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 at the shows that didn’t make my list, I’m astonished: Kele McComsey’s Melville-inspired, anti-establishment “I Would Prefer Not To” at 150 Bay Street, Arthur Bruso’s stark, touching return to action at Curious Matter, Cheryl Gross’s pugilistic show at the Lemmerman Gallery, Clarence Rich’s subversive fusion of classical mythology and hip-hop attitude at Deep Space, Anthony Boone’s solo tour-de-force at the Commuter Gallery. These were all excellent exhibitions. But there were others that moved me more. Let’s count them down. You ready?
15. “Firoz Mahmoud: Early Episodes II” at the NJCU Visual Arts Gallery
From a distance, Firoz Mahmoud’s pieces look like gorgeous, muted abstractions, full of ballpoint pen shading, washes of pink ink, tinted salt, and crushed, iridescent pearl. The closer they’re inspected, the more the images cohere — and the more the political significance shines through. “Early Episodes II” stands up ferociously for Bangladeshi identity, held down by oppressors and colonizers, but unvanquished and unashamed. If the pictures of palaces and historical figures tucked into his line-scored canvases don’t make his meaning clear, you’re invited to read fighting words scribbled into the margins of the pictures. Explosive, talkative, opinionated, saturated with pride and color in equal measure.
14. “Kevin Darmanie: Apartment Therapy” at the ArtWall at CoolVines Powerhouse
Let it be known that 2023 was the year when a back alcove at a wine shop became an essential stop on the Jersey City art circuit. The ArtWall at CoolVines had been hosting local shows for awhile, but it came into its own with a series of economical, fearsomely coherent shows, including a lovely visitation from the printmaker Kim Bricker. Even better was the pandemic-era meditation from Newark watercolorist Kevin Darmanie, whose visual storytelling was spiked with details both warm and chilling. “The Visitor,” a marvelous canvas, captured a woman in an upscale Newark apartment, dressed up, sneaker tips nervously touching the surface of the floor, ready to go, but unable to engage with her surroundings. Her expression is partially concealed by her mask, but in her eyes, we could see anxiety.
13. “Fever Dream” at SMUSH Gallery
SMUSH curator Katelyn Halpern loves full immersion. In “Fever Dream,” she turned over the walls of the small space on McGinley Square to a trio of painters with untamed imaginations, including the provocative Noelle Velez, and Santiago Cohen, whose animal-human hybrids radiate a powerful feeling of temporal dislocation. But the breakout star of this fantasy show is Kaira Villanueva, an unrepentant space cadet who summoned alien landscapes reminiscent of the covers of science fiction paperbacks. Her work isn’t exactly surrealism, because it’s not a reverie: it’s a sustained imaginary vision she’s inviting us to inhabit — and explore — with her. Unlike many of the other shows on this list, “Fever Dream” is still on view, so if you want to take this rocket ship ride, you know where to go.
12. “Playing Silly Games” at Evening Star Gallery
One of the most welcome developments in the Jersey City art scene in 2023 was the emergence of Evening Star Gallery, an exhibition space in a lovely garden apartment on Monitor Street. The gallery’s dedication to experimental and ornamental ceramics was obvious from the get-go (and from the big kiln in the backyard, too). But Evening Star hit its stride with “Playing Silly Games,” a pleasantly anarchic show that vigorously dissevered clay-based art from our expectations for it. Under Doris Cacolio’s imaginative curation, the ceramicists ran wild, shaping and firing animal statues, zoetropes, superhero masks, and, on a central table, an enchanted forest in miniature, governed by a fox with a dangerously proprietary expression. Together, they struck a blow for a marvelously elastic medium that, too often, plays second fiddle to painting.
11. “Under the Thousand Stars” at IMUR Gallery
In 2022, IMUR made headlines for opening a gallery in the side room of a Turkish restaurant. In 2023, the art space didn’t need the hook to get attention. Ivy Sarioglu consistently attracted strong shows to the space, including an honest assessment of the fragility of the city hung in the wake of the 2022 Anatolian earthquake. But my favorite came from an artist who has made his name closer to home: Jersey City perimeter-walker Greg Brickey, whose “Under the Thousand Stars” splattered hundreds of fragmentary paintings all over the IMUR walls. Each one felt like a site of intrigue — pieces of a jigsaw that was never meant to cohere. As immediately impressive as it was, this was a show that rewarded close attention to detail, symbol, and tricks of positioning. The exhibition turned on Brickey’s subtle transvaluation of the meaning of the star: not merely a sign of hope, but also one of distance, mystery, and ache for a lost sense of completeness. It was a long stroll under a shattered sky, and the best event yet from a gallery that’s rapidly becoming a scene cornerstone.
