Well, you can’t fault us for trying.
After many years characterized by more inspiration than coordination, we went large — or, at least, larger than we ever had before. Jersey City Art Week bundled the fifth Art Fair 14C, the thirty-fourth Art and Studio Tour, and the thirty-first annual International Sculpture Conference into a single event. The Week (which was, in truth, four days) was organized and supervised by 14C and touted by the municipal government as breakthrough for Jersey City. The mayor promised to create the biggest and best arts event on the East Coast. The words Art Basel were used in the press release.
Art Basel it wasn’t. The shows attached to the ISC were adequate but underwhelming. Attendance at Studio Tour stops, especially those far from Downtown, was slow. Art Fair 14C’s main event at the Central Railroad Terminal at Liberty State Park was an aesthetic success, but setup was complicated and costly. Before the Week was even over, 14C organizers announced that the Fair wouldn’t be back in 2024. The Art Week doubters — and there were many — were quick to remind the rest of us that they knew all along that the plan was inadequate.
Saying “I told you so” is gratifying. It’s not a strategy, though. We can acknowledge that what we tried in 2023 didn’t work as designed. I would, however, hate to see artists and arts organizers conclude that the ambition was unwarranted, and retreat to small measures. Before we decide that grand plans and Jersey City don’t mix, there are a few things about Art Week that I’d like us to consider.
The Week That Was — And Wasn’t
There is so much astonishing art in Jersey City that even politicians are bound to take notice. Marketing hyperbole aside, the official statements made by members of the municipal government about Jersey City Art Week were, no doubt, sincere. We do have a scene worth sharing with the rest of the world. There isn’t any reason for us not to think big. Art Week’s organizers really did hope to boost the profiles of local creators and the independent venues and galleries that display their work.
But that wasn’t the whole story. The municipal government clearly saw Art Week as an opportunity to transfer the responsibility for a nettlesome old property — the Jersey City Art and Studio Tour — to a new caretaker. JCAST is a more complicated undertaking than it appears to be from the outside. It requires coordination, dedication, and money to run properly. Long before Art Week, the Tour often felt rudderless and in need of guidance. By handing off responsibility for JCAST to 14C, the government tacitly acknowledged that the event had become burdensome. The scale of Jersey City Art Week and the fanfare from 360 Grove made it seem that City Hall would be taking an active role in the event. Truthfully, they were pulling back.
In theory, the move made sense. The 14C Fairs have been some of the most successful big-scope art events ever held in the Garden State. Fair organizers have demonstrated that they can realize a busy and multifaceted event. Yet there’s a tonal mismatch between Art Fair 14C and the Art & Studio tour, and that discontinuity was never reconciled. The Studio Tour is anarchic, communitarian and crowd-participatory, uncommercial, and hyperlocal. 14C is organized, creator-centered, professional, and international. The curators behind 14C understood the history and significance of the Studio Tour, but they never figured out how to make the annual event sing in harmony with the big show they were working on at the railroad terminal. Naturally, they put their promotional muscle and imaginative resources behind the project that best reflected their values and vision: their own.
Several local arts organizers have suggested that the 2024 JCAST should be handed to the Jersey City Arts Council. This strikes me as a possible direction, but not necessarily a good solution. The Arts Council has never run an operation as complicated as the Art & Studio Tour; in fact, their track record for events isn’t great. Bryant Small, the new leader of the Arts Council, has distinguished himself as a painter and as a curator. It’s not inconceivable that his talents might extend to the administration of a citywide event. But he’d need substantial financial support from the city to make it happen — and the city has made it clear that they’re in a budget crunch. Which means it’s time to ask ourselves a very uncomfortable question:
Has JCAST Run Its Course?
Before you close your browser in disgust, I believe it hasn’t. I think there’s still a place on the arts calendar for the Tour — at least in 2024. With the Fair on hiatus until Spring ’25, any attempt to re-create Jersey City Art Week is likely to take JCAST as its centerpiece.
