There was a wall made of PVC pipe stuffed with drinking straws, and positioned by the sculptor Josué Urbina to catch and channel the light, and guide the eye down strange and narrow passages. There was a page from a child’s fantasy: an image of photographer Megan Maloy’s wide-eyed daughter, a frog, and a fairy-tale forest. There was, in an adjacent gallery, a map of New Jersey, with ribbons attached to spectral photographs snapped by the tireless Garden State chronicler Dorie Dahlberg. There was sand-saturated paint slathered on screen-door mesh by Tarik Mendes, broken and reassembled cinderblock bricks by Josh Urso, stark, murmuring landscapes by printer Kim Bricker, and mylar balloons refashioned into children’s clothing and hung on a line by impish, imaginative Mollie Thonnesson.
All of that was at 150 Bay Street; a little to the west, a charmless condominium atrium was enlivened by mystical circular paintings by Katie Niewodowski that glowed like nodes on the sephirot; at Casa Colombo, Caridad Sierra Kennedy’s plays of color abutted Scot Wittman’s shots of ballet dancers in mid-pirouette in sunlit caves and forest glades. Art House Productions premiered a beautiful new exhibition space fronting Warren Street. Donchellee Fulwood leaned her winsome, puzzle-like paintings against the walls of Calabar, a new gallery behind the leasing office at the Beacon, and DISTORT, Jersey City’s most prolific street artist, threw open the doors of his studio at the Tenmarc building and shared medieval-looking scