About the
Michel de la Chenelière Centre for Learning and the Arts
Photo: MMFA, Denis Farley
At 3,588 square metres in area, the Michel de la Chenelière Centre for Learning and the Arts is the largest educational complex in a North American art museum, welcoming over 300,000 participants to its activities every year.
Thanks to the expansion of this space in 2016, the MMFA has increased the number and scope of its ambitious educational and community programs, and at the same time launched innovative health and art therapy initiatives.
Michel de la Chenelière
A great benefactor of education
Michel de la Chenelière has long held a passion for art and education. A native of Normandy, he moved to Montreal at the age of twenty. Some fifteen years after beginning to work in publishing, he founded his own company, which focused on educational titles. As time passed and acquisitions were made, Chenelière Éducation became North America’s biggest French-language publisher in the field of education.
Since selling the company in 2006, Michel de la Chenelière has devoted himself fully to his philanthropic activities. Thoroughly convinced of the power of art to change people’s lives, in 2011 he made a first exceptional gift to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts of $3 million and then, four years later, a second gift of $2 million. Thanks to such generous donations, the Museum has been able to enlarge the Michel de la Chenelière Centre for Learning and the Arts space and increase the number of its education and art therapy projects.
In addition, along with the MMFA, this great benefactor of education has created a scholarship program recognizing the excellence of a master’s thesis on the Museum’s collections.
The Michel de la Chenelière Centre for Learning and the Arts would not exist were it not for the generous and essential support of the Fondation Michel de la Chenelière.