But when the Art & Studio Tour returns for its thirty-fifth autumn, I’m hoping it’ll be different from the way it’s been for the past few years. Circumstances in Jersey City have changed. The Tour ought to change with them. To put the event in perspective, it’s helpful to remember the way things were around here when JCAST launched. Thirty years ago, the event wasn’t just smaller, easier to manage, and cheaper to run. It was also the only game in town. If you missed Studio Tour weekend, you’d have to wait twelve months to get the measure of the local arts scene. Either that, or you’d have knock on a lot of doors at 111 First Street and ingratiate yourself with a lot of artists.
That’s not exactly true anymore. In contemporary Jersey City, several arts collectives and studio buildings host open house events reminiscent of the Tour experience: MANA Contemporary, Elevator, and ART150, just to name a few. The periodic Downtown Art Crawls organized by Art Fair 14C simulate the peripatetic experience of JCAST; with the Fair on the sidelines in 2024, its directors have announced an intention to throw many Crawls, some in neighborhoods far from the Warehouse District. Meighboring cities now throw parties that are transparently based on our Tour.
But while these events simulate the mechanics of the Studio Tour, they never exactly capture its tone — and that tone is the reason why JCAST isn’t obviated by the emergence of new tours and new open house events. The Studio Tour, at its best, connects our thriving scene of ambitious creators with its roots in the DIY, participatory, radically egalitarian, freewheeling Jersey City and Hudson County of the late ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s an extension of our collective memory, and an expression of values that are well worth holding on to. Giving up on it would hurt. Long before 14C took over the Art Week, the Tour was in desperate need of a facelift and update. This year’s version didn’t even have a printed map. Maybe it’s the city; maybe it’s an angel investor. But someone with deep pockets needs to step up and give the Studio Tour the love it deserves.
Or we could let it go the way of 111. But we’d miss it once it’s gone.
Twelve Pillars
All Art Week shakiness aside, the foundation of the local scene remained rock solid. The small and independent galleries that provide creative life in Jersey City with much of its offbeat character remained reliably entertaining, often daring, and occasionally brilliant. All year long, Deep Space Gallery felt like a party (77 Cornelison Ave.) — although the stuff that the curators were entertaining us with was profound, in a pleasantly gonzo manner, anyway. Tarot cards, joyrides, mythology, boardwalk fortune telling, roulette wheels, and a delirious casino-themed birthday celebration: it all suggested that the gallerists were itching to escape from pandemic-era confinement and get themselves down to the shore. Beautiful Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) indulged in plenty of escapist whimsy too. It was one delightful show after another, including a procession of experimental selfies and a masterful sculpture roundup that left the ISC in the dust.
On the far west side of the city in an old warehouse, Drawing Rooms (926 Newark Ave.) grappled with New Jersey identity and the relationship between our town and the other post-industrial cities in our orbit. Over in McGinley Square, SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.) continued its pivot toward immersive installations, once again showing how capacious they can make a small storefront feel. That meant a reprise of last year’s Disaster Place show (this time right in SMUSH headquarters), an exploration in film, music, sculpture, and flamboyant metaphor of the sexual life cycle of coral reefs, and an Earth Temple dedicated to environmental grief. A few blocks to the west, Eonta Space (34 DeKalb Ave.) answered with visual playgrounds of their own, including a Founders Day show from the gallerists that was simultaneously hilarious, furious, and unnerving. It left me breathless.
In style and temperament, these five galleries are very different. But they’re all load-bearing pillars of the scene — and this year, several more columns were added to the temple. The freshly-minted Art House Productions gallery (345 Marin Blvd.) exceeded expectations with a series of smart, beautifully presented shows in a glass-paneled room that enlivened the Arts District streetscape. IMUR Gallery (67 Greene St.), a small but winsome spot in the side room of the Rumi Turkish Restaurant, came into its own identity in its second year, flashing erudition and an international scope unusual for the Garden State. At Outliers (150 Bay St., second floor), four out-of-town artists with deep ties to Jersey City presented work rich in narrative significance; at Evening Star, a gang of wonderfully unruly potters and claybashers turned a Monitor Street basement into a shrine to experimental ceramics.
The shows at the small galleries were, once again, supplemented by inventive curation at the local colleges and universities. NJCU, HCCC, and Saint Peter’s kept up their tradition of fine art shows that split the difference between schoolroom gravity and recess-bell abandon. Steady programming at all these rooms meant that there was always something local worth checking out. On grey days when it seems like the arts are undervalued and underfunded, and grand events like the Art Week are doomed to be mismanaged, it’s worth remembering that we’ve got something here that few towns do: a solid bedrock of independent art spaces, answerable only to their curators, many of whom are themselves outstanding artists. That’s our great strength. As long as we’ve got that, we’ll continue to be a magnet for visual artists of all kinds, and a locus of creativity for Jersey and beyond.
Intermission (A Parable)
Once upon a time, on the second floor of a building in an alleged Arts District, there was a large room. Surrounding that large room were many smaller rooms, and those smaller rooms contained some of the best visual artists in the city. The visual artists would make art in the smaller rooms, and when the art was ready to be shown, they’d hang their pieces in the large room. This was logical.
One day, the artists in the small room found a padlock on the door of the large room. No longer could they show their art there. Instead, they could hang their work in a narrow space that was not much bigger than the small rooms they came from. That narrow space was right next to the large space, which was now empty. Visitors to the building saw this arrangement. It did not seem logical. When they asked why things had changed for the artists in the small room, they were told it was because of Reasons.
When the artists in the small rooms passed the large, empty room, they found this demoralizing. Nonetheless, they accepted this arrangement because of Reasons. Imagine their surprise when the lock was removed from the door on behalf of arts organizers who did not occupy the small rooms. This happened once!, twice!, three times. Apparently, Reasons only applied to those in the small rooms. Those from beyond the building were sometimes exempt from the padlock.
As you might imagine, this arrangement confused visitors, jeopardized morale in the building, and eroded the sense of community in the Arts District. Alas, it was not remedied in the year 2023. Nevertheless, there is still a way that this parable can end happily ever after. Hint: it is logical.
MANA Goes SoBe
MANA Contemporary can be an odd place. Our largest arts institution feels a bit like a warehouse, a bit like a fortress, and a bit like a downed spacecraft from a civilization that’s more advanced than the one we’re accustomed to (but maybe not too advanced not to crash-land.) Its advertising and community outreach, though much better than it used to be, is still not commensurate with the quality of the work exhibited. But until 2023, the selection of art at MANA was not strange at all. MANA featured work from mid- to late 20th Century modernists and minimalists, including Andy Warhol, Arnulf Rayner, Fred Sandback, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin. Many of these artists are also prominently featured in the DIA Beacon, and the temporary exhibitions at MANA shared with the DIA a certain austerity and proximity to the art-historical canon.
That all changed significantly in 2023. MANA’s 2023 moves felt less like a natural evolution than a sudden style transplant — like watching a formerly buttoned-down colleague dispose of her preppy wardrobe, buy designer threads, and relocate to Ibiza. With uneven results, the institution celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop, draping the lobby in denim and turning over a ground floor gallery to a sneaker exhibit that looked more than a bit like a Foot Locker. Fashion designers and lux fashion brands began to be foregrounded in shows : PRPS jeans, for instance, and the gaudy maximalism of the clothing worn by drag queen Machine Dazzle. It’s hard to imagine anything farther removed from a Fred Sandback yarn sculpture.
This move paralleled the rise and acceleration of MANA Fashion Services, which, since its April 2022 launch, appears to have eaten the Miami version of MANA Contemporary and come back for seconds. The South Florida institution was a driving force behind the Jersey City Day of Fashion, a citywide event that culminated in a series of runway shows at MANA. The Jersey City day was fun, if a bit frivolous; though camera-phones flashed and outfits glittered, it didn’t exactly make the case that haute couture deserved the same respect as the painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture that is the bread and butter of MANA’s excellent studio artists. (Because it doesn’t.)