10. “Moments and Measure” at Art House Productions
Curator of the year? That had to be Art House’s Andrea McKenna. The celebrated Jersey painter didn’t merely attract great shows to the glass-walled room fronting Marin Boulevard. She made a small space feel far bigger than it was, letting Frank Ippolito’s sensational lightboxes shine, unfurling Ibou Ndoye’s narrow tapestries, giving Diana Schmerz’s startling deconstructions of banned books room to resonate, and hanging her own visitations on burlap of spirits navigating the bardo. The high point of the season, though, was an exhibition of startling, psychologically complicated paintings in oil and distemper by Jersey City artist Mark Kurdzeil. Kurdzeil’s images of women, cats, roofs, and mouse holes asked nagging questions about the permeability of domestic space and the psychological malleability of their inhabitants. They were also startling to behold: full of radiant fields of red, yellow, and rhododendron pink, all flashing through the gloom of a grey day.
9. “Chaos & Clarity | Light & Shadow” @ ART150
The fifth Art Fair 14C did not come without controversy. But the event at the Central Railroad Terminal was an aesthetic success — a blowout exhibition that drew some of the best artists in the Garden State to Liberty State Park. “Chaos & Clarity,” a spring group show curated by 14C Exhibitions Director Kristine Go, was an early indication of where we were going. Go used the big gallery at ART150 (a space that really ought to be given back to ProArts, but more on that next week) to show off new pieces by 14C favorites, including the prickly, electrifying Valerie Huhn, storytelling painters Gail Boykewich and Nan Ring, the architecturally inclined Linda Streicher, and Tim Daly, poet of the smokestacks. But she also made plenty of room for members of the local art community: Guillermo Bublik in an uncommonly anthropomorphic mood, Peter Delman, dean of Jersey City painters, some beautifully muted work by the late Robert Kogge, and pieces by Paul “Eggman” Wirhun, whose exhibition of miraculous fabrications made entirely of cracked eggshells nearly made this list. The result was an effusion of under-appreciated talent, and a demonstration of why Art Fair 14C is needed in the first place.
8. “Quiet, Please” at Outliers Gallery
By now, we know that photographer Dorie Dahlberg is a rich and idiosyncratic chronicler of the Garden State. But what happens when she turns her lens on Sweden, and juxtaposes those shots with others she’s taken of the Jersey Shore? As it turns out, she’s able to tease out some uncanny resonances between her Scandinavia and her Mid-Atlantic: an eerie stillness, a certain quality of light, a sense that invisible forces of order and disorder are tugging at either ends of a frayed rope. Dahlberg’s show complemented another globetrotting Outliers exhibition: Ed Fausty’s outstanding “What’s Happening at the Li River,” a series of vivid shots of the residue of human activity in the Chinese heartland. A small gallery it is. But it punches way above its weight.
7. “777” at Deep Space Gallery
Given the disposition of the crew that gathers there, it’s probably not possible for Deep Space Gallery to mount a show that isn’t fun. “777” was no exception to this. The gambling-themed gallery’s seventh birthday show had some unusually dangerous undercurrents, though. Fortune-telling, crapshooting, wipeouts on the Boardwalk: all metaphors for the vagaries of life in the city, and the chances we’ve been taking in a year as dicy as 2023. Deep Space regulars contributed gleefully, and fatalistically, and stayed on theme. That meant a skewed Wheel of Fortune from Macauley Norman, a miniature magic 8-Ball from Molly Craig, a primer on gambling lingo from Bayonne painter Joe Waks, and references to slot machines and roulette tables all over the place. “777” managed to capture the thrill and destabilization of the casino floor, even as it reminded us that you can check out of the hotel, but you can never truly leave the game.
6. “Black’ity Black” at Novado Gallery
Among the highlights of a terrific 2023 at the indispensable Novado Gallery: a sculpture exhibition that captures some of the region’s finest 3-D artists at their adventurous best, a spiky array of experimental self-portraits, and a series of mesmerizing paintings of boats and bodies of water by Philadelphia’s Brooke Lanier. But nothing topped “Black’ity Black,” a group show featuring masterful abstract art from African American artists. Curator Jerome China went for the audacious gesture, including paintings made with janitors mops, rough, unframed wall hangings, and a wooden shield wrapped in tiny strips of fabric. He also made way for works of impeccable balance, like a trio of poised abstract expressionist canvases from the Pennsylvania painter Al Johnson. Titanic forces were at work in that beautiful brick-walled room — energies barely held in check by the formidable skills of the artists. That’s the way it was all year long at Novado: whirlwind-tamers, riding out turbulence, emotional and otherwise, in a winsome space.
