The city of Montreal, its history and its significant figures will be celebrated throughout the fall in the metropolis’s museums. Take a look at the offer of some of them.
McCord Stewart Museum
Relating the riches of the individuals and communities making up the fabric of Montreal, this is the mission of the McCord Stewart Museum, honored this back-to-school season with four new exhibitions to see before Christmas, in addition to the permanent retrospective Indigenous Voices Today. Knowledge, trauma, resilience. If we will have to wait until December to marvel at The mechanical Christmas windows from the Ogilvy store and his childhood memories dating back to 1947, To all those women who we don’t did not nameby artist-in-residence Michaëlle Sergile, is already shaping up to be one of the key designs of the year. Interested in the founding of the Colored Women’s Club of Montreal in 1902, the artist gathered archives of the black communities of Montreal, beyond the contents of traditional knowledge which sometimes avoided large parts of their realities. Other titles to remember at the McCord Stewart Museum: Manasie Akpaliapik. Inuit universe (from October 4, 2024 to March 9, 2025) and Costume balls. Dress up the storye 1870-1927 (from November 14, 2024 to August 17, 2025).
Ecomuseum of the proud world
As of October 24, Crossroads and culture. Rue Ontario des Faubourgs, at the Écomusée du fier monde, will take us to the section of Ontario Street in the Centre-Sud district of Montreal, a corner of the city rich in history, which has long nourished our popular culture and its artisans. Buildings from an industrial past, parish centers, passers-by with colorful luggage: we will explore the places of all kinds of encounters. In addition, there is still time, until October 13, to dive into EMPOWERED. The gesture, the spirit and the materialselection of photographs by Pierre Fauteux taken from Montreal to Paris.
Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC)
Abenaki documentary filmmaker, activist and singer Alanis Obomsawin, one of the world’s most acclaimed indigenous filmmakers, is at the heart of the exhibition Children need to hear another storyone of the fresh jewels of the Museum of Contemporary Art (presented until January 26, 2025). Cinematographic, visual and musical works of the great lady are listed there by decades, supported by documents from yesteryear and reports attesting to the changes in society made in the wake of Mme Obosawin. The exhibition is enhanced by an exclusive mural by the artist Caroline Monnet, Wàbigonwhich means “a flower blooms” in Anishinaabemowin and which reflects the colossal legacy of Alanis Obomsawin.
Montreal Memory Center (MEM)
Marking its first year of existence, the Montreal Memories Center has just inaugurated its first signature installation, simply titled Montreal. “What is Montreal, who is it? » asks the premise of the project. This panorama of the metropolis and its population materializes through testimonies, objects, photos, digital animations, a tangle of characteristics of the city and new stories “on a human scale”. Life path, languages, homes, municipal ecosystem: Montreal is in the spotlight in all its splendours! The MEM programming includes several other activities to complete this main offering.
Quebec Museum of Crafts (MUMAQ)
Of thread and paperthe current invitation from the Musée des métiers d’art du Québec (until October 27), highlights its curator, paper sculptor Marie-José Gustave, as well as the work of eight other Quebec and Canadian artists transcending paper using various techniques. Innovative contemporary practices, know-how, approaches and inspirations are revealed through a multitude of carefully and delicately prepared blends.
Château Dufresne
Another little piece of Montreal’s past is reflected these days at Château Dufresne, and until June 29, 2025, in Viauville is the future! Based on the dream of Charles-Théodore Viau, founder, in 1867, of Biscuiterie Viau & Frère, to build his small residential town on the banks of the river, the exhibition recounts the establishment of this “little Westmount of the east », maintained by the descendants of Viau. The name will eventually be attached to the eastern district of Maisonneuve, now a stronghold of the Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. Failing to have realized his urban ambition, Charles-Théodore Viau will have bequeathed urban planning principles and innovative architectural strategies.
Arsenal Contemporary art
Admirers of Diane Dufresne are entitled to a complete foray into the life and career of their idol with the immersive exhibition Diane Dufresne. Today, yesterday and forever, on the Arsenal Contemporary art program until October 13. The most eccentric and flamboyant of our divas opens her drawers and wardrobes wide: along the way are her dresses (so broken!), her records, her sculptures, her personal archives (photos, handwritten notes, newspaper articles and magazines) and other objects testifying to his extraordinary legacy to Quebec culture. If this is the case, her fans will bite their fingers at having missed such an appointment with the singer-songwriter, voice of Hold on, I’m coming! And Oxygen. The Arsenal is also inaugurating, this weekend, Tintin, the immersive adventure, immersed in the comic epic of the intrepid reporter.
Phi Center
If the walls could speak, they would perhaps tell the story of the excited, overloaded slices of life, evocative of a thousand and one human scenes, sketched in the photos of Clustersa free exhibition by the illustrious André Turpin, director, cinematographer and screenwriter, and Léa Valérie Létourneau, artistic director and cinema decorator, which the Phi Center is proud to host until October 20.
A young couple embraces, hidden behind the filing cabinets of a storage room where, a few meters away, animal stuffed animals rest on top of a cupboard or books on a lower shelf . A dismayed man seems to be reflecting on the greatest catastrophe of his life, hiding his eyes with one hand, in an office strewn with scattered papers, while a pair of legs appear in front of him which we can guess belong to an interlocutor in waiting for some response, envelope in hand. Angry children in a messy living room, popcorn at their feet, under the gaze of a guard absorbed in her cell phone. A man – the writer and rapper Biz, in this case (who agreed to participate in the affair out of friendship for Turpin) – writes down a thought in pencil with one hand, holds a trumpet in the other in a workshop of an excessively cluttered artist. There are many short films to fantasize about while visiting Clusterswhich currently has less than ten paintings, but which must improve over the years. For the moment, the office – or a room with all the appearances of one – is the predominant setting, but we are reinventing it according to the people and things who inhabit it.
“Rather than starting from an idea of a scene, an emotion, a character, we start above all from a place, which inspires us with an in-depth staging, characters and story,” mentioned André Turpin at the launch of Clusters, on September 19, to explain their approach.
“In a photo, there is no scenario, unlike in cinema; in a film, there is a whole prelude to the experience we are about to live in a scene. In one photo, the spectator arrives in the middle of the film and must invent the scenario himself. In some ways, it is a “hot” medium. The observer must participate himself, even if he is given clues! »
The Phi Center will also hold the exhibition Coded dreams from October 9 to January 12, 2025, a look at the twists and turns of artificial intelligence, where art and technology will merge to transform “complex data into dreamlike, interactive and participatory stories”.
This content was produced by the Special Publications team at Dutyrelating to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part.