Arts and Culture

No matter what else is going on in Jersey City, there’s one thing you can count on: first-rate visual art shows. There were so many good ones mounted in 2023 that I couldn’t stick to my customary Top Eleven. We’re going fifteen deep this year, and honestly, I could have gone further.  When I look […]

There is something unbearably lonesome about an image of a cross on another planet.  Its presence reflects the hope that God might chase us across the stars.  But there’s no church in the alien wilderness, and no congregation on the interstellar plain.  The tiny cross in Kaira Villanueva’s “On the Lookout” is tucked into a […]

Curating a group show is a little like deejaying a set, a little like stitching together a patchwork quilt, and a lot like assembling a choir.  A curator must get many different voices to sing in harmony.  Like a choir, a well curated group exhibition isn’t univocal.  Instead, each participant is selected to augment and […]

In 2023, our arts organizers went big.  Jersey City Art Week was the most ambitious, most coordinated, and most ballyhooed event local organizers had ever attempted.  The state’s largest art fair in the middle of Liberty State Park!  Open studios at MANA Contemporary!  An international sculpture conference!  The 34th annual Jersey City Art and Studio […]

In Keith Garcia’s paintings, objects of desire are often very far away.  Stages in the distance tantalize with floodlights and hot color.   Lush hills are visible through the windows of sparsely decorated living rooms.  A warming fire beckons the viewer’s eye across vast expanses of icy water.  Perfectly round full moons hang, watchfully, in […]

On Morgan Street, the umbrellas are out.  In defiance of a long-running superstition, they’re open indoors.  Perhaps because nobody holds them, the pall of misfortune rests on no single set of shoulders.  Instead, these umbrellas and parasols are mounted on the wall.  The protection they bestow is general, and permanent.  They couldn’t be closed even […]