The Montreal Art Center and Museum is a not-for-profit community arts hub that has been supporting local artists since 2010, housed in a patrimonial building at 1844 William Street in the heart of Griffintown. The building itself is part of the story: put up in 1879 for the Caledonian Iron Works, which made parts for ship engines and trains, it now serves as the creative home to hundreds of member artists, with more than fifty open and private studio spaces plus dedicated rooms for the Ceramics Club. The mission is stated plainly — to support, assist and promote locally based visual and performing artists — and it comes with a clear-eyed recognition of how hard a professional career in art actually is. Emerging, amateur and hobby artists are all made welcome, and the membership programmes are built as much around friendship and collaboration as around skills and strategy. In fifteen years the centre has mounted over 200 exhibitions, putting thousands of works in front of the Montreal public and offering them for sale, and each year brings a fresh programme of significant shows, musical performances, lectures and cultural events — including an Emerging Artist Exhibition that opens the walls to non-members.
Walking through it feels a little like stepping into a time machine. Contemporary work by the resident artists shares the building with a permanent collection of nineteenth-century European and international painting and a remarkable holding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works on paper by Picasso, Monet, Rembrandt and others. The industrial past is still visible everywhere you look: 140-year-old safes, Douglas fir structural elements, antique furniture and display cases, and the historical wax statues salvaged from the former Grévin Museum. Best of all, some fifty resident artists are at work on site, and you can meet them — and, if something speaks to you, buy directly from them.
The evening programme is where the place really comes alive. Cinema is a fixture, with regular projections at 1844 William often running to a second show: recent months have brought Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, Jennifer's Body, Cronenberg's The Fly, and Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress, alongside a Film Club Night built around Breakfast at Tiffany's for the friendly movie-lovers' gathering it implies. Music and performance fill the rest of the calendar — an intimate Open Mic and New Talents evening at the Art Center Café with Rully Marten, a Saturday night of jazz, showtunes and originals from Sheli Stevens, whose voice has carried from cruise-ship stages to some of the best rooms in Montreal — and exhibitions keep arriving, among them Johanne Bernier's Havre de la brunante, a body of mixed oil and vivid colour in which wind, light, flowers, rain and trees become a language of peace, celebrating raw beauty, simplicity and the unity of nature.
Historic, generous, and genuinely run for the artists in it, the Montreal Art Center and Museum is a Griffintown institution where a nineteenth-century ironworks has become a place to see art being made, watch a film, hear a set, and take something home.