For those who attended this year’s Jersey City Art & Studio Tour, the event was almost too large and sprawling to take in, and the wisest art lovers picked selective sites to visit rather than trying to run to studios in every corner of Jersey City.
“I felt like there was a lot of buzz leading up to the event, which was great,” said Christine Goodman, founder of Art House Productions. The group relocated to new headquarters near Journal Square prior to the event on Oct. 18 and 19. “It’s hard to get a sense of the size of the festival, since I was in my own space the whole time. The foot traffic did feel bigger to me this year.”
Billed as the largest culture event in Jersey City, the tour showcased artists of every kind, from fine-painting to performance, and in every part of the city.
“One of the featured artists here, Peter Bill has been on the scene for decades,” said John Mc Inerney, owner of Hudson County Art Supply at Coles and First streets downtown.
Bill, a British painter who has lived in several parts of Hudson County over the decades, including Weehawken, has exhibited in England and the U.S. For a long time, he was involved with the Cooper Gallery, formerly located on Grove Street, and he has also exhibited in Hoboken and the Williams Center in Rutherford.
“One of the featured artists here, Peter Bill has been on the scene for decades.” – John Mc Inerney
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Hudson County Art Supply is also a mainstay of the downtown artists’ scene. Its exterior walls are filled with vivid cartoon characters that have pedestrians pausing to gaze even on days other than the art tour.
“We change them periodically,” Mc Inerney said.
Bay Street, at the heart of the Power House Arts District, was particularly challenging since the studio spaces required a bit of climbing up narrow staircases in large, former industrial buildings to hive-like spaces where the artists actually work.
Visiting the Arts District
This was particularly true when visiting the studios of Phil Vassil or Philip Nicholas at 134 Bay St., although the works at the end of the climb were worth traveling through the maze of old industrial hallways to see.
Some artists in the area have already left their mark on the local scene, such as Shauna Finn, whose show at SILVERMAN’s Majestic Gallery near Grove and Montgomery streets is just coming to a close.
Ali Harrington, who works in the same studio at 123 First St., will kick off her show “Neck of the Woods,” at the Majestic in early November. Her work depicts her travels across country. Her works evoke the feeling of places like Utah rather than detailed portraits, and you get an emotional kick from each place, feeling what she felt when she passed through.
She said she started out in Boston and made her way west and back again, collecting a body of imagery along the way, managing to capture the intense uniqueness of each stop.
Joanna Wilkinson, a Brooklyn native with a studio on Bay Street, found a roll of interesting material during her wanderings and has used it as a kind of canvas for a remarkable mixed media work that evokes comparisons with artists like Jackson Pollock.
A few twists and turns into an even more remote portion of the 123 Bay St. brought the viewer to the studio of Christopher Boyle, whose works – some as large as the side of a house – are hauntingly familiar. Indeed, they should be. He started out working with ink blots, and has evolved a bio-geometric style that is as thought-provoking as it is visually appealing.
“People tell me all the time that they see things in my work,” he said. “I only see patterns.”
Also on this block at 371 Warren St. is the Panepinto Galleries, in which some of the local artists have work displayed. The 3,500 square foot gallery and 5,000 square foot artist spaces form a significant core to the arts district.
The current show during the tour was Lucid Visions, bringing together local and international artists based in Jersey City, Brooklyn and Manhattan in dealing with the mysterious landscape between wakefulness and the dream-state. This collection of work was elegant and surreal, and sometimes three-dimensional, like a full sized papier-mâché donkey.
Al Sullivan may be reached at asullivan@hudsonreporter.com.