A to Sze: Collecting at MAM (2000-2025)

During the past 25 years, the Montclair Art Museum’s collection has grown significantly, in accordance with its mission to reflect the rich diversity of American culture, past and present. Featuring a variety of historic, modern, and contemporary works from 1880 through 2024, this collection-based exhibition also encompasses a range of themes, styles, art movements, and mediums. The exhibition title playfully references the names of two featured contemporary artists, Derrick Adams and Sarah Sze. The mixed media collage There’s More Than One Beauty School (2018) by Adams and Sze’s large-scale installation Random Walk Drawing (Air) (2011) are among the Museum’s most recent and ambitious acquisitions. They are presented here for the first time, along with 23 other works, rarely or never displayed before.

Themes of spirituality, history, global cultures, artistic agency, and social justice resonate throughout the manifold variety of works on view, acquired via purchases and generous donations since 2000. MAM continues to make strategic additions to the collection with artwork by both established and emerging American and Indigenous artists, with an emphasis on members of under-represented communities.