Thursday, April 19, 7:00 pm

MAM and MSU are honored to welcome John Elderfield, Ph.D., chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at MoMA as well as, curator of their most recent De Kooning exhibition. De Kooning is widely considered to be among the most important and prolific artists of the 20th century. Dr. Elderfield’s MoMA exhibition is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full scope of the artist’s career. John Elderfield has been the recipient of numerous fellowships for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an associate fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In addition, the French government awarded him an Officier des Arts et des Lettres. Please arrive early. The galleries will have extended hours from 5 to 7 pm. Tickets to the lecture include admission to the current exhibition on the day of the program.

Thursday, March 9, 7:00 pm

Please join The Montclair Art Museum and Montclair State University in welcoming Holland Cotter, chief art critic at the New York Times. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Criticism in 2009. In 2010, he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Writing by the College Art Association. He was for many years a contributing editor at Art in America. Please arrive early. The galleries will have extended hours from 5 to 7 pm. Tickets to the lecture include admission to the current exhibition on the day of the program.

Thursday December 1, 7:00 pm

At a moment when corporate money, special interests and partisan politics seem to trump policies that promote human welfare and sustainable ecology, it is important to remember the power of individual action. This panel presents Reverend Billy and Lillian Ball, who have explored activist strategies that mobilize others in the service of environmental remediation and economic justice. Eleanor Heartney will serve as moderator for this discussion.

Reverend Billy Talen is the leader of the Church of Earthalujah.  This is a New York City based radical performance community, with 50 performing members and a congregation in the thousands. They are wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters, earth loving urban activists who have worked with communities on 4 continents defending land, life and imagination from reckless development and the extractive imperatives of global capital. They employ multiple tactics and creative strategies, including cash register exorcisms, retail interventions, cell phone operas combined with grass roots organizing and media activism. They are entertainers and artists, performing regularly throughout The US and Europe.

Lillian Ball is a multimedia artist and environmental activist working in NY. Water imagery has been a constant in the work for over 30 years, continuing, now with a focus on water quality issues. Recent work uses a variety of methods, such as game installations or video projections to address environmental concerns ranging from climate change to wetland conservation. In addition, Ball was appointed to the Southold, NY Land Preservation + Stewardship Committee where she has served on an ongoing basis since 2006.  Her most recent works are the permanent WATERWASH™ public projects combing storm water remediation, wetland restoration, and educational outreach.

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. Eleanor Heartney's books include: Art and Today, 2008; After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, 2007; Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, 2004 and Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order, 2006 and Postmodernism, 2001.

Thursday October 13, 7:00 pm

Vito Acconci’s design & architecture comes from another direction, from backgrounds of writing & art. His poems in the late 60’s treated words as matter & the page as a field to move over; his performances in the early 70’s shifted art from object to interaction; his installations in the later 70’s turned museums & galleries into community-meetings. By the late 80’s his work crossed over & he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science. They treat architecture not as nodes but as circulation-routes & about time as much as about space; they make spaces fluid, changeable & portable; they design buildings that slip into landscape & vice versa, but they start with clothing & end with vehicles; they make architecture subservient to people & not vice versa -- they anticipate cities on the move. Built in the last decade are, in Graz, a person-made island; in Tokyo, a clothing store as soft as clothing; in Coney Island an elevated subway-station façade that waves & bulges to make views & seats. About to be built, in Indianapolis, is an interactive tunnel through a building; in Toronto, a building-complex fence that twists & rises up the building to make wind-screens, & splits to make public-places. They’re designing now, near Eindhoven, a meditation park around an archeological site; in Luzerne, a portable retractable roof; in Santiago, a plaza divided into cluster-places for self-organization.

Thursday April 14, 7:00 pm

Jeff Koons studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York City and York, Pennsylvania. Mr. Koons’ work has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), The National Gallery (Washington, DC), Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA), The Eli Broad Family Foundation (Santa Monica, CA), Tate Gallery (London, UK), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Tokyo Metropolitan Museum (Tokyo, Japan). Mr. Koons is also known for his public sculptures, such as the monumental floral sculptures Puppy, shown at Rockefeller Center and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao, and Split-Rocker, exhibited at the Papal Palace in Avignon, France. Most recently, in 2006, Balloon Flower (Red) was unveiled at 7 World Trade Center in New York City. Mr. Koons has lectured at many universities and institutions, including Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Yale University (New Haven, CT), Columbia University (New York, NY), New York University (New York, NY), the Royal Academy of Arts (London, UK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC).

Tuesday March 29, 7:00 pm

Uncommon Threads is a panel discussion with Lucky DeBellevue, Orly Genger, and Aric Obrosey moderated by Matthew Nichols. This eclectic group of contemporary artists share an interest in labor-intensive craft traditions such as knitting, crochet and lace-making. But their diverse practices and unorthodox materials generate a wide range of artistic statements. Matthew Nichols, Visiting Critic in Residence at Montclair State University, will lead a discussion of the artists' similarities and differences.

Thursday February 17, 7:00 pm

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. As a photographer and video-artist, Shirin Neshat was recognized for her brilliant portraits of women through the Women of Allah series. She also directed several videos, among them Anchorage (1996) and, projected on two opposing walls: Shadow under the Web (1997), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999). Neshat's recognition became more international in 1999, when she won the International Award of the XLVIII Biennial of Venice with Turbulent and Rapture, a project involving almost 250 extras and produced by the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, which met with critical and public success after its worldwide avant-première at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1999. In 2001-02, Neshat collaborated with singer Sussan Deyhim and created Logic of the Birds, which was produced by curator and art historian RoseLee Goldberg. The full-length multimedia production premiered at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in 2002 and toured to the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis and to Artangel in London. Shirin Neshat has become one of the most well known Persian artist within the Western artistic world. Shirin was profiled in The New Yorker magazine in October 22, 2007. In 2009 Neshat won the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival for her directional debut "Women without Men", based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel of the same name. The film examines the 1953 British- and American-backed coup, which supplanted Iran's democratically elected government with a monarchy.

Mariko Mori

Thursday, December 2, 7 p.m.

Mariko Mori is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been acquired by museums and private collectors worldwide. Educated in Tokyo, London, and New York, Mori gained recognition for her interactive installation, WAVE UFO, which debuted at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in 2003. The installation was subsequently shown in New York and Genoa, and included in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Mori’s recent large sculptures include Tom Na Hiu (2006) and Plant Opal (2009), both of which contain elements that interact with their natural environments. Mori’s monumental installations have been exhibited throughout the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Prada Foundation, Milan; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Serpentine Gallery, London; the Dallas Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her works have been in collections of Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Prada Foundation, Milan; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pinchuk Arts Centre, Kiev; Aros Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Benesse Art Site, Naoshima. Mori has received various awards including the prestigious Menzioni d’Onore at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 (awarded for “Nirvana”), and the 8th Annual Award as a promising Artist and Scholar in the Field of Contemporary Japanese Art in 2001 from Japan Cultural Arts Foundation. Mori is currently based in New York.

Leonardo Drew

Tuesday, October 12, 7:00 pm

Leonardo Drew is best known for his dynamic large-scale sculptural installations. Drew attended Parsons School of Design and received a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His sculptures can be seen as exercises in formalism rooted in the very experience of looking. The work also explores memory by employing a wide range of material to evoke common elements of the human experience and our diverse histories. Drew lives and works in Brooklyn and San Antonio, Texas, and is represented by Sikkema & Jenkins Gallery, located in Chelsea, NYC.