(Rahway, NJ) -- Arts Guild New Jersey located at 1670 Irving Street in the Downtown Rahway Arts District will host the premier opening of the MUCY Project, a portable micromuseum. Museum hours will be from 12 Noon to 6:00 PM on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, August 15, 15 and 16, 2015.
This project is the brainchild of Cranford resident, Lya Finston and her friend, architecture student Max Glazer. Lya Finston is a sophomore at Oberlin College/Cranford resident/Cranford High School Class of 2014.
A prospective Visual Art major at Oberlin College, Lya has been making art for as long as she can remember, centered primarily around drawing, painting, and collage. Her first art class outside of the Cranford public school system was a drawing class at the Arts Guild New Jersey in Rahway, which she attributes to the beginning of her lifelong love for the visual arts.
Inspiration for MUCY
Growing up in Cranford just an hour train-ride away from New York City, Lya frequented Manhattan’s art museums from an early age. After high school, she became very interested in pursuing museum work in any way she could – namely in curation and art restoration. MUCY is the second of her art curation projects, the first of which was a public art show of student work and American Cancer Society fundraiser at the Cranford Community Center in the spring of 2014. She is also currently interning at an art restoration company in Chelsea, Manhattan. Pursuing her interest in museum work, she enrolled in a month-long museum education and docent program at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio. The program’s academic approach toward the museum environment fueled her interest in creating and running one of her own.
The idea for MUCY (the Micromuseum of Union County Youth) was inspired by a Los Angeles Magazine article on the Los Angeles Museum of Art or LAMOA, a portable, 9-by-12 ½ foot “micromuseum” created by German-born artist Alice Könitz. Eager to put her ideas into action, Lya went to her friend Max Glazer, a friend of hers from high school and a sophomore studying architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, who agreed to partner with her on the project and design the structure, itself.
About the Project
Mission: MUCY’s mission is to provide an accessible, nonprofit, portable space for showcasing and spreading awareness of local student artists within Union County.
Structure: The museum is a 6-by-6 foot and 8 foot high wooden structure of three walls, a floor, and a ceiling meant to function as a miniature museum and fits one viewer inside at a time. The museum will be installed in a different town in Union County every Friday around 11am after its initial opening and run until around 5-6pm the following Saturday and Sunday, each time featuring the work of two different local student artists, one of whose work will be displayed on the interior walls of the museum, and other of whose work will be displayed on the exterior walls. As a pop-up museum, the plywood structure is collapsible in order to better transport it from place to place.
In addition to presenting the museum at Arts Guild New Jersey in Rahway, the artists intend to arrange openings in Summit, Cranford, Westfield, and Clark for MUCY’s summer tour. Exhibitions will feature the works of Cranford residents Annelise Sforza, Justin Dinspechin, Nick Ricardo, James Doyl, and Max Glazer, and Westfield residents Brendan Lenihan, William Nisley, and Noor El-Sherbeini. They hope that MUCY’s inaugural summer tour will introduce the MUCY team to young artists from other towns and thereby broaden the project’s Union County township representation for future summer tours. A variety of art forms will be represented throughout the summer, including poetry, music and sound, drawing and painting, three-dimensional art and sculpture, and photography.
For information about the MUCY project, please contact Arts Guild New Jersey at (732) 381-7511 or by email at info@agnj.org.
ABOUT THE ARTS GUILD NEW JERSEY
Arts Guild New Jersey is a non-profit center for the arts located in the downtown Arts District of Rahway. Each year, the Guild presents a series of fine art exhibitions and an art education program that includes studio art classes for adults, teens and children, an on-going series of intensive one-day workshops for adults, and a series of summer art workshops for teens and children. Arts Guild New Jersey is easily accessible from the Garden State Parkway, NJ Turnpike, Routes 1 & 9, Saint Georges Avenue (Route 27/35), and by train, via NJ Transit Northeast Corridor and Jersey Shore Lines. The exhibit program at Arts Guild New Jersey is made possible, in part, by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, and by a grant from the Horizon Foundation for New Jersey, which promotes health, well-being and quality of life in New Jersey’s communities, including the arts.
