FAMILY PROGRAMS

Family Learning Lab
3rd floor – Elevator Lobby

Families are invited to visit our third floor Family Learning Lab to explore the exhibition Cézanne and American Modernism through a hands-on art project. Lying to the east of his home in Aix-en-Provence, France, Mont Sainte-Victoire was a favorite subject of Paul Cézanne. He painted the mountain in a series of works from different angles, at different times, and in different weather. Visitors are invited to create their own versions of this famous scene.

Imagination Station — Returns!
Saturdays 1 – 2 pm starting September 19
Instructors: Julie Healy and Aggie Wszolkowski
Member adults free, nonmember adults $12, children $6

Our popular drop-in weekend program returns every Saturday. This program will be held in the Museum galleries and will focus on a different artwork or theme each week. Families will be engaged in active looking, lively discussion, interactive activities and scavenger hunts, and have a unique opportunity to sketch in the galleries. Visit the Museum website for weekly themes. Space is limited.

Le Ballon Rouge (1956)
Thursday, November 5, 6 pm
Member FREE, nonmember $12 adults, children $4

The 34-minute short film follows the adventures of a young boy who finds a sentient, mute, red balloon. The film, which has a music score but almost no dialogue, tells of Pascal, who, on his way to school one morning, discovers a large helium-filled red balloon. As Pascal plays with his new-found toy, he realizes the balloon has a mind and will of its own, and it begins to follow Pascal wherever he goes through the streets of Paris. Please join MAM for the film screening of The Red Balloon. The Museum’s new late-night hours on Thursdays (until 9 pm) also offer you the opportunity to visit the current special exhibition, Cézanne and American Modernism.
Free Red Balloons to the first 100 audience members.

Balloons provided by Jonathan’s Balloons, 242 Bellevue Avenue, Montclair.

Cardboard Creature Costumes
Saturday, October 31 Halloween, 1 – 4 p.m.
$20 member family, $25 nonmember family

After a morning of trick or treating, come spend the afternoon at MAM making a creative costume out of cardboard, tape, recycled scraps, and lots of imagination. Become a robot, butterfly, dinosaur, spiky cactus, or even a walking refrigerator… options are endless. A MAM teaching artist will be on hand to help families turn piles of raw scrap material into creative and innovative costumes. This workshop is geared for caregivers and children to work together. MAM will supply a mound of raw materials but families are encouraged to BYOC (bring your own cardboard) to add to the communal pile.

Space is limited—Advance registration encouraged online under Art School or call
(973) 746-5555, ext. 239 .

Free Family Days are made possible by The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey.

Homeschool Day, 12 – 2 pm (Ages 4 – 13)
$6 per child. Adults $12.
(FREE for ADULT members)

The Montclair Art Museum invites you and other Homeschooling families for a fun and educational afternoon. These two-hour programs will include a gallery tour and studio art project led by a Museum educator.

• November 19   —    Figure Drawing
• December 16 —  Figure Painting
  
• January 21 — Still Life Painting
  
• February 17 — Painting on Canvas
  
• March 18 — Drawing Into Sculpture
• April 21 - Illustrating a Narrative with Mixed Media
  
• May 20 - Native American Symbols and Patterns
• June 16 - Georgia O'Keeffe Large Scale Nature Drawing

MAM Park Bench
Second Wednesday of the month, 9:30 am – 11:30 am
Free with Museum admission
STORYTELLING IS NOW AVAILABLE IN BOTH ENGLISH AND SPANISH

Parents with young children will enjoy MAM Park Bench, a program that introduces children to the Museum and provides them with an artistic social outing. Get acquainted with other parents and young children, work on fun art projects, and experience a guided tour of the Museum. Storytelling in the galleries is provided courtesy of the Children’s Services Department of the Montclair Public Library. Local native Spanish educator Nieves Cespedes will conduct storytelling in Spanish.

