Mission
The Chelsea Art Museum, Home of the Miotte Foundation, is
committed to an exploration of “art within a context.”
This approach favors a program of exhibitions which reflect
contemporary human experience across a broad spectrum of cultural,
social, environmental and geographical contexts. CAM’s
exhibitions, each supported by a rich series of related cultural
events and educational programs, seek to support in both its
artists and audiences a sense of creativity, community and
cultural exchange. Co-founder and president, Dorothea Keeser,
describes CAM’s curatorial vision as, “a commitment
to art as a living entity which reacts and interacts with
us and changes the way one continues to live one’s daily
life ”.
In collaboration with a network of museums and visual arts
institutions both national and international, The Chelsea
Art Museum seeks to present important, but relatively unexplored
dimensions of 20th and 21st Century art, particularly focusing
on artists that have been less exposed in the United States
than in their home countries. The museum, a 30,000 sq foot
renovated historic building in the heart of Chelsea, is located
opposite the piers which served as entry for the arrival and
assimilation of foreign cultures into New York. This location
provides a powerful symbol of the museum’s mission:
to be a meeting point, a destination for exhibitions and works
from Europe, the Americas and Asia and returning CAM generated
exhibitions to those partners both overseas and within the
United States.
CAM also serves as the home of the Jean Miotte Foundation
which is dedicated to archiving, preserving, presenting and
making available for exhibitions the work of Jean Miotte.
Rotating selections of Miotte’s work are shown on a
regular basis, as are selections from the permanent collection
which includes rare holdings of such artists as Pol Bury,
Mimmo Rotella, and J.P. Riopelle.
The Museum also presents film, performance and frequent artist
talks and round-tables which seek to foster cross cultural
and interdisciplinary debate.
The Chelsea Art Museum is
also the Home of the Miotte Foundation, which is dedicated to archiving
and conserving the oeuvre of Jean Miotte and providing new scholarship
and research on L’Informel. Miotte’s
extensive collected works are preserved as a legacy for New York,
where he has had a studio in SoHo since 1978.
The art of Informel (or Informal Art) had an important role in
the European and American post-war art scene, and Miotte was an
early proponent. Meaning “formless,” or “away from
form,” Informel is related to Abstract Expressionism, but seeks
to strip away all reference to representation, and to become a new
kind of international language.
Miotte (b.1926) has exhibited regularly since 1952. He first arrived
in New York in 1961 with a Ford Foundation cultural exchange grant,
and after a period of work and travel throughout the U.S. he had
his first New York one-man show in 1962 at Alexander Iolas. Later
his work was exhibited by the Martha Jackson and Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer
galleries.
Miotte describes abstract painting as “a voyage through the
20th century”—revealing at once an experience of
alienation and yet breaking through barriers of nationalism
to create a wholly international language. Within his framework
of gestural abstraction, Miotte continues to grow, fighting
repetition, pushing at the boundaries of the gestural mark
of paint on canvas. Miotte is represented in the collections
of the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, and numerous other major museums
in the U.S., Europe and Asia. In 1980 he was the first Western
painter invited to exhibit in post-Mao Bejing.
The collection of the Chelsea Art Museum includes many European
abstract artists often labeled as Informel, including
Corpora, Lakner, Kirkeby, Millares, Miotte, Santomaso, Schumacher,
Stöhrer, Thieler, Vedova. The collection also holds American
abstract artists Francis, LaNoue, Mitchell, Motherwell, Riopelle;
a large body of works by the Affichiste Mimmo Rotella; and works
by Jean Arp, Olivier Debré, Jean Fautrier, and Ellen Levy.
Sculptors in the collection include Bernar Venet, Pol Bury, Kanter,
Jeff Beer, Johannsen
and Zadkine. The collection also has an important selection of
rare books and works on paper. Growing the collection is an important
priority for the Museum.
Also: HISTORY OF OUR BUILDING
 |
