Montreal Museums Reopen to the Delight of the Art Deprived
Is your soul searching for a brief escape from a depressing mix of pandemic anxiety, curfew boredom and winter blues? Well, on Monday, February 8, all Montreal museums will finally be allowed to reopen their doors — during daytime hours only — to the delight of museum lovers; many of whom have been deprived of art and culture for more than four months due to the second covid-19 lockdown.
While some Montreal museums will be ready to see their public again on Monday or Tuesday, others will need more time to recall their staff, finalize the setting up of exhibitions or even put health measures back in place.
Here are the exhibitions to discover in the top 3 Montreal museums:
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)
Mark February 11 in your smartphone calendar as the date to set foot again at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), which will inaugurate its major exhibition Riopelle: The Call of Northern Landscapes and Indigenous Cultures. It will explore legendary abstract painter and sculptor Jean-Paul Riopelle’s interest in nordicity and indigenous communities, as well as the influence these territories and cultures had on his artistic production from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Three other exhibitions await visitors: GRAFIK! Five Centuries of German and Austrian Graphics; Yehouda Chaki: Mi Makir – A Search for the Missing; and Survivance, which spotlights the striking paintings of Haitian-born Montreal-based artist Manuel Mathieu during his first solo exhibition in a North American museum.
If you are a world art lover, check out Best Kept MTL‘s review of Arts of One World, the permanent intercultural exhibit inside the MMFA’s newest wing that opened in November 2019.
To enter the museum, you will need to have previously purchased your ticket online. Reservations will start on Tuesday.
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC)
The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, commonly known as the MAC, has announced that it will reopen its doors in full on February 10 and feature previously unseen exhibits. Ready since last September, the exhibition La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux will bring together the works of 34 artists from the Montreal region who have never or have rarely displayed at the MAC; while the exhibition Des horizons d’attente will unveil, for the first time, the works of 21 artists recently acquired by the museum.
Another must-see is John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea, a “devastatingly beautiful, heart-wrenching and incredibly timely” video installation which “weaves together multiple narratives that portray the ocean as a site of terror and of beauty”.
But also make sure not to miss a selection of works handpicked by John Zeppetelli, Director General and Chief Curator of the MAC.
McCord Museum
At the end of last September, the glamorous Christian Dior exhibition at the McCord Museum had only been launched for three days when the lockdown of the museums was announced for October 1. The dresses imagined by this master fashion designer will return on February 11 to explore “the brilliance behind Dior’s dramatic creations that revived the entire Parisian haute couture industry after the devastation of the Second World War”.
The three other exhibitions awaiting the public are Wearing our Identity – The First Peoples Collection; Griffintown – Evolving Montreal; and Chapleau, Profession: Cartoonist, which is the first major retrospective devoted to the creative work of Serge Chapleau, an icon of Quebec cartooning and scathing humor.
Much like some of the other Montreal museums, do remember that you must have booked your ticket online before entering the McCord.
Bottom line: Some collective art therapy is just what the doctor ordered. Enjoy!
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Speaking of reviving culture, here is an interesting report on how the city of Miami is making live theater work during the pandemic… that Montreal could draw inspiration from for the warmer days of the Spring!
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