Arcadio, O'Connor & Suarez: "The Cheese and the Worms"
There's a monster on Sussex Street. It's a scarecrow, or a statue of one, anyway: big, sinewy, bug-eyed and irate, and almost tall enough to reach the second story of a residential building. This beast rises from the patio of a Paulus Hook brownstone and stares out at the block with a combination of menace and proprietary pride. From now until early November and possibly well beyond that, this will be his neighborhood. He's an early-blooming example of our favorite harvest species. He's a Halloween decoration.
published on 09/17/2025
Nathalie Kalbach: "If These Walls Could Talk"
Around the corner from where I'm sitting, there’s a row house on a residential block. To a motorist blowing by, it probably looks unremarkable. It always catches my eye, though.
published on 09/10/2025
Leandro Comrie: "A Quiet Odyssey"
What gives Leandro Comrie's "King" the right to rule? Is it his raiment, decorated with scores of curlicues of white and royal purple paint, signifying motion and activity and cinched savagely at the waist? Is it his arms, long enough to touch his ankles, formidable and thick, draped at his sides in a gesture of ease and preternatural balance? How about the magenta halo behind his head, bright and electric, suggestive of sanctification in some other world? Or could it be the face, with its crown of wavy hair, full lips and slanted white eyebrows, and lower jaw squared against all adversaries. He looks confident and ready. But the crimson dot he stands on and surveys is barely big enough to contain his boat-like shoes.
published on 09/03/2025
Erasure Gallery: A Project by Curious Matter
I never felt the need to formally come out. It struck me as a redundant thing to do. Nobody in my life has ever treated me as if I was straight. In school, friends, crushes, teachers, coaches, and the many acquaintances who felt the need to assess my masculinity in pungent language all assured me that I was gay all day. I gave the unfriendlier characters points for creativity, linguistic invention, and persistence, even as I was running away from them.
published on 08/27/2025
Anna Collevecchio: "The Door Is Right There"
In winter 2015, On Kawara landed, gracefully, at the Guggenheim. For the next few months, the walls of the main rotunda were dedicated to Kawara's life work: intensely rendered monochromatic paintings of the date, every day, every year, for almost fifty years. Sometimes the curator paired these with newspapers that also corresponded to the date. Sometimes, the act of painting the date, over and over, was left to speak for itself.
published on 08/20/2025
Kyle Orlando: "Scratch Fever"
Artists like cats because artists are like cats. The feline temperament is mercurial, ungovernable, mischievous, intermittently social, prone to periods of feverish activity followed by glowering reclusiveness. I'll wager many painters can relate. Cats are also beautiful animals, moving through the world with a well-curated mixture of adorableness and murderous malice. Phonies they are not. We respect them for their candor.
published on 08/13/2025
Deb Sinha: "Cult of Beauty"
Storyteller, let's say you want to create a city from scratch. You'll begin by whipping up a cast of inhabitants. They're the reason why towns exists in the first place: they're spots where your characters might congregate, interact, and develop their own narrative trajectories. Unless you're an unusual kind of author, you're going to make these people appealing — attractive to you, and attractive to each other. They've got heavy lifting to do. They've need to maintain your interest while you're bringing them to life.
published on 08/06/2025
Kamonchanok Phon-ngam: "Threads of Inner Harmony"
A fact that children know but grownups often forget: if you've got a pair of buttons and a length of string, you have all it takes to make a face. A sweet face, too, friendly and approachable, since string is soft and pliable, and everybody likes to fasten and unfasten buttons. Stitched smiles and shiny plastic peepers win us over quick, and even dolls assembled for mean scraps of fabric and loose twine speak straight to our deepest pleasures and protective impulses. Textiles, it turns out, are tethered to the heart. They remind us of our first tactile experiences, and the small, sheltered, hopeful world we inhabit before we've even got words to attach to what we're seeing.