• December 9 — Mountains
• January 13 — Black and White
• February 10 —  Family
• March 10 — The City
• April 14 — Totem Poles
• May 12 — Color!
• June 9 — The Ocean

Thanksgiving Weekend — Park Bench
Friday, November 27, 10:30 a.m. – Noon
Saturday, November 28 10:30 a.m. – Noon 
Adults free with Museum, admission, Children $8

Cézanne-themed art project, interactive gallery activities, and light morning refreshments. Bring your cell phone to listen to the family audio tour of Cézanne and American Modernism.

Sunday, December 13, 1 - 5 p.m.
FREE Family Day
Cézanne and American Modernism

Families are invited to participate in art projects, demonstrations, workshops, and gallery activities, all inspired by MAM’s exhibition Cézanne and American Modernism. Explore the galleries with our cell phone audio guide featuring exhibition-related commentary on Paul Cézanne and his American contemporaries.

Free Family Days are made possible, in part, by The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey.

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ADULT PROGRAMS

Advance ticket sales available through the Museum Store or by calling (973) 746–5555, ext. 237.

A Morning with Cézanne
Lecture and Private Viewing with Art Historian Jayne Warman
Tuesday, November 3, 9:30 a.m. – Noon
$12 MAM members, $15 nonmembers

Treat yourself—and a friend—to an interactive, delicious, and dynamic start to your day by joining the Montclair Art Museum for light refreshments and a morning lecture focused on early American collectors of Cézanne and the influence of American artists on these collectors. Jayne Warman, art historian, specialist, and adviser on Cézanne exhibitions, will reveal Cézanne within the context of his importance to American artists. Enjoy the opportunity for a private viewing of the Cézanne and American Modernism exhibition.

Co-Sponsored by the Montclair Arts Council Creative Aging Initiative.
 

MSU/MAM Art Talks
Eleanor Heartney, Panel Discussion
Tuesday, November 10, 7 p.m.
$10 members, $15 nonmembers
Free for MSU staff and students

Eleanor Heartney, Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress, was named a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2008. She was also a recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992 and is a past and present Visiting Art Critic with Montclair State University’s MFA Program. Ms. Heartney will moderate the evening’s panel discussion. The panel will involve a group of artists whose work is not necessarily identified with religion or belief, but whose work reflects in various ways their religious upbringing and traditions. The point here is not to see art as a form of proselytizing for any specific dogma, but rather to acknowledge how religious training and beliefs are essential elements in understanding the often apparently irreligious work of certain artists.

This series is a collaboration between the Master of Fine Arts degree program of Montclair State University and the Montclair Art Museum.

African American Artists in France
Valerie Mercer, DIA Curator
Thursday, November 12, 7 p.m.
$10 members, $15 nonmembers
FREE for AACC members

Historically, Paris has offered artists of color opportunities and freedoms they had not experienced in the United States, resulting in many emigrating or studying abroad. Learn how the stimulating art scene in France nurtured such artists as William H. Johnson and Hale Woodruff, both featured in the Cézanne and American Modernism exhibition. Valerie Mercer is Curator of the General Motors Center for African American Art at the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA). Prior to joining DIA, Mercer was senior curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she organized the nationally toured exhibition Explorations in the City of Lights: African American Artists in Paris, 1945–1965.

This lecture is presented by the Museum’s African American Cultural Committee (AACC). The AACC lecture series is made possible by a grant from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation.

MSU/MAM Art Talks
Elizabeth Peyton
Thursday, December 3, 7 p.m.
$10 members, $15 nonmembers
Free for MSU staff and students

From her earliest portraits of musicians to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics, Elizabeth Peyton has created a body of work that presents a chronicle of America at the end of the last century. Peyton’s small, jewel-like portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and personal. Her works reflect the cultural climate of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Peyton emerged as a vanguard voice in the return-to-narrative figuration in contemporary painting in the 1990s, and is among a small group of artists to develop a peculiar hybrid of realism and conceptualism.

This series is a collaboration between the Master of Fine Arts degree program of Montclair State University and the Montclair Art Museum.

