Montclair Art Museum's Advance Schedule of Exhibitions Through Summer 2017

MONTCLAIR, N.J. - June 30, 2016 - PRLog -- The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is pleased to present the following exhibitions in its 2016-2017 season.

Dannielle Tegeder: Infrastructure
Through June 2017

The Montclair Art Museum presents new works by artist Dannielle Tegeder. Infrastructure features a site-specific wall installation, large-scale mobile, and series of animations that merge the interior and exterior spaces of the Museum. The exhibition is organized by Alexandra Schwartz, curator of contemporary art, and will be on view through June 2017.

Each piece in the exhibition is its own imagined urban system that also reacts to the surrounding architecture. Prominently featured in The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Art Stairway, a wall of glass windows allows the artwork on view to be visible from the street and viewers to see out on to the Museum's grounds and beyond to the Manhattan skyline. The wall installation and mobile draw from the infrastructure that exists behind the Museum's walls as well as reflect what is going outside of them. A complementary pair of animations on MAM's outdoor video monitors are digital renderings of drawings that are set to motion to rhythms of contemporary classical composer Matthew Evan Taylor. The original drawing for the animation Zeolfrora is a recent acquisition to MAM's collection.

Dannielle Tegeder is a New York-based artist raised in a family of steamfitters, whose fascination with architecture, urbanism, and engineering inspire her abstract drawings, paintings, installations, and illustrations. Her work explores abstraction, and has begun to include large-scale installation, sculptural objects, video, sound, and animation.

This exhibition is also part of MAM's New Directions series, the centerpiece of the Museum's contemporary art program.

do it!
September 10-December 31, 2016

Rather than an exhibition of objects created by artists, do it! is a collection of conceptual instructions provided by 27 renowned artists including Robert Barry, Louise Bourgeois, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sol LeWitt, and Yoko Ono. A highly participatory contemporary art exhibition, do it! has brought together the community and Montclair-area organizations to implement these written instructions.  Visitors will have new interactive experiences as they are invited to write, doodle, draw, and design based on projects that include over-sized coloring books, optical illusions, and more!   Organized by Independent Curators International and coordinated at MAM by Leah Fox, director of the Vance Wall Art Education Center, and Gail Stavitsky, chief curator.

Janet Taylor Pickett: The Matisse Series
September 10, 2016-June 18, 2017

Janet Taylor Pickett: The Matisse Series explores the dialogue between Taylor Pickett's artwork and that of renowned French artist Henri Matisse. Featuring 76 collages and 4 handmade books, it spotlights the ongoing creative conversation between the two artists and the profound impact of Matisse on Taylor Pickett's art.

A highlight of the exhibition will be the installation of Sixty Six Dresses: An Odyssey, 2014-15. In many of her dresses, Taylor Pickett juxtaposes images of African sculpture, textiles, and cultural elements, with details from Matisse's work, typically procured from exhibition catalogue reproductions. This multicultural dialogue is at the heart of her complex, archetypal work. The artist's interest in light, color, and multiple perspectives is also pervasive in some of her recent works in which she combines elements of Matisse's work with tripartite spaces evoking medieval altarpieces, unifying past and present times.

This is the second time the artist has been featured in a one-person show at MAM; the first More than One Way Home in 1997 was a 25-year mid-career survey. Furthermore, the artist taught classes in the Museum's Yard School of Art and served on the Museum's Board of Trustees, as well as its African American Cultural Committee, which she co-founded. Taylor Pickett will also be represented in two concurrent complementary exhibitions, Matisse and American Art and Inspired by Matisse: Selected Works from the Collection, opening February 2017.

Janet Taylor Pickett: The Matisse Series is co-organized by Gail Stavitsky, MAM chief curator, and independent art consultant Kathy Imlay.

Matisse and American Art
February 5-June 18, 2017

From February 5 to June 18, 2017, Montclair Art Museum will present Matisse and American Art, the first exhibition to examine this French master's profound impact upon the development of American modern art from 1907 to the present. His art has provided a liberating model for American artists' varied explorations of vibrant color, strong, fluid lines, and clear compositional structures in their pursuits of self-expression.

Featuring 68 paintings, archival objects, sculpture, prints, and works on paper, Matisse and American Art will juxtapose 19 works by Matisse with 49 works by American artists, including Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, Maurice Prendergast, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, John Baldessari, Sophie Matisse, Faith Ringgold, and others. Matisse's transformative impact on their works is revealed not only by their adaptations of his palette and pictorial structures but also through their choice and appropriation of his subject matter-still lifes, landscapes, figurative works, studio interiors, and portraits. While previous projects have illuminated Matisse's relationship with postwar artists, this will be the first exhibition to expand Matisse's impact beyond the typical focus upon the New York School by extending it back to the beginning of the 20th century and forward to the 21st.

The exhibition is organized by Gail Stavitsky, MAM chief curator, with Dr. John Cauman and Lisa Mintz Messinger. It is complemented by a major scholarly catalogue, Matisse and American Art, and a concurrent exhibition of the Montclair Art Museum's collection Inspired by Matisse.