published on 07/30/2025
"North Jersey Photographers" Exhibition"
A photograph of a house tells us something important about the photographer. She's not inside it. A painter, a sculptor, or a printmaker can work from memory. She can sketch a building from the street, unlock the door, and render a picture of the exterior from a studio on the interior. The photographer doesn't have that flexibility. For her, creation of a work of art implies separation from her subject. Maybe that's why photographers always feel like outsiders.
published on 07/23/2025
"Envisioning Our Future"
We have thoughts about the Sixth Street Embankment. It would be odd if we didn't. Anything that heavy is bound to leave an impression on sensitive souls. The great stone sleeper has dozed for years, unperturbed, as the rest of the town has changed around it. Court cases, environmental studies, and action plans from transportation agency aside, our ongoing reluctance to change the Embankment has a superstitious quality about it. Do we see it as a giant paperweight, without which the entire Downtown will fly away into the turbine of international capitalism? Or does the long black wall feel more like the body of a beast, a serpent from a Hudson County version of Midgard, inviolable and primordial, and too dangerous to touch?
published on 07/16/2025
Kirby & Delia: "All Rise"
The murals in the Brennan Courthouse (583 Newark Avenue) aren't tough to decipher. There are pilgrims, there are patriots, and there is Hudson County history rendered in the boldest strokes. Look to the underside of the building's grand dome and you'll find signs of the Zodiac; look to the walls for "The Coming of the English," a piece by Howard Pyle that depicts exactly what its title suggests that it will. This feels appropriate for the town's most handsome building — one with an interior reminiscent of classic civic architecture in Trenton and D.C. and the decorated Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and named after a jurist whose written decisions on the Supreme Court were distinguished by their clarity. William Brennan believed in the salutary effects of direct and comprehensible language. For him, the law was no place for abstraction.
published on 07/09/2025
"Summer Mosaic"
Suddenly, the galleries in the Garden State are suffused with sunshine. The big ball of fire in the sky has gotten down to business, and curators have been keen to pick pieces that reflect the effects of the rising mercury. Galerie Lucida in Red Bank — a favorite among Jersey City artists — launched a summer-themed show. In McGinley Square, the curators at Crema assembled their own crew for a visual commentary on the warm months; Project Greenville mounted a group show dedicated to representations of parks and greenspace; Drawing Rooms switched on an aesthetic equivalent of lightbox therapy with an exhibition that celebrated the color yellow. Art spaces have become tanning mirrors, capturing light and refracting rays toward our retinas.
published on 07/02/2025
DS Special Projects
If you're looking for the place in Jersey City that is farthest from deep space, Hamilton Park would be that place. Everything about the neighborhood is intensely terrestrial. It's green, it's full of life, and it's the home of many people who are proximate to earthly power of one kind or another. Hamilton Park exudes a spirit of closeness, with street-level businesses and stoop-level life, the rest of the Downtown in walking distance, and New York City on the far side of the tunnel. Those who convene there do not seem like lost astronauts. There's too much at their fingertips for them to bother thinking about the void.
published on 06/25/2025
"Everyday People"
Portraits are paintings that look back. We know that the sitter doesn't actually see us, but part of us — the part that secretly believes in ghosts — suspects that there's an essence in the frame that is oriented outward. As anybody who has ever ventured into a family picture gallery could tell you, that can be uncomfortable. Art appreciators will sometimes say that the eyes of great portraits follow viewers around the room. They're less upfront about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Do they chase you like the admiring glances of a lover, or do they stick with you like a guilty conscience?
published on 06/18/2025
Eksioglu & Gross: "Tension & Tenderness"
All art is sequential. As long as we exist in time, we're condemned to see one picture after another and carry our associations from the first thing we see to the second, and third, and umpteenth. Though an artist can attempt to dictate the sequence, her authorial control is far from absolute. A cartoonist can guide us from frame to frame, but there's nothing to stop us from leaping to the punchline. A curator can ask us to navigate a conceptual mini-golf course, but we may putt right around the trickiest obstacles.
published on 06/11/2025
"Stick Around for Joy"
C.S. Lewis suggests that angels tell us to "fear not" because they are so fearsome. As corroborating evidence, he quotes scripture: the seraphim are described as massive creatures with great occlusive wings and bodies covered with eyes. To stand in the presence of one would be a terrifying thing. And it is by this sign that we may know them. Being not of this earth, the divine is not likely to be beautiful by earthly standards, and hey, what do we mortals know about celestial glory anyway?
published on 06/04/2025
Rene Saheb: "Stories, Transformed"
Rene Saheb keeps her garden well-watered. Her canvases and sculptures aren't wet to the touch, but they look like they could be. Drippings run down the surface of her acrylic paintings in bunches. Her sculptures, too, are plump and glistening, full of stacked sacks with pregnant curves and apertures that appear ready to pour something forth. Her colors, too, have the softness, transparency, and blurred quality of flower petals left to soak in a bowl overnight. She gives us undulations, folds, and rich thickness. A Rene Saheb scene always feels a bit like a glade right after a rainstorm: everything ripe and effulgent, with shadows in the mist, and growth happening so fast you could swear it's happening right before your eyes.
published on 05/28/2025
Nicholas D'Ornellas: "A Last Look"
Do you remember how it felt to leave an apartment behind? Do you remember your kitchen, once a font of life and nourishment, barren and stripped of your familiar possessions, naked, staring back at you, suddenly alien? What about your bedroom once you’d dragged the mattress away? Was there a permanent imprint on the floor like a photonegative? Or had every sign of you vanished? Did you search for traces and marks that proved your time there wasn't an illusion? Or did you turn the key one final time without a parting glance at where you’d been?
published on 05/21/2025
"The Devil Show"
The Devil is a thorny problem. Just by being around, he causes theological friction. If God is truly just, why does he allow the wicked Adversary to exist? If Satan is a free agent, capable of upsetting the divine plan, then God cannot be all-powerful. If the Devil is under God's control, but He is letting the tempter run around and corrupt souls, well, that’s not a very nice trick for the Big Guy to play on humanity, now, is it? Any way we look at it, the persistence of the Devil reflects poorly on God.
published on 05/14/2025
DISTORT: "Ending Up"
Just before you reach the entrance to the Journal Square station, you'll see the train before the train. It's a mural on the south side of an old apartment building on Summit Avenue. Its creator has, through a trick of perspective, made it look like a PATH tunnel has been cut out of the brick. A rail car in aerosol rushes toward us. Behind it are representations of the rock from which the tunnel was hewn, laborers with pickaxes, and a godlike figure whose garment seems to contain the primordial Jersey forest. At the bottom of the image is a modest tag: DISTORT. The artist has worked around architectural features, several metal poles and fixtures, and the rather undramatic proximity of a Dunkin Donuts to bring us this vision — one that neither glorifies or minimizes public works, but instead reminds us of their utility, their place in local history, and the sweat of those workers who sutured together the town.
published on 05/07/2025
Lori Perbeck: "Edge of Light"
Ours is a town receptive to strange photographs. Artists and viewers still operate under the twin signs of Edward Fausty and Shandor Hassan, former residents of 111 First Street and audacious image-makers, city-scapers, and saturators of our fields of vision. Dorie Dahlberg, Frank Hanavan, and Grant Hardeway have all demonstrated how much urban storytelling they can coax out of an odd picture. Then there's Susan Evans Grove, an experimentalist unabashed, who finds constellations in the pockmarked hulls of ships, and, through tricks of illumination and shadow, turns arrangements of cosmetics bottles into post-apocalyptic skylines. Grove's hallucinations teach us something important about light: under the direction of a skilled illusionist, it obscures as much as it shows.
