Rudy Rotter

After Rotter's passing, and due to structural problems with the building, the Museum was disassembled in 2011. The art was moved to another local location. In the process, a small portion of the collection was disseminated to various interested people and institutions in Wisconsin. The remaining art, which covered three floors of the warehouse was returned in 2015, but no longer set out in a curated and ordered state.

Rudy Rotter continued to create art daily until his death in 2001 at the age of 88.

In 1996, the Kohler Foundation acquired 100 pieces of Rotter's art for their permanent collection. In 2003 his work was included in "Remembrance and Ritual: Jewish Folk Artists of Our Time" at the Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York. Later in 2004, his drawings made with magic markers on photographs and prints were shown in "Create and Be Recognized: Photography on the Edge" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and published in a book of the same name. The Portrait Society Gallery presented Rotter's art in annual shows during his final decade. In 2019, the artist's work was displayed at the Outsider Art Fair in New York, and was featured in an article in the Folk Art Messenger's 2018 Fall/Winter edition.

With advancing age, Rotter's strength declined. This change lead to his Late Period (1990 – 2001) work when he transitioned from hard, heavy objects to light-weight materials. His supplies included collections of wallpaper samples, shiny metal trophy discards, commercial tile samples, and a variety of other found and thrift store acquired objects. This change of materials and a resulting more flexible manner of art making, lead to his works becoming increasingly abstract and playful.

Upon retiring from dentistry in 1987, Rotter moved his artwork from the basement of his office to a large 100-year-old warehouse. As the warehouse filled with art, it was transformed into the self-designated Rudy Rotter Museum of Sculpture. Rotter created over 15,000 pieces of art over 45 years.

Rotter began sculpting at the age of 43, making half-size human figures in clay. By the late 1970s he was sculpting teak bas reliefs from hardwood scraps provided by a local yacht builder. At this same time he was making small machetes of imagined grand monuments. His eclectic style was born out of his constant drive to create and experiment. He used found and scavenged materials. These often suggested new forms, formats, and ideas. Unusual materials included his sister's old mink coat, scrap leather, shiny trophy factory discards, wallpaper samples, thrift shop finds, commercial paper scrap, and more. In his last decade he added drawn images on to photographic prints.

Rotter's Early Period (1958-1989) sculptures and drawings are most often composed of entwined and physically interrelating figures. The usually unclothed figures are without the standard cultural references to time and place. Thus they become expressions of universal humanity.

Beginning in 1958, Rudy began showing in local and state-wide locations, such as libraries, the Wisconsin State Fair, and local colleges. He donated work to public institutions throughout the City of Manitowoc. By 1978 he was in the exhibition entitled "Grass Roots Art: Wisconsin" at the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He continued to show infrequently in small venues through the early 1990s.

Prior to artmaking, in the early 1950s Rotter first began exercising his creative impulses as an inventor. His most notable accomplishment was inventing the first sugarless chewing gum. Other small inventions followed, but none became mature enterprises. By 1954 Rotter began to make art, a pursuit that would occupy all of his free time for the remainder of his life.

Rotter's limited early involvement with art included a modeling stint for his sister's art classes while an athlete at the University of Wisconsin. In dental school in the early 1940s, he attended human anatomy classes which included dissection. This knowledge was leveraged decades later in his drawings and sculptures.

Rudy Rotter grew up on the south side of Milwaukee in an Eastern European immigrant neighborhood as the youngest of six children. The family arrived at the turn of the last century, moving into a Polish-speaking neighborhood. There they built up seven small businesses before the Crash of 1929. Despite a setback during the Great Depression all the children achieved an education and entered the American mainstream. In high school, Rudy and his brother Peter became all-city football stars; an anomaly and special distinction for Jewish kids of their era. Rotter would later fashion his immigrant family experience into mythic-style tale which he then employed as the core conceptual structure of his art.

Rudy Rotter (1913–2001) was an American outsider and self-taught artist residing in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Raised in Milwaukee, he moved to Manitowoc after the War in the late 1940s to setup a dental practice. After settling in and starting a family, he embarked on a simultaneous career as an artist. In the following decades he produced a prodigious volume of art.