An Innovative Interdisciplinary Educational Partnership between the MMFA and the ITHQ
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and the Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec (ITHQ) are proud to announce a new interdisciplinary educational partnership. Rising from a common desire to promote learning and creativity, its goal is to sensitize ITHQ students to different forms of art, through opportunities to meet with artists and connect with artworks from the Museum’s encyclopaedic collection.
Beginning this semester, ITHQ students in the Formation supérieure en cuisine [Advanced Culinary Training] program will have the opportunity to visit the MMFA's collections free of charge and to exercise their culinary creativity after encounters with artists exhibiting at the Museum. These unique experiences will help raise the students’ awareness about various forms of cultural expression and enrich the artistic and emotional content of their training.
Guided tours of the collection will spark their imagination and inspire new creative techniques, while meetings with artists will be an opportunity to learn more about the artistic process and its creative source. Back at the ITHQ kitchens, the students will be asked to don their aprons and create dishes inspired by their emotional response to the works: and the artist whom they had met will be invited to sample these ephemeral culinary works and listen to the narratives behind them.
Students in the Formation internationale en service et sommellerie de restaurant [International Training in Restaurant and Sommelier Services] program will have a similar educational experience. After visiting the Museum's collections, they will be asked to taste a panel of wines and associate them with the feelings evoked by the artworks, guided by sommelier service professor, Lianne Castravelli.
Students in the Baccalauréat en gestion du tourisme et de l’hôtellerie [Bachelor's in Tourism and Hospitality Management] and the Hautes Études en gestion hôtelière internationale [Advanced Studies in International Hotel Management] programs will also be able to visit the MMFA collections. Guided by their teacher, Robert Laporte, they will be encouraged to consider the similarities between the artistic process and management of the client experience.
This educational agreement follows a successful pilot project conducted in 2017 by Professor Isabelle Diguer with the support of professor/chefs Benoît Lenglet and Gilles Herzog. Graduates of the ITHQ’s Formation supérieure en cuisine program had been invited to create dishes inspired by Catherine Bolduc’s Escape Attempt (2016) installation, shown in the exhibition Mnemosyne: When Contemporary Art and the Art of the Past Meet.
Culinary creation inspired by the art work Escape Attempt (2016), by Catherine Bolduc, executed by Veronique Dupont-Parent in the context of the ITHQ’s Advanced Culinary Arts program, in 2018.