5. “Notes on Experimentation” at MANA Contemporary
When an artist parks a motorcycle by the entrance to an exhibition space, you can bet she means to race your heart. Here was single the most impressive act of curation done in Hudson County in 2023 — a surprisingly coherent and forthright show assembled from disparate works created by MANA Contemporary tenants. Maria De Los Angeles got scores of provocative and unusual pieces to sing in rough harmony, and in so doing, she demonstrated that there is more unity of purpose in that big cultural repository at the end of Newark Avenue than we often believe there is. The disparate pieces in the show were cauterized by De Los Angeles’s own searing paintings: classic motifs reinvigorated by colorful imagery drawn from Latin American art, folk-symphonies of acrylic color, and dense gardens of figures, including faces, flowers, birds, and stars. “Notes on Experimentation” was a triumph for its organizers, and a forceful reminder of the treasures hidden behind those studio doors. Bring them out more often, will you, MANA?
4. “Polygon” at Commuter Gallery
Mustart is the aerosol virtuoso with the melting flowers and floating words on shaded, sunrise-colored backdrops. Clarence Rich is the portraitist with the knack for capturing pain and hard experience in a few cleverly angled brushstrokes. Usually, they’re out in the street, decorating walls, Turnpike pylons and train trestles with their characteristic street art. But they’re even better when they work small — well, reasonably small. “Polygon” was full of splashy pieces that captured the muralists’ skills in concentrated form: collisions of shape, character, urban iconography, and graffiti-like line drawings from Mustart, probing stares from cobalt blue faces passionately rendered by Rich. They were joined at the Journal Square gallery by the stained-glass artist TF Dutchman and fellow muralist 4SAKN, who added their own lively voices to a raucous conversation. There were a few better shows mounted in town this year. None felt more like Jersey City than this one did.
3. “NJ & Me: Imperfect Together” at Drawing Rooms
And no show felt more like the Garden State than this one did. That was by design: Drawing Rooms curator Anne Trauben asked for work about New Jersey, and artists answered with unusual candor. The “Imperfect” artists showed us a complicated place: a land of seismic natural forces, weathered brick factories, too-geometric suburbs, and an abundance of highways. Human habitation constantly collides with the forces of sea and sky, and even in the midst of a crowd, loneliness is ever-present. This was reporting that couldn’t have been done by outsiders. Only those from Jersey could be this frank, this unsparing, and this loving at the same time. And only a true Garden Stater like Anne Percoco could have given us that pile of paper leaves, cut out of circulars and bills and shaken from the tree of commerce, and swept into an artful heap in the gallery corner.
2. “Joy Ride” at Deep Space Gallery
It’s both accurate and misleading to call Amelia Shields economical. Every line she commits to canvas is doing something meaningful. There are no wasted gestures in her work. Yet a woman who includes a plush, life-sized replica of the front of a sportscar in her gallery show — one you could enter and pretend to cruise around in — is not overly concerned with limits. Shields likes a little maximalism now and then. A joy ride on a Jersey highway is meant to be taken at high speed; the driver must be heavy on the accelerator and committed to the feeling of wind in her hair. Shields’s characters are cartoon-like in the best way: they’re distinguished by instantly legible gestures and exaggerations that let you know exactly where they’re coming from, what they’re feeling, and what they’re up against. In one hilarious, infuriating, heartbreaking, wildly entertaining show, Shields showed us the people we’d become, filled with longing, bedeviled by sexual frustration, cautious to a point but reckless when we can get away with it, and above all, desperate to throw reclusion aside and hit the open road.
1. “Founders Day” at Eonta Space
Eonta founder Dan Peyton festooned mute, windowless wooden houses, each about the size of a shoebox, with doily-shaped designs in pastel. His partner Bayard contributed a pair of wearable angel’s wings made from thousands of strips of torn fabric. Lauren Farber, the third of the three founders, raised the stakes further by running a knife through hardcover books — many of them holy books — as if she was trying to dislodge something inaccessible from the pages. She stacked shredded tomes into a giant archway feathered by loose pages, and invited visitors to walk through. Texts were turned inside out to make fan-shaped sculptures and lamp-like assortments on the gallery floor, each one striking, balanced, iconoclastic. Thick metal chains wrapped around science tomes, rendering them unrecoverable. A makeshift outhouse, wallpapered with pages from primers and prayer-books, squatted in the middle of the show; you could go into that, too, and lose yourself in the reading room.
In gestures made at the intersection between rage and wild worship, Farber, battling with her failing eyesight, crafted something stunning and terrible, and announced a ferocious refusal to submit to infirmity quietly. An entire bookshelf put to the torch squatted, charcoal black, on the eastern wall of the exhibition space. Handfuls of spent bullets lay like seeds on a platform covered, library-style, with open books. Careful construction yielded to artful destruction, and then the wreckage yielded right back. Even in the Eonta backyard, “Founders Day” wouldn’t loosen its grip: husks of burned books lined the garden path. This was an experience of shattering intensity, an expression of the shared trauma of the past few years, and a celebration of the defiance of those of us who’ve managed to survive. Reliving this gutsy, glorious, wonderfully knotty show has left me breathless. (Pauses.) Okay. I’m ready for more art. Who’s with me?