During the 2022 Studio Tour, the Gallery at Art House Productions was, ever so briefly, open to the public. Curator Andrea McKenna put together a crisp show that highlighted many of the Art House Productions’s favorite creators, including several who’d exhibited strong work at the organization’s old gallery on 17th Street. Here was a reminder, in […]
Tris McCall
Tris McCall has written about art, architecture, performance, politics, and public culture for many publications, including the Newark Star-Ledger, the Bergen Record, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Posted inColumns
Rogue Waves December: Jersey City Nutcracker, NJCU Jazz, Fascinations Grand Chorus, more
Certain holiday traditions don’t budge. Mistletoe, for instance: that stuff comes out in December and gets retired once Santa returns to the North Pole. Nobody drinks egg nog in May. And if a dance company mounts a production of “The Nutcracker,” you know Christmas is right around the corner. Hudson County has its own “Nutcracker.” […]
Posted inEye Level
The Pompidou Centre is Unnecessary
A European star was coming to Jersey City. Rem Koolhaas, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect and one of Time Magazine’s 2008 picks for the world’s most influential people, announced his intention to build a fifty story tower on the lot that was once home to the Arts Center at 111 First Street. Architecture News wrote that Koolhaas’s interest […]
Posted inColumns
“Pompeii: The Immortal City” at Liberty Science Center
Pompeii is gruesome. There, in the terrible shadow of Mount Vesuvius, thousands of imperial Roman townspeople asphyxiated under a ten-foot blanket of volcanic ash. Two millennia later, archaeologists are still reconstructing the city and refining what we know about the cataclysm. We know Pompeii residents tried to escape and were unsuccessful. Centuries-old impressions of bodies trapped in agony […]
Posted inEye Level
Drama, Anxiety and Beauty at Art Fair 14C
On the lacquered floor of the gigantic Jersey City Armory (678 Montgomery St.), scores of participants set up for a crowd of spectators. But despite the overhead scoreboard, wooden bleachers, and anticipation in the air, this is no sporting event. Instead, painters, sculptors, photographers, multi-media dreamers, and creators of unclassifiable what-is-its — most from the […]
Posted inVisual Arts
“The Embankment on My Mind” at NJCU Makes a Powerful Case for Preservation
The Sixth Street Embankment is hard to miss. What you see when you look at it depends on who you are. To developers, it’s a place to build and make money. To greenspace advocates, it’s a potential answer to Manhattan’s High Line. Birds may see a verdant spot to roost; seedpods might find a fertile […]
Posted inPerforming Arts
Rogue Waves November: Live Music in Jersey City
There were other bands, too; lots of them. Yo La Tengo cast a long shadow over adventurous music in the Garden State and beyond. The Cucumbers were quirky, The Wygals were powerful, and The Bongos filled the Mile Square with glam rock color. But the story of the Hudson County rock renaissance of the 1980s […]
Posted inEye Level
“Your Home Is My Home” Shakes Up Dineen Hull Gallery
One of the greater ironies of art in Jersey City: the three truly incendiary group shows mounted during the pandemic era have all hung in our most moneyed institution. “Implied Scale,” a condemnation of waste and a passionate staredown directed at habitat destruction, “Land of the Free,” a searing examination of the border and the […]
Posted inEye Level
BARC The Dog at Deep Space Has Plenty of Bite
I. Avatars If you’ve played an online game — and social media is an online game — there’s a good chance you’ve participated in an art project. A modest one, one circumscribed by the game’s parameters, but a common act of creation nevertheless. You’ve made a small digital stand-in for yourself, dressed it up, equipped it, […]
Posted inColumns
A Brief Encounter With Xiaoqiang Li at Novado Gallery
Some abstract works register an immediate impression but don’t hold attention; the pieces in Li’s exhibition don’t demand scrutiny, but they certainly reward it. The longer they’re observed, the more they seem to breathe.