(EMAILWIRE.COM, November 02, 2002 ) The Chelsea Art Museum (CAM), located at 556 West 22 Street at 11th Avenue, will open on Thursday, November 14. The museum, in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district, occupies a completely renovated three-story brick building comprising some 30,000 square feet. A privately owned museum, open to the public, its mission is to provide a venue for art that might otherwise not be seen in New York. CAM will also be a home for the Miotte Foundation.

Confident that the heat of cutting edge art is adequately represented in New York, its founders, Dr. Dorothea Keeser and Jean Miotte, are dedicated to showing quality work by mid-career artists and young national and international artists not previously exposed to New York audiences. CAM is also committed to generating powerful thematic exhibitions and becoming a venue for midsize traveling shows from European and smaller American museums. As Dr. Keeser has commented, "A medium-size space such as ours can present the intimacy I often find lacking in institutional spaces. Near the Chelsea Piers, which has always been an entrance to New York, CAM can become a meeting point, where American shows come to New York and collide with their peers from overseas. The entry and commingling of foreign cultures and ideas has always been such an important aspect of the New York experience. We would like to feel that, in our small way, CAM is adding to and continuing this tradition."

The 10,000-square-foot ground-floor galleries are the museum's main exhibition spaces for contemporary art. The inaugural exhibition here is Samadhi: The Contemplation of Space. Curated by Robert Morgan, the exhibition features twelve artists whose work suggests spatial openness and attempts to break-down the subject-object relationship between artist and viewer. The Sanskrit term Samadhi alludes to a state of contemplation in which thought is made manifest in material form. Samadhi: The Contemplation of Space urges the viewer to yield to an intuitive and sensory understanding of each work's structure and meaning. Participating artists in the inaugural exhibition include Renè Pierre Allain, Robert Barry, Beom Moon, Frederick Eversly, Tadaaki Kuwayama, John McLaughlin, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Rakuko Naito, Mimmo Roselli and Kazuo Shiraga.

The second-floor gallery is designed for more intimate exhibitions, including works on paper, photography and video. The opening exhibition in the second-floor gallery is Shots in the Dark', a survey of actual crime photography curated by Gail Buckland. Although the pictures here were chosen for their psychological insights, they also address issues such as surveillance and privacy, freedom of the press, exploitation in the media, capital punishment, the psychology of serial killers and how photography has been used in some of the most sensational cases. Says Ms. Buckland, "Photography has the power to make us see. One of the purposes of this exhibition is a better understanding of violence in American society."

The loft like spaces of the third floor will serve as the home of the Miotte Foundation, an organization dedicated to archiving and conserving the oeuvre of Jean Miotte and providing new scholarship and research on L'Informel. Miotte's paintings will be exhibited alongside revolving selections from the permanent collection of the Miotte Foundation. The collection is strongly informed by European artists, including the Informel artists Kirkeby, Schummacher, Thieler, Stohrer, Lakner, Milares and Vedova; thirty works by the Affichiste Mimmo Rotella; and works by Jean Arp, Max Bill, Pol Bury, Robert Cronin, Olivier Debrè, Jean Fautrier, Albert Folon, Sam Francis and J. P. Riopelle. Sculptors in the collection include Bernar Venet, Kanter, Cronin and Zadkine. Growing the collection for CAM is an important priority for Dr. Keeser.

Forthcoming exhibitions include The Aesthetics of Rigor: New Italian Painting and Sculpture, curated by Barbara Rose, and Dangerous Beauty, curated by Manon Slome. Plans for an exhibition of contemporary Cuban art are also in progress.

The museum also has plans to present film, performance and frequent artist roundtables fostering cross-cultural and interdisciplinary debate. A bookstore and café are planned to open in early 2003.

The museum will be open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6 P.M. Suggested admission price is $5, and $2 for students and senior citizens.

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Produced for The Chelsea Art Museum (CAM)

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