CreARTivity
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Morris County: Art Institutions by Municipality
Morris County keeps its art in unusually good rooms, from Morristown's 1937 movie palace to a hilltop museum of automata. A town-by-town guide to its institutions.
In this article
Morris County keeps its art in unusually good rooms. Morristown, where Washington’s army wintered twice, has turned a 1937 movie palace into one of the busiest theatres in the state, and a hilltop mansion into a museum whose collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata is among the finest anywhere. Out at Madison, a university campus holds the state’s Shakespeare company, and up in Netcong a small palace theatre stages work for young audiences. What follows is a guide to those spaces, gathered town by town.
A quick note: opening hours, locations, websites and programming can change over time. Please confirm the details with each venue before you plan your visit.
Madison
2 institutionsTheater
Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey
The state’s professional classical theatre company, based at the F. M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre on the Drew University campus, with an intimate indoor stage, a summer outdoor amphitheatre, and a deep commitment to teaching.
Museum
Museum of Early Trades & Crafts
Housed in a richly detailed Romanesque Revival library building on Main Street, a museum of the hand crafts and working trades of early New Jersey, with tools, objects and changing exhibitions.
Morristown
3 institutionsMuseum · Theater
Morris Museum
An art, science and history museum on Normandy Heights Road, celebrated for the Guinness Collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata, with the Bickford Theatre and a summer concert series on its grounds.
Performing Arts
Mayo Performing Arts Center
Built in 1937 as the Community Theatre, the jewel of Walter Reade’s New Jersey cinema chain, left idle for a decade and rescued, and now a nonprofit presenting more than two hundred events a year on South Street.
Museum · Historic House
Macculloch Hall Historical Museum
An early nineteenth-century Federal mansion with period rooms, a walled garden, and a notable collection of works by the cartoonist Thomas Nast, who lived across the street and invented the modern image of Santa Claus.
Netcong
1 institutionTheater
The Growing Stage
New Jersey’s children’s theatre, staging professional productions and workshops in the Historic Palace Theatre on Ledgewood Avenue, with a mission to make theatre a shared family experience.
Morris has more arts organisations than it has stages to hold them, and the county’s cultural life is stitched together by groups without a fixed address: Morris Arts, which acts as the county’s connective tissue, the Harmonium Choral Society, the New Jersey Ballet, the Women’s Theater Company, and a summer of free festivals on the Morristown Green and the lawns of Giralda Farms. Next in the series we cross into another North Jersey county and keep the map growing, one town at a time.
Author
About the author
CreARTivity Educational Team
The Educational Team writes CreARTivity's reference work: histories of artistic disciplines, guides to cultural traditions, and the county-by-county surveys of arts institutions across New Jersey. Its brief is to be useful to someone meeting a subject for the first time and still worth reading to someone who already knows it. Edited by Marie Juliane David.
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