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.

Miotte Foundation

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.

Permanent Collection

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