published on 04/30/2025
"That's Not Right"
Art fairs, I have learned, are a little bit like the senior prom. They might not be your idea of a good time. But you don't want to be stuck at home while everybody else is on the dancefloor. Even if you don't party, it's still nice to be asked.
published on 04/23/2025
Dorie Dahlberg: "People I Used to Know"
Maybe you’ve got a friend who won't stop texting old photographs to you. I do. At any moment, I am one glance away from an uncomfortable saunter down Memory Lane. Gentle suggestions that he ought to reorient his attentions to the future haven't deterred him. The shots of me at younger, spryer, healthier ages can be tough to take. But for sheer destabilization, they've got nothing on the pictures of acquaintances I once had but forgot about entirely, or the pictures of people I'll never see again. Those can be a midday stomach punch: a reminder of the frailty of memory and the transience of all things.
published on 04/16/2025
"Blind Spot"
Anonymity, the Jersey City photographer Grant Hardeway tells us, isn't invisibility. That may be so. But anonymity isn't presence, either — not entirely. The anonymous person dwells somewhere between here and not-quite-here. He stands on the cusp of recognition. Sometimes he gets awfully comfortable in the shadows.
published on 04/09/2025
"Body of Work"
At the ART150 Gallery, the human figure continues its long and tortured comeback from its lockdown-era eclipse.
published on 04/02/2025
"N Is for Nancy"
For Women's History Month, our most subversive gallery rounds up some old friends for a sly, subtly provocative group show
published on 03/26/2025
"I Said What I Said" -
Jerome China cooks up an engaging sequel to his excellent 2023 show at Novado Gallery
Jerome China breaks chains. That sounds like a metaphor, but it isn't: China, a sculptor of brawny statues in iron and steel, often includes metal links in his work. Allusions to bondage, the middle passage, and resistance to oppression are hard to miss. Yet China is also drawn to the aesthetics of force. He likes applications of practical physics, and he's sensitive to dramatic gestures. A shattered chain looks cool. It means something strong has met something stronger.
published on 03/19/2025
Sawyer Conlon: "Overbrook"
Part experimental photo exhibition, part ghost story, part time travel portal, part Weird NJ - where else would this happen but SMUSH Gallery?
published on 03/12/2025
"Open Book(s)" - Adventures on the wild frontier of bookmaking, and meaning-making, in the first floor galleries of Mana Contemporary
Books do not need to be beautiful objects to be cherished. Many indispensable books on my shelf were in poor condition when I brought them home from the shop. The publishers who put out the cheap yellow-page paperbacks that rocked my world and set my course when I was a child didn’t give much consideration to font, printing, or paper stock. All that mattered was readability. Could I open it fast, close it up quick, and chuck it in my bag when I was done? If anybody at the publishing company was making design decisions, those were their objectives. Any impediment to or distraction from the reading experience was unwelcome. They took it for granted that everything that mattered was inside the book.
published on 03/05/2025
Greg Brickey & Katie Niewodowski: Chaos & Order
Two stargazers examine the deep code of the universe (and the city) as it forms, coalesces, and falls apart around them.
published on 02/26/2025
Jodi Gerbi: Hope & Resilience
If all you need to see in a gallery show is an exhibition of superior painting skills, "Hope and Resilience" has got you covered. Jodi Gerbi can handle a brush as well as anybody in Hudson County can. The carnival hues of her oil painting, the drama of her modest-sized canvases, the balance in composition and interaction of light and shadow, her knack for suggesting the synthetic — all of this speaks to her confidence, her training, and her astonishing dexterity.
published on 02/19/2025
Kwesi O. Kwarteng - "Woven World": A Tapestry Of Social Connectedness
Our civic leaders like to say that forty different languages are widely spoken in Jersey City. Take a walk from the Heights to Greenville, and you'll probably hear them all. Ethnic and cultural diversity is one of our town's strengths. We're right to be proud of it.
published on 02/12/2025
