For most Hoboken residents, the Hoboken Studio Art Tour is just another of the many annual offerings that make up the city’s cultural events calendar. But for artists who participate, the tour is the biggest night of the year. Drawing deep pocketed collectors from New York City and suburban New Jersey to the mile-square city, the studio tour helps to keep Hoboken artists afloat in a time of retrenchment and uncertainty.
The tour features over 100 artists, giving Hobokenites a chance to see artists in the intimate setting of their own studios as opposed to the strategic sterility of a gallery.
According to Hoboken Administrator of Cultural Affairs Geri Fallo, the tour is designed so that patrons can walk easily from studio to studio, taking advantage of Hoboken’s dense footprint and concentrated artistic hotspots like the Neumann Leathers complex or the Monroe Center for the Arts.
The studio tour will run from noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 9. Free tour maps will be available at City Hall at 94 Washington St. on the day of the tour.
Hand-cut Hoboken
The Hoboken Studio Artist Tour may have no better acolyte than Ricardo Roig, who works out of a studio in Chambord Place in Southwest Hoboken. The painter and screen-printer says he loves Hoboken’s educated art-loving residents and looks forward to the annual tour—this year will be his fourth—as a chance to meet them and share his work. “This is how I connect with people,” said Roig.
In a break from past editions of the Studio Tour, Roig will be showcasing his screen prints instead of his paintings. Roig creates the objects by hand-cutting stencils for each color he will use in a print, then laying down each color separately by scraping paint across the stencil onto high quality paper placed below.
“The realness is in what the artist’s hands touch.”—Ricardo Roig
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Though they are produced from the same stencil, each print is unique in its own little way due to the process by which they are created—an extra splotch of blue, a slightly crooked line, a raised pattern where the paper stuck to the screen. “The realness,” says Roig, “is in what the artist’s hands touch.”
Roig says he is the only artist he knows of who hand-cuts screen prints as intricate as his own. Others who reach his level of detail, says Roig, use computers to design and cut their screens.
The screen prints have a strong, sharp-edged “graphic” style, with each color broken down into light medium and dark tones. The subject matter is pulled from Roig’s life and travels—a wave-tossed beach in Hawaii, marathon runners on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and a 26-print series on places in the mile-square city, where Roig lived before moving to Union City (now that Roig has his studio, he says he is hoping to move back to Hoboken if he can find an affordable one-bedroom).
Roig’s studio is located at 51 Harrison St. It will be open to the public from noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
Fine figures
The Studio Art Tour coincides with the opening of Lou Carbone’s new exhibit at the Hoboken Historical Museum. From 2 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 9, visitors can stop by the upper gallery of the Museum for free and see five new paintings from Carbone. In fact, the paintings are so new that as of this past Wednesday, only one of them was complete.
Carbone’s paintings are highly stylized scenes, often incorporating nude figures, which depict “ritual happenings combined with feelings of sexual tension that are woven with a quiet elegant motion,” according to the artist statement on his website. In deference to the family-friendly nature of the Historical Museum, however, all of the figures in his new show are fully clothed.
Carbone has been in every Studio Tour the city has put on, and in that time he has watched the art scene in the city change. He used to have studio space in the Monroe Center, then moved to Neumann Leathers, where he rented space from artisanal furniture maker Eric Chapeau. When Chapeau made the move to Mana Fine Arts in Jersey City, Carbone rented a new space in Neumann from fellow painter Tim Daly.
Carbone admits that gentrification has taken its toll on the artist community in Hoboken, but said the sale of Neumann Leathers to a new set of owners who have spoken positively about preserving its artist studio space is a glimmer of promise. “I don’t particularly want to be a perennial pioneer,” said Carbone.
The Hoboken Historical Museum is located at 1301 Hudson St. In additional to his opening reception on Sunday, Carbone will host a preview party at the museum from 7 to 10 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 7. His exhibit will run through Sunday, Dec. 23.
Cooking from scratchboard
At her studio in the Neumann Leathers building, photographer and graphic artist Jane Greenbaum will be sharing a project that is near to her heart. She will be signing and selling copies of her self-published cookbook, illustrated with her own scratchboard drawings, to raise money for breast cancer charities.
Greenbaum herself is a breast cancer survivor, and she wants the book to benefit the hospital that managed her chemotherapy and radiation, Memorial Sloan Kettering, along with Mary’s Place by the Sea, a renovated home in Ocean Grove, N.J. which hosts and pampers women recovering from breast cancer.
The illustrations in the book were produced by scratching out designs on a white clay surface covered with black ink. Greenbaum called scratchboard a “reductive kind of style” that reveals images through subtraction.
Even the recipes in the book have sentimental value for Greenbaum—all of them come from her 81-year-old mother Arlene Lemelson. Greenbaum says Lemelson is the type of cook who you just have to get the recipes from, and the cookbook is one way of doing just that.
Greenbaum’s show will take place in studio 6H in the Neumann Leathers complex, which can be found on the top floor of the elevator via the 333 Newark Street entrance. The studio to the public from 2 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week.
Pumpkins and pastels
Bill Curran will be celebrating his 12th year on the Hoboken Studio Art Tour with a live demonstration of painting a still life. Whether in oil or acrylic paint, Curran’s artworks take a pastel perspective on his adopted hometown.
Curran’s muse is nature in all its miniature glory, and he says Hoboken continues to provide ample subject matter even after almost 31 years. Curran works as an associate at the Hoboken Historical Museum, and he finds many of his inspirations on walks to and from the museum—a stand of hollyhocks on the Stevens campus, autumn chrysanthemums in front of the old church at Sixth and Willow streets. His apartment looks out on the backyards between Bloomfield and Garden streets north of First Street, and he said he is continually struck by the flowers and trees he sees there.
Curran prefers to paint en plein air, setting down his easel wherever a scene strikes him, but for the Tour, he will be in his apartment and studio, painting a pumpkin and a bucket of mums. Though he does not rely on painting to make a living, Curran says he has done well at the Studio Tour, selling $2,000 worth of art last year alone.
Curran will hold a preview of his Studio Tour show from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Nov.7, also at his apartment studio, located at 100 Bloomfield Street, Apartment 1.
Other artists featured
The Artist Studio City Hall will host artwork from students at the Hoboken Charter School and beadwork from jeweler Bernadette Micchelli. The Hudson School at 601 Park Ave. will host artwork by students, alumni, faculty and friends.
At Schnackenberg’s Luncheonette at 1110 Washington St., Joyce Flinn will be showing off her mosaic map of the United States constructed solely from shards and sections of commemorative plates.
Issyra Gallery, an African art-focused gallery located in Unit C11 on the Observer Highway side of the Neumann Leather complex, will host a Friday night jam from 8 to 10 p.m. Also at Neumann, Mary Nicholas Picard will be demonstrating weaving techniques and giving visitors a chance to lay down a line or two on her loom. Picard’s studio is located fourth floor via the elevator, which is accessible through the 300 Observer Highway entrance.
Several special events will take place at the Monroe Center at 720 Monroe St. Jo and Co Mosaics will be demonstrating mosaic techniques all day in room C509C. On Friday Nov. 7th at 8:30 p.m., Lois Dilivio will be performing a performance art comedy piece called “It’s About Time,” also in room C509C.
For further information, check the Hoboken Cultural Affairs website at http://www.hobokennj.org/artists-studio-tour or call Geri Fallo at (201) 420-2207 or email her at gfallo@hobokennj.org.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.