KATE DODD TRANSFORMS THE MONTCLAIR ART MUSEUM'S LAURIE ART STAIRWAY INTO AN IMMERSIVE AND CONTEMPLATIVE SCULPTURAL EXPERIENCE

Installation view of Kate Dodd: You're Invited!, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (on view Sept 19, 2026). Courtesy of MAM and the artist. Photo: Gail Stavitsky.

Montclair, New Jersey, September 3, 2026—You’re invited to walk through a soaring, latticed sculpture that inspires wonder and asks us to reflect on waste, consumer culture, and the role museums have in preserving and presenting art.

The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is proud to present Kate Dodd: You’re Invited!, a site-specific installation made primarily of recycled Montclair Art Museum materials. Created by New Jersey-based artist Kate Dodd (b.1960), the work is constructed from thousands of paper strips assembled into a web of quilt-like patterns draped over an arched structure. The work encompasses Laurie Art Stairway and dramatically curves upward to spread across multiple windows.

A soaring patchwork of repurposed text and imagery, the work is entirely composed of material generated by MAM over the years, including invitations, educational booklets, fundraising materials, art history books, curatorial essays, and exhibition catalogues. Phrases like “You’re Invited,” “Join Us!” and “Support MAM” are interwoven with names of artists, donors, curators, exhibitions, and the Museum’s logo, in addition to more than twenty images of iconic works from the Museum’s collection. Artists represented include Philip Guston, Robert Henri, Lily Martin Spencer, George Inness, Elsie Driggs, Charles White, and Tom Nussbaum, as well as Native artists once known.
 

An immersive wave of visual information that is both playful and probing, Kate Dodd: You’re Invited! is a colorful, openwork collage of geometries and organic patterns that spread dynamic combinations of light and shadow along the visitor’s path.

Dodd sees this journey as “an opportunity to highlight the Museum’s history, iconography, and generosity to the community in combination with the evolving meaning of this information over time.”

A resident of Orange, NJ, Dodd creates temporary and permanent site-specific installations and is renowned for public art commissions across the Garden State and beyond. Her work has been exhibited nationally in museums, galleries, and colleges. Her achievements include the 2024 exhibition Kate Dodd: New Work at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (2020), and multiple residencies, including at MacDowell. She earned her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1983 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1990.

The exhibition is curated by Gail Stavitsky, Chief Curator Emerita, and will be on view from September 19, 2026, to August 6, 2027.