There are a few interesting clothing designers in Jersey City, and it’s not wrong to want to celebrate their work. But MANA’s suggestion, reinforced by its Day of Fashion partners in the municipal government, that Jersey City possesses a thriving high fashion scene is nonsense. South Florida is a fashion-conscious place; Jersey City is a town where community leaders regularly appear in public in t-shirts and ill-fitting blazers. Miami has Wynwood and the Design District. We barely support a handful of independent boutiques. My guess is that MANA Fashion Services knows this well, and was simply looking for a place near Lower Manhattan to hold their event in the run-up to New York’s Fashion Week.
Very little of the Jersey City Day of Fashion had anything to do with Jersey City, and that ought to make fans of MANA Contemporary feel a little queasy. We’re supposed to be the big dog in the MANA empire. Miami MANA has always been a sideline. I’d hate to see the big, brick-bodied institution on Newark Avenue take on a Flagler Street personality. Visual art is what we do here, and MANA has plenty of it to showcase. When the institution handed its main gallery over to an in-house curator for a show highlighting work by resident artists, the exhibition mopped the floor with the jeans, spangles, and sneakers.
Pompin’ Ain’t Easy
At least MANA is trying something. The best example of the discontinuity between power players and the needs of local artists is right up the hill to the east. Or at least we’re told it will be; there’s very little sign that Pompidou x is going to be ready to welcome visitors any time soon. The latest ETA for the French import is 2026. That means there’ll be at least two more years of discussion before the museum opens its doors.
Which means we’ve got two more years to decide that what we’re doing here is folly. The Jersey City Times estimates that the Pompidou could cost the city over sixteen million dollars a year, including more than five million dollars for the rights to the famous name. That’s a crazy price for an institution designed to provide Jersey City with a commodity that it already has in spades: great visual art. In a town that’s already heavily levied, there are hundreds of other applications for that public money. It could be applied to healthcare, open space, property tax relief, or rent relief.
Or it could be spent on a museum of our own. Jersey City hasn’t had one in decades. In a city that derives much of its aesthetic identity from visual art, that’s a considerable oversight. It’s also highly unusual. Cities half of our size and with a fraction of our talent maintain art museums. In the coming weeks, we’re going to outline what a Jersey City Art Museum might look like — one that, we believe, could draw crowds and highlight local creators, curators, and conceptualists at a cost that wouldn’t crush the city budget.
A Matter Of Trust
While we’re taking a peek at the balance sheet, it’s only proper to evaluate the efficacy of another initiative. Three years ago, Jersey City voters approved a levy to create an Arts and Culture Trust Fund. Since that referendum, the city has distributed more than two million dollars to arts organizations and individual artists. How has this transformed the cultural life of the city? Has the public expense been worth it?
The answer is… it’s still too soon to know. Does that sound like a cop-out? It isn’t; at least not yet. Two years is simply too short an interval to make an assessment. Many great art projects take way more than twenty-four months to conceptualize, incubate, and mount. An Arts and Culture Trust Fund grant disbursed in 2022 might lead directly to a groundbreaking project in 2024.
But while we’re advising patience with this process, it’s also important for Jersey City to see results, and soon. Disinclined as its administrators have been to say so, the Trust Fund is a tax, and like all taxes, it’s only justifiable to impose it if it generates a public good. Most people in town saw their property tax bill go up this year. Every dollar added to the tax burden makes it tougher to live and do business here — and that includes dollars earmarked for dance, theater, and visual art. Direct funding of the arts is good for creative people, but responsible and scrupulous stewardship of the economy is better.
There are thousands of artists in Jersey City. Public money only goes to a few. Several prominent recipients have now gotten the maximum award twice. It’s not necessarily a criticism to point this out: the organizations who’ve been fully funded tend to be ones we really want in town. But someone still needs to ask whether these awards are public money well spent, or if they’re just adding further weight to a tax burden that’s making rent and mortgage payments hard for artists and non-artists alike. I don’t like to be an ombudsman or referee; I’d much rather generate dense paragraphs about exhibitions I like. But. I’m going to continue to keep track of where these dollars are going, and what they’re being used for. And next year at this time, I believe I’m going to have a much more definitive answer to the question of whether this Fund has, on balance, been a boon to the city.
Between now and then, I might occasionally have something more to say. I’ve been known to.
With love and appreciation from Fourth Street,
Tris McCall