How about an art museum?

Madison’s two largest art museums — the Chazen Museum of Art on the UW-Madison campus and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on State Street — have joined forces with 14 other institutions across the state in hopes that you’ll hit the road this fall and visit their galleries along the way.

The group launched “Wisconsin Art Destinations,” billed as the first Midwestern art museum-based collective designed to entice travelers and day-trippers to museums that are as diverse in location, architecture, and mission as they are in their own right. The project’s website, wisconsinartdestinations.com, suggests three weekend itineraries that visitors can follow, with recommendations not only for stunning art exhibits but also for unique Wisconsin hotels and restaurants nearby.

The museums themselves are diverse. In Manitowoc, there is the picturesque Rahr-West Art Museum, housed in a former 19th-century Victorian mansion. In Milwaukee County, there is the magnificent Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, listed on the National Register of Historic Places for 50 years, with a Renaissance garden. Nearby in Sheboygan, the new Art Preserve at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is the first in the world to focus exclusively on works from the artistic community.

The initiative is being funded by a $40,000 grant from the Wisconsin Department of Tourism for “destination marketing,” and the campaign will be promoted both statewide and in the Chicago metropolitan area, said Aaron Sherer, executive director of the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh.

“It really brings attention to our institutions, our art museums, but also to the areas surrounding them,” he said. “So when we say ‘art destination,’ we mean the art museum, but we also mean the community — (with) restaurants, shops, nature and other things to experience in each of our communities.”

“Day 3” of the three-day “Southern Route” for Wisconsin travelers, for example, includes a suggested day trip to Madison, where visitors can stay at the Edgewater Hotel, shop at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, dine at Graze, and enjoy a Wisconsin old fashioned at the Old Fashioned after a day of touring Chazen and MMOCA. Days 1 and 2 include visits to art museums in Racine and Milwaukee.

The multi-museum collaboration grew out of an attempt to connect. After years of working solo, directors of art museums across the state began meeting periodically a few years ago and have maintained those meetings through the COVID-19 pandemic, said Sherer, now the group’s facilitator.

Wisconsin Art Destinations, which he calls a “collective brand,” was born out of these meetings.

“While we’ve each developed our own audience, our audience isn’t necessarily aware of the other” exceptional art museums across the state, he said. “If you were an art lover in, say, Chicago or Madison and you wanted to see other art museums in Wisconsin, you’d have to do a lot of work to find out what art museums existed and where they were. There just wasn’t a website that grouped us and said, ‘Yes, these are the professionally run art museums in Wisconsin. We all have art collections, we all have changing art exhibitions, we have professional curatorial staff who think about being creative in what we offer.’ We just wanted to make it easy for people to find us.”

The Wisconsin Art Destinations website “is a great way to consolidate” information about all the art museums in the state, says Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen Museum of Art.

“And from my perspective, it shines a light on some amazing museums and collections that don’t get as much attention as those of us who are associated with a giant university,” Gilman said. “It’s great to be a part of it, and it also elevates some of these other museums that are wonderful.”

Some of the notables on Gilman’s list include the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh, set on a four-acre Tudor Revival farmhouse, the cutting-edge Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend and the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass in Neenah. (“If you haven’t been there yet, that’s wonderful, too,” she advised.)

Paul Baker Prindle, director of the Gabriele Haberland Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, said the idea behind Wisconsin Art Destinations may have its roots in the joy of “rediscovering home” that came with people taking shorter trips during the pandemic.

“What’s so great about this initiative is that it not only encourages local tourism and getting to know your own home, but I think it’s also an opportunity for arts organizations across the state to get to know each other,” he said. “We work in such different regions across the state, and to be able to come together in this way is really great.”

In Madison, the Chazen Museum, located at 750 University Ave., serves students but also welcomes the public to its many galleries with free admission and programming. Although the museum doesn’t track visitor demographics, about 200,000 people visit the Chazen each year, Gilman said, and during the summer, when many UW-Madison students are away, the museum remains busy with both local and out-of-town visitors.

Baker Prindle, who has degrees from UW-Madison and Edgewood College, took the helm of MMOCA just three months ago after serving as director of a California art museum. He noted that three Los Angeles-area art museums recently formed a coalition to collectively own, manage and acquire works by Los Angeles artists.

The three museums “just got national press about how they’re collaborating to collect art and share it with each other in Los Angeles. It’s called MAC3,” Baker Prindle said. “So I think (collaborations) are a national trend. And of course, as always, Wisconsin got ahead of the curve.”