Honoree Bios

Cynthia Corhan-Aitken grew up in Brooklyn and attended college at The Fashion Institute of Technology. Cynthia and her husband Murray moved to Montclair in 1999. At the time, Cynthia was running a successful Couture Bridal House in Soho working long hours and traveling around the country on weekends for trunk shows. After their older daughter turned three, it became clear that this lifestyle was unsustainable and she closed Cynthia C. & Company.

After many years as an apartment dweller with nothing more than window sills and a fire escape on which to garden, she found herself on an acre of property with a sweeping front and back lawn, a blank canvas, and a gardener was born.

Cynthia became a member of The Garden Club of Montclair in 2003. Over the last 20 years, she has served as chair of various committees including Flower Design, Workshops, and Programs, and mounted a Standard Flower Show in 2022.

In 2004, Cynthia discovered the Montclair Art Museum and began taking classes—Life Drawing, which brought her back to her days at FIT, and later Pastel Painting which she continues to do today. That was the start of a long and happy relationship with MAM.

When a friend asked for her help to fix up her garden for a party in 2007, Cynthia dug in and did so as a favor. At the party people asked who did the work, a second career was born. Cynthia began taking Landscape Design classes at the New York Botanical Garden in 2008, graduating in 2011, and incorporating Twig & Vine Design in 2012.  The combination of her love for art and her love for flower design led her to a years-long commitment to Art in Bloom. After creating a design for the first time in 2005, she has participated in every AIB since, including a virtual version during the pandemic, and has served as the Floral Design Chair since 2016. Becoming a member of the Board of Trustees in 2015 confirmed Cynthia’s commitment to the Montclair Art Museum, which has become an important and much-loved part of the life she has built in Montclair.

Philemona Williamson’s long career as a narrative painter explores the tenuous bridge between adolescence and adulthood, encapsulating the intersection of innocence and experience at its most piercing and poignant moment. She has shown widely, with solo shows at June Kelly Gallery in New York, Jenkins- Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, amid-career retrospective at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey in 2017 and a recent solo show at Galerie Semiose in Paris.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for The Arts, New York Foundation for The Arts, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 2022, she received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was awarded the Anonymous Was a Woman grant.

Philemona is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Montclair Art Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Hampton University Museum; The Mint Museum; Sheldon Art Museum; Smith College Museum of Art; the Kalamazoo Art Institute; Mott- Warsh Art Collection, AT&T, and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. Her public works include fused-glass murals created for the MTA Arts in Transit Program at the Livonia Avenue Subway Station in Brooklyn, a painting used by the MTA’s Poetry in Motion and, for the NYC School Authority, a mosaic mural in Queens. Additionally, she created a series of paintings for the children’s book “Lubaya’s Quiet Roar” from Penguin Random House.

Philemona has taught Painting and Drawing at Hunter College, Pratt Institute, SVA, Bard College, RISD, Cooper Union, and Parsons, as well as serving on the advisory board of the Getty Center for Education. She is currently on the board of directors of Doing Art Together and The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.