The Montclair Art Museum Is Reading!
Book Discussion
Thursday, December 10, 7 p.m.
FREE MAM members, $12 nonmembers
Please RSVP to mkelshaw@montclairartmuseum.org

In conjunction with MAM’s exhibition Cézanne and American Modernism, the Montclair Art Museum’s community-wide book club has selected The Masterpiece by Emile Zola as the topic of conversation for the next MAM Is Reading book club meeting. A novel of art, ambition, obsession, betrayal, and the French Impressionists as you’ve never seen them before!

Please join MAM Trustee, Montclair resident, and widely read author Deborah Davis, who will lead an evening of lively discussion. Participants will gather at MAM’s Yard School entrance. The Book Club Meeting will be held in the gallery.

Cézanne and American Modernism
Cello and Piano Concert
Thursday, December 17, 7 p.m.
$10 members, $15 nonmembers
Member children free, nonmember children $5

Cellist Jameson Platte and pianist Matthew Quayle will explore how techniques and sensibilities analogous to Cézanne’s manifested themselves in the music of French and American composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Based in the New York City–New Jersey area, the duo’s recent appearances include Merkin Concert Hall (New York) and the Glen Falls Symphony Musicbridge Festival.

LEARN TO DRAW IN 20 MINUTES
Thursdays, Sept. 17 & 24, Oct. 29, Nov. 19,  7 – 8:30 pm
Free with Museum Admission

Bring a friend or date—check out the must-see Cézanne and American Modernism exhibition, have a quick and fun drawing lesson, and then hit the town for dinner and drinks. Materials provided—just bring your sense of adventure. Drawing lessons are drop in and ongoing—stay as long or little as you like.

MSU/AIA Lecture
Professor Bob Brier
Egyptologist
Thursday, January 21, 7 p.m.
FREE

Dr. Bob Brier has worked in Egypt for more than 30 years and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on mummies and pyramids. He has authored numerous books on the subject. He is Senior Research Fellow at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, New York. He teaches Egyptology courses such as Middle Egyptian (Hieroglyphs) and a seminar called The Mummy. His most recent work has been on the Great Pyramid of Giza, which was featured on a National Geographic television special and is the subject of his most recent book, Secret of the Great Pyramid. This is sure to be an enlightening evening with Dr Brier. A Q&A will follow the lecture.

This program is a collaboration between the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies at Montclair State University, and the Montclair Art Museum.

CLOSER LOOK
2 pm Saturday and Sunday
Free with Museum Admission

These informal 20 minute gallery talks offer visitors an in-depth examination of a featured artwork or paring or artworks in the Cézanne and American Modernism exhibition.
Note: No Closer Look on Saturday, November 14.

December 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, 20, 2 p.m.
Cézanne and American Modernism (Saturday and Sunday)

Friday, February 5, 2 p.m.
Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats

Friday, March 5, 2 p.m.
Sandy Skoglund, A Breeze at Work, 1987

Sunday, December 13, 1 - 5 p.m. SAVE THE DATE
FREE Family Day
Cézanne and American Modernism

Families are invited to participate in art projects, demonstrations, workshops, and gallery activities, all inspired by MAM's exhibition Cézanne and American Modernism.  Explore the galleries with our cell phone audio guide featuring exhibition-related commentary on Cézanne and his American admirers.

Free Family Days are made possible, in part, by The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey.

Third Annual African American Film Festival
Sunday, February 21, 2 p.m.
Sunday, February 28, 2 p.m.
FREE
For updates on film selections visit montclairartmuseum.org

The Montclair Art Museum’s African American Cultural Committee (AACC) proudly collaborates with the Montclair African American Heritage Committee for the third Annual Film Festival. The festival will include film screenings and discussions on topics relevant to the evolution of Black American cinema from the early 20th century to the present.

The African American Film Festival is sponsored by the Montclair African American Heritage Parade and Festival Committee, MAM, Montclair Public Library, Township of Montclair, Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, and the Essex County League of Volunteer Workers. This African American Cultural Committee program is made possible by a grant from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation.