Design 21: Social Design Network

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.