No galleries on Newark Avenue will be involved. Neither will the Elevator building on Hamilton Park. Even the Canopy Hotel will be on the sidelines for this one. The first Art Crawl of the year is strictly a Powerhouse Arts District affair.
The Crawl, a night of open studios and gallery shows, will visit several Jersey City wards in 2024. Organizers Art Fair 14C are starting on Saturday night in one of the city’s most compact and walkable neighborhoods. All of the events at the Art Crawl will take place within a block or two of the ART150 headquarters at 150 Bay Street that has become a nexus of local creativity. Doors will swing open at once at the Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.), the Art House Gallery (345 Marin Blvd.), the Firmament Gallery at Nimbus (329 Warren St.), the ArtWall at CoolVines (350 Warren St.), and 150 Bay itself. (Several of the Crawl’s food and beverage partners, like Two Boots and Downtown Yogurt, are located a little farther away; visit www.artfair14c.com/art-crawl for details.)
Saturday’s event, which will run from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m., kicks off a period of intense Crawling activity: six scheduled Art Crawls in eight months, including visitations in Bergen-Lafayette, Journal Square, and the Heights. It’s ambitious. It also feels like a compensatory move. There won’t be another Art Fair until 2025. The Jersey City Art & Studio Tour, an event that overlaps in tone and spirit with the Art Crawl, is presently reinventing itself for its thirty-fifth season. Elevator and MANA Contemporary won’t host open studio events until next month. For the moment, the field is wide open for 14C to make its presence felt and remind everybody of its centrality to local public culture.
It also feels appropriate to throw the spotlight on the PAD — and the former warehouse at the intersection of First and Provost in particular. This summer, 14C will welcome scores of new artists to the building through a residency program established by Art Fair founder and director Robinson Holloway. Confusingly, the address of the residency is 157B 1st St., but the arts dormitories will be right upstairs from the studios at ART150 at 157A. It’ll all make sense to Art Crawl visitors, who’ll be invited to get a glimpse of the facility on Saturday. By the time the Crawl returns to Downtown Jersey City, these three residency floors ought to be populated with creators of all kinds.
Will they be meaningful contributors to the local scene? Fingers crossed, but even if they keep to themselves or direct their energies and aspirations toward the other side of the Hudson, there’ll still be plenty of notables at 150 Bay Street. Sixteen resident artists will be opening their studios to visitors for the Art Crawl, including the imaginative painter Kirkland Bray (room 234), experimental photographer Susan Evans Grove (room 242), feline rhapsodist Robert Policastro (room 255), the dramatic, hallucinatory Fabricio Suarez (room 239), the audacious eggshell cracker, stainer, and re-assembler Paul Wirhun (studio 238), portraitist with a camera Megan Maloy (room 256), fashioner of industrial kintsugi Josh Urso (studio 214) and the talented newcomer Rene Saheb (studio 243), whose canvases are dreamlike and immediate in equal measure.
There’s so much variety and depth at 150 Bay Street that a Crawler could easily spend all four hours bopping around the second floor. But you’re not going to want to do that. Instead, you’ll want to cross a few streets and sample other galleries, and maybe a few discounted eateries, too. Unlike prior Crawls, this one can be comprehensively covered in the time allotted without sprinting (or biking) between the locations. In short, Holloway and 14C have shrunk the distances, but they haven’t attenuated the intensity of the experience. In my book, that’s a meaningful achievement — but it won’t be a triumph until they demonstrate that they can export their model to other parts of town.
CRAWLING AROUND 150 BAY STREET
In addition to the sixteen open studios, floor two of 150 Bay Street contains four galleries, all of which will be open for the Crawl. The most consistent of these is the smallest: Outliers (studio 246), a joint project operated by two of the most thoughtful photographers in the Garden State, an oil painter of uncommon lyricism, and an endearing collage artist whose work is reliably enlivened by his particular sense of humor and whimsy. The “Spring Sampler” show at Outliers will feature art from all four, which means fresh shots by Edward Fausty and Dorie Dahlberg, assemblages by Brad Terhune, and canvases that feel like stills from stories by Francisco Silva.
The Backroom Gallery (studio 225) is, as it sounds, tucked away in the rear corner of one of the larger studios on the floor. “Vinyl Dreams,” which has been up for awhile, consists of more than fifty imaginary album covers from musical projects that never were, hung on the wall in sequence like the framed accomplishments of major studios. They haven’t had the audacity to make any of them gold or platinum, though. It’s a telling exercise in rock alternative history as it might have been told by visual artists — one with less depravity and more particularity. In order to get to the disks, you’ll pass through the workspace of the prolific Guillermo Bublik, whose line drawings and puzzle-like sheets of interlocking shapes are frequently mesmerizing, compulsively rhythmic, and, sometimes, downright funny.
The glass-windowed first floor lobby at 150 Bay has been a de facto gallery ever since ART150 moved in. It’s been the host to some of the most articulate and confrontational shows of the still-young year, and with Frank Ippolito taking over the corner for the month with “Cautionary Tails,” we can expect something similarly provocative. Ippolito is an artist whose work won’t be mistaken for anybody else’s: once you see his giant lightboxes and lenticular animations, you’ll always know it’s him. Because they’re beautifully backlit and curiously intimate, Ippolito’s pictures stand out in a group show like a bright red jellybean in a bowl of licorice. On his own, it’s always a vibrant picture show — it just happens to be one with pictures that morph as you walk by them.
