The McMullen Family Gallery
Patterns, Systems, Structures
Abstraction in American Art
Through May 2013
This exhibition, curated by MAM’s Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, is drawn entirely from the permanent collection of the Montclair Art Museum and explores the rich variety of approaches to abstraction in American art. Since the late 19th century, painters and sculptors have not always aimed to depict persons and objects representationally. Artists moved toward abstract visual expression as they experimented with unconventional materials and techniques and developed visual languages of form, color, and line that exist independently from their subjects’ natural appearance. Some artists deliberately altered appearances by stretching or bending forms, breaking up shapes, and giving objects unlikely textures or colors. Others looked to aspects of our person-made world, such as architecture, to invest their compositions with a sense of solidity, monumentality, and structure. Artists have made these transformations in an effort to communicate universal or unseen spiritual aspects of existence and of modern life that they cannot convey through representational treatments.
All Museum programs are made possible, in part, by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vance Wall Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and Museum Members.
The McMullen Family Gallery is customarilly dedicated to changing selections of American art from the mid-eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century. Arranged in a general chronological order, the installation traces the development of American art from its emergence in the Colonial period, when there were no art schools or museums, to the American Renaissance era, when American visual culture flourished both at home and abroad. Throughout this century and a half, American artists were greatly influenced by European sources; at the same time they developed a distinctly independent national culture.
If you are planning a special visit to see a particular piece of artwork at MAM, please call ahead to confirm the object is on display in our galleries. Works are sometimes on loan for exhibitions at other museums, or may have been taken down temporarily for conservation and gallery rotations. Phone 973-746-5555.
