Montclair Art Museum: Selected Works [Paperback] Stavitsky, Gail; Fischer, Diane P.; Johnson, Twig and Birmingham, Mary

The Montclair Art Museum -- heralded by Art and Antiques as " . . . a model of the best that America's regional museums have to offer today" -- has been a significant visual arts center for more than eighty-five years. Established in 1914 as the Garden State's first public art museum with the vision and generosity of community leaders and pioneering collectors of American and native American Art, the Museum's holdings have become an important cultural repository both for New Jersey and the nation. Many devotees of American art have enjoyed the Museum's individual works at different exhibits around the country.

This beautiful volume offers an illustrated cross section of a collection of 15,000 works. The more than 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs featured here reveal the museum collection's breadth and many recent acquisitions. A special section covers the Museum's important concentration of works by America's greatest landscape painter George Inness, whose presence in Montclair may be said to have inspired the founding of the Museum. Another significant section features works of the Morgan Russell Collection and Archive, a collection of more than 9,000 works on paper that record the complexities of the artist's aesthetic and intellectual adventures, especially his development as part of the first declared American modern art movement, Synchromism, from 1912 to 1914.

The Montclair Art Museum is one of a surprisingly small number of U.S. museums dedicated solely to art produced in this country, and it is remarkable for its shared focus on native American art produced by the many indigenous culture groups of North America and on works produced by European and other settlers in the post-colonial period. This volume combines Native and other American art within a range of artistic media in provocative and insightful ways, and its commentaries reflect the careful scholarship and commitment to public education for which the Museum is well known.

Gail Stavitsky is an experienced Chief Curator with a demonstrated history of working in art museums. She specializes in American Modernism and is responsible for the care, preservation and programming of the Montclair Art Museum's exhibitions and permanent collection, which encompass American art from the 18th century to the present.

Diane P. Fischer has spent her career combining museum work, teaching, and art consulting. She received a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York majoring in American Art and minoring in the History of Photography. Her dissertation was later published in both English and French as a multi-authored catalogue for the exhibition Paris 1900: The "American School" at the Universal Exposition (1999 - 2001). This major exhibition, which she organized as a curator at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, traveled to four venues, including the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. Some of her other many other publications include essays in Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg (2008) and The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism (2005).

Twig Johnson received his Ph.D. in ecological anthropology from Columbia University, doing fieldwork among small scale fishermen in Portugal, Brazil and Anegada (BVI). He has participated in many international sustainable development negotiations as a member of US, UN or NGO delegations. He is currently on leave from the Policy and Global Affairs Division of the National Academy of Science where he developed a Science for Sustainability Initiative. He likes to spend quality time with people he cares about, ideally on or next to the sea, and was recently sworn in as Assistant Harbormaster and Deputy Shellfish Commissioner of Kingston, Massachusetts.

Mary Birmingham is Curator of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Born in the suburbs of Boston, Birmingham moved to New Jersey with her family as a teenager. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from Seton Hall University, New Jersey before moving to New York City to attend New York University for graduate school, though she subsequently dropped out to begin work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Birmingham paused her career in order to start a family back in New Jersey, but ten years later she enrolled at Hunter College to complete her graduate Art History degree. She became active in the art world again by writing, curating independently, and teaching adjunct class at Montclair State University and Kean University before taking on a position in the curatorial department at the Montclair Art Museum. Birmingham worked at the museum for nine years before moving on to the Hunterdon Art Museum and then the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in 2011.