Montclair museum’s new curator exhibits a precocious feel for art of New Jersey

by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Staff Writer

It’s one thing for parents to think of their children as artistically gifted. It’s another when someone a little more objective confirms the notion.

Alex Greenberger developed a love for art at a precocious age. He began pulling art books from the family’s shelves when he was three years old. After going through that collection, Alex, now a seventh-grader at Glenfield Middle School in Montclair, buzzed through the stacks of the town’s libraries; his father, Dr. Lee Greenberger, director of oncology research at Johnson and Johnson in Raritan, would all but buckle under the weight of the numerous volumes he would bring home from these trips.

The rest of the family is similarly enmeshed in the arts: Alex’s mother, Randy Simon, is an art therapist; his nine-year-old brother, Michael, is a ballet dancer.
After hearing a lecture by Twig Johnson, the Montclair Art Museum’s curator of Native American art and former director of education, at a museum family day in 2004, Alex became enamored of the idea of designing his own exhibit. He approached Johnson, and the mechanism was soon in the works.

Alex is the MAM’s first Youth Selects Curator. Working with current education director Gary Schneider, Alex went through “hundreds and hundreds” of images at the museum over the course of a year to come up with those included in his exhibit “Views of New Jersey,” a collection of works by George Inness, John Sloan, Edward Hopper, and Andy Warhol, among others.

The exhibit opened Dec. 4.

“To curate is to pick a [theme] and figure out what looks good next to each other,” said Alex, “the colors, the topic of the painting, and the size.”

He became fascinated by the amount of works that featured New Jersey and New York scenes and worked to develop a “thematic collection of images.” He identified three categories that together create a narrative walk, beginning with “Through New Jersey,” chiefly pastoral scenes from the late 18th century; transitioning through “The Bridge,” modernist works dealing with transit and movement; and ending with “The Block,” scenes of a bustling New York City.

Alex explained the thought processes behind some of his choices to NJ Jewish News. He picked Warhol’s Seven Cadillacs, for example, because “in New York there’s a lot of traffic so I think the Cadillac is a good representation.”

A learning process

Alex learned the stages of curating — research, honing thematic concepts, selecting and editing images, writing labels and descriptive text, framing the works, and creating a floor plan for the installation.

“We were very excited to work with Alex,” Schneider said. “We didn’t necessarily know that he would curate the show. There were a number of different options. He could have worked on labeling the images, working as a teen docent…but he was pretty sure he wanted to curate the show, and we had to figure out how.

“The thing that’s really different [about the program] is that it’s not about making art,” said Schneider, “but about looking at art and putting it together to create a show.”

Alex didn’t ask his mother for guidance or suggestions during his yearlong project. “[He] wouldn’t give me much information about what he was doing,” Simon said. “He wanted to surprise me. The only influence I had was in terms of his having access to my art history books and starting his own collection.”

In addition to serving as Youth Selects Curator, Alex is doing community service at MAM for his bar mitzva project as a religious school student at Bnai Keshet in Montclair.

“Views of New Jersey” will be on display in the lobby outside the museum’s Le Brun Library through spring 2006. For more information, contact the Montclair Art Museum at 973-746-5555 or visit www.montclairartmuseum .org.

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