Over the years, Ippolito, whose home base (studio 201) will be open for the Crawl, has shown his work in the two bigger spaces that greet the visitor as she steps out of the elevator and onto the second floor. The corridor-like ART150 Gallery — that’s the one that faces the entrance — has been the more active of the two. That may change: Holloway has taken over the large room that housed “The Empowering” and other memorable shows, and it’s been rechristened Gallery 14C. With no major event on the immediate horizon, it’s likely to be the Art Fair’s main exhibition space for the near future.
“Re:Growth,” showing at the ART150 space, is the latest exhibition inspired by our collective resilience in the face of difficult times. If that sounds slightly anodyne, consider the curator: the formidable and frank Andrea Morin, who made her name locally through her affiliation with LITM, the lost and lamented Newark Avenue bar that kept the flame for Jersey City arts burning during the days after the demolition of the Arts Center at 111 First Street. Pieces like “Somewhere in Between,” Kelly Nicole’s oil painting of a gagged and wraithlike woman with her head turned away from a weird moonlit forest, demonstrate that this show has plenty of teeth.
Kristine Go, the founder of the South Jersey gallery MK Apothecary and the 14C Director of Exhibitions, pulls into the big room with “Static Motion,” a group show that includes work from thirty-nine artists, including quite a few Fair favorites. Printmaker and storyteller Barbara Seddon contributes a piece, as does Raisa Nosova, whose audacious canvases and plays of color are always whirring turbines. There’s room for 2023 Fair standout Mary Jean Canziani, who paints, sometimes mischievously, on the hard covers of old books, Glenn Garver, whose muscular oils always deliver a kick, and the young Neo-surrealist Gail M. Boykewich, whose unsettling work explores the beauty and fragility of the human body — inside and outside.
CRAWLING THROUGH THE REST OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Boykewich also makes an impression at the Art House Gallery, where “Through the Looking Glass,” an Andrea McKenna-curated exhibition of offbeat and arresting portraits, will hang until the end of the month. Her piece is small, but it’s potent and symbol-rich. Local masters of expression Paul Pinkman and Ben Fine have generated puckish images of humans worth acquainting yourself with, and Lauren Rosenblum, a painter who has distinguished herself at 14C, contributes another detailed and stubbornly realistic study of the human face in action. But this show is stolen by Deb Sinha, a 150 Bay Street artist, with a captivating painted image of a young roughneck hovering somewhere between surliness and desire. Even by Sinha’s high standards, this one is a knockout.
Other portraits are on display at the Firmament Gallery at Nimbus. “The New Tide,” a dance piece recently performed at the theater, re-created scenes from the scrapbook of celebrated photojournalist Gordon Parks, a mid-20th Century artist whose shots brought the Civil Rights Movement and the daily struggles of African-Americans to an international audience. Parks’s photos are still relevant and still resonant, and in “Sometimes I Wander…,” which extends the Arts Center’s fruitful partnership with Cheryl and Christopher Mack of Bridge Gallery, Nimbus is exhibiting several prints — including a few poses that viewers of “The New Tide” will recognize from the show. he Even without enhancement by the Nimbus dancers, Parks’s wounded, defiant, gorgeous images speak loudly and clearly. They’re on view alongside shots by the celebrated hip-hop photographer (and Jersey guy) Chi Modu.
On the ground floor of the Modera Lofts Apartments, you’ll find two more art spaces: elegant, winsome, brick-walled Novado Gallery, and the ArtWall JC, a small but punchy slice of vertical real estate in a comfortable nook at the back of the CoolVines Powerhouse wine shop and grocery. Anne Novado might’ve had the best year of any gallerist in Jersey City in 2023, but like many of our local arts leaders, she’s been catching her breath in the beginning of 2024 and gathering momentum for the opening of a substantial show later this month. Even in transition, the Novado Gallery is rewarding to visit: gorgeous glass umbrellas by Brian Gustafson, artfully rusted statue contraptions by Jerome China, large abstract but curiously comforting paintings by Candy Le Seuer, melting landscapes by Robert Glisson, and Novado’s own delicate images of elusive, faceless creatures in charcoal-gray on white.
As for the ArtWall at CoolVines, they’re promising a show called “Jersey City Genius Loci” — an attempt to wrangle the spirit of the city we call ours. They’ve tapped a few talented diviners to make the effort, including Donna Kessinger, who often tickles the viewer with a gentle rain of polka dots, and Jennifer Krause Chapeau, a sharp-eyed observer of the mysterious patterns of the Jersey landscape. The new exhibition replaces “Achroma,” a beautiful, balanced black and white show that included stark work by the unclassifiable Tenesh Webber and the protean Lucy Rovetto, another artist who’ll be showing her studio at ART150. (Rovetto, a frequent returnee to the ArtWall, is also part of the “Genius Loci” show).
And while we’re on the subject of places where a person can get something to eat, allow me to conclude by putting in a plug for one of the Crawl’s culinary partners. Bourke Street (331 Marin Blvd.) looks like a chain. It’d be easy to dismiss as another corporate eatery for commuters who aren’t thinking very much about what they’re consuming. That’d be a mistake. This bakery with an Australian pedigree is turning out some of the best sourdough loaves in Hudson County. The pastries are outstanding, too. Hey, if you’re going to be crawling around from painting to painting, you’re going to need something good to eat — even if, for once, you don’t have to crawl very far.