that people were trying to kill me with flowers.”
When Krause got home, he found an empty bar. People were now afraid to visit Art*Bar because the owner had been shot.
“I thought I’d survived and that we could now move on,” said Krause. “We never closed, not even one day, but we had no business at all. I didn’t cash a paycheck for myself for over eight months so others could be paid first. I remember sitting in the bar on a beautiful day and seeing people outside walking dogs past the bar. But they wouldn’t come here after dark because they knew the owner got shot.”
In response, Art*Bar became less of a late-night bar and more of a daytime coffee shop destination.
“Colectivo had been in development for years before it finally happened, so we knew there was a market for a neighborhood coffee house,” said Krause. “I decided to offer the same menu in a dog-friendly space where people could relax during the daytime. We did this for three years. When Colectivo opened, we went back to being a bar, but we do still offer the same hot drink menu. It widened the perception of us in the community, while widening our service offering beyond alcohol. We earned a lot of praise from non-drinkers for being an alcohol-free space by day.”
The empire rises
“Those 20 years went by really fast,” said Krause. “I just wanted to make it to the 5-year mark. If you can make it to 5 years, everything will be all right. And then, ten years happened, and by then I’d bought out my business partner and got the building 100% to myself. That independence gave me the vision to open a new space next door.”
Hop Back Inn, a “dingy little dive bar,” had been Art*Bar’s neighbor for its first four years. The “jukebox & pool” joint was approaching the end of its life, as its owner wanted to retire. Krause knew, before there was ever an Art*Bar, that he was going to want that space too.
“I didn’t want a bar next door competing with us, so we bought it,” he said. "I wanted a quiet getaway from whatever was going on at Art*Bar. Customers were always looking for somewhere to go next, so we figured we’d create that next space for them.”
Two opened in 2008, only four years after Art*Bar. The atmospheric lounge offered higher-end cocktails, more intimate conversation, love songs on the jukebox, large and comfortable booths, and low lighting to set the mood. Best of all, it was cozy, with capacity for 40-50 customers at the most.
“People got Two right away,” said Krause, “and now I’m having a hard time getting away from it. We’ve reinvented the space as Meow Bar, and we’re updating the signage and décor with a mid-century modern cat motif. All our cat figurines wound up in the Meow Bar. Every time we find something cat-related, it goes over there. We’ve introduced an ice cream drink program on the level of At Random, but right here in the neighborhood.”
“It’s ironic because Art*Bar is widely known as this dog-friendly space. And here we’re opening a cat-themed bar.”
While Two was opening on the west side of Art*Bar, the owners of the West Bank Café on the east side were also approaching retirement. Unfortunately, they – like so many others – were discouraged from selling their business during the Great Recession.
Seven years later, the owners approached Krause again. They were not just ready to retire from the business, but ready to sell the property. Fortunately for them, Krause had saved for seven years to purchase the property in cash. He wanted to open a breakfast restaurant, because there was nowhere in the neighborhood quite like that.
“The sale included everything except the food,” Krause laughed. “We spent the next four years planning, designing, renovating, and rebuilding. This was a ground-up transformation. There were serious structural issues; in fact, the building was caving in on itself. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.”
“It took too long, it ran over budget, and we kept running into new and unexpected challenges,” said Krause. “But in the end, it was a designer’s dream come true. We cut no corners anywhere.”
Wonderland opened in October 2019 as a seven-day-a-week neighborhood diner serving comfort food favorites. Just as it was beginning to boom, the world was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
“It was surreal, so soon after grand opening, to be letting 40 people go,” said Krause. “But we waited it out. We were busy doing all the renovations we couldn’t do while we were open. And like everyone else, we slowly came back to life. First, we were takeout only, then fast casual, and finally back to full service. While we are no longer open seven days a week, we are open Tuesday-Sunday from 4 to 9 p.m. for dinner and Friday-Sunday from 9 a.m. until -3 p.m. for brunch. Being closed on Mondays has helped us not burn ourselves out. We’d like to get back to lunch and breakfast daily, but we’re going to take our time to get there, and the neighborhood will tell us when we’re ready.”
“I’ve been inspired by our Saturday and Sunday brunch business,” he said, “and we recently hosted three hundred people for Mother’s Day. We are coming back stronger and stronger every week.”
Krause currently employs thirty-seven people across the three storefronts. The Milwaukee Business Journal named him one of the top LGBTQ-owned employers in Wisconsin.
What’s next?
“I’m very proud of our connection to the community,” said Krause. “I look forward to the RW24 bike ride and the Annual MishMash Festival. We’ve been fine tuning the block party over time, and now it’s a break-even event that costs as much as it makes. We don’t make any money, but that’s not why we do it. We do it for the community.”
“Everyone’s doing their bit to make Riverwest a better place to live,” he said. “Crime goes up and down with the seasons. To be honest, crime happens everywhere. I don’t think we’re ever truly safe anywhere. But you do have to take care of your neighbors and yourself. I love that the neighborhood has embraced us so much. It tells me we’ve done things right.”
“I only imagined myself doing this for 10 years, so our 20-year mark came at me fast,” said Krause. “Our art calendar is so heavily booked through 2027 that we can only layer on pop-up events. But we must be flexible, because more and more artists are born every day, and more and more groups are showing up to collaborate with us. And it’s wild to think about staying fresh, when all the stuff that the bar is known for – the paint-by-number art, the bottle caps, the bungy cord railings – was all done 20 years ago and still looks new and fresh by comparison.
“It’s all about persistence and perseverance,” he said. “The customers keep on coming back, and as long as they do, we’ll be here.”
