A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund

Feb. 7 - July 25, 2010

A Force for Change is the first exhibition to explore the legacy of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, created in 1917 by the well known Chicago businessman and philanthropist. The Rosenwald Fund's Fellowship Program was designed to foster black leadership through the arts, literature, and scholarship, and between 1928 and 1948, the program awarded stipends to hundreds of African American artists, writers, and scholars across many disciplines.

The exhibition presents the artistic products of Julius Rosenwald’s support and includes more than 60 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by 22 Rosenwald fellows, as well as an original short documentary film. The artists in the exhibition are among the foremost of their era: Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas,  Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Rose Piper, Augusta Savage, Charles White, Hale Woodruff, and more. The exhibition was organized for the Spertus Museum, Chicago, by guest curator Daniel Schulman.

Two related exhibitions complement Force. Exploring Identities: African American Works from the Collection examines some of the ways that contemporary African American artists have explored issues of individual and culturally determined identity. Drawn from MAM's permanent collection, works are by Elizabeth Catlett, Willie Cole, Melvin Edwards, Whitfield Lovell, Janet Taylor Pickett, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems. Martin Puryear Prints: Selections from the JPMorgan Art Collection presents 13 works by the internationally renowned sculptor and printmaker. Martin Puryear (b. 1941) has worked with Arion Press of San Francisco on a suite of woodcuts made in 2000 to accompany a limited edition of Jean Toomer's 1922 novel, Cane, regarded as the highest literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. The majority of the works in this exhibition are from the Cane project and typify Puryear's original sense of organic forms resonating with mysteriously evocative symbolism.

Click Here to read Curator Daniel Schulman's article in American Art Review.

Click Here to read an article about the Julius Rosenwald Fund from the NY Times.

A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund was organized by Spertus Museum, Chicago.

The exhibition was made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art
                                                                                                                         
Major support was also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Righteous Persons Foundation, and The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

                                   
A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund is presented at the Montclair Art Museum with major support from JPMorgan Chase & Co.
 

Additional funding is provided by the Vance Wall Foundation, Annie sez, Mandee, and Exhibition Angels Bob and Bobbie Constable, as well as through a Building Arts Pariticipation grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Out of the Vault: 95 Years of Collecting at MAM

August 8, 2009–Summer 2010

Marking the occasion of MAM’s 95th anniversary, and its distinction as the first institution in New Jersey designed as a museum, the exhibition celebrates the Museum’s unique focus on American and Native American art in this installation of over 60 works of art. The works selected include 23 recent acquisitions and nearly 40 familiar treasures. Twenty-one of the works in the show have never before been on view at the Museum. Many of the most recent acquisitions are by living artists, a testament to the origins of the Museum as an institution that collected the contemporary art of its time, with the donation of such works as Childe Hassam’s Summer at Cos Cob (1902) by MAM co-founder William T. Evans in 1915. Click here for more information.

Myths, Memories, and Inspirations: A Mural by Dan Fenelon

November 1, 2009 – Fall 2010

Dan Fenelon is best known for his vibrantly colored works that include sculpture, toys, paintings, and murals. His work is a blending of cartooning, street art, graffiti, and ancient tribal motifs. Dan will create this site-specific mural for MAM’s Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation Art Stairway. The mural, inspired by works from the Montclair Art Museum’s permanent collection, re-imagines these images with Fenelon’s distinct tribal style. Easily apparent in the mural is Tony Abeyta’s Hunters Procession, 1995, animal imagery found on both totem poles and transformation masks, as well as various pottery, basketry, and katsina images found within MAM’s Rand Gallery. Fenelon, like Abeyta, believes that “if paintings are successful, they should communicate a powerful force, a feeling that is contained in all of us.” In this work, Fenelon is able to translate these feelings and inspirations of native art into his own vocabulary and vision.