Notes on Napkins at Morris Museum

Exhibition Details

December 12, 2025 – May 17, 2026

Morris Museum

6 Normandy Heights Rd. Morristown, NJ 07960

In 2020, 100 American composers were commissioned by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance to share their visual thinking for a project called Notes on Napkins: 2020. Gary Lichtenstein Editions produced prints from the results, which are on view in Museum Court.

Many artists, writers and composers “think” on paper, capturing an otherwise fleeting inspiration in an unexpected moment before it disappears. New masterpieces have found their beginnings on scratch pads, sticky notes, the backs of envelopes and so too on the humble paper napkin.

At the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic, Kristy Edmunds instigated a micro-commissioning project for 100 music makers through UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA). Co-curated with colleagues at Pomegranate Arts, they invited music artists from diverse cultural and creative realities to contribute a small composition, lyric, drawing or musing. Each received a small stack of napkins, a few pens, and a very modest honorarium that was sent by mail to wherever they were based while the world’s stages remained shuttered.

Notes on Napkins (2020) is the limited print edition resulting from their singular responses. The project is a rare collection of musical thought arrested in visual time. Each artist’s personal approach— spontaneous or exacting, poetic or imbued with defiant wit— offers remarkable perspective on their creative, resilient and generous habits of being. Like the music they are known for, these artists make authentic and poetic use of the moment at hand even when the opportunity arrives in the form of a small paper square during a global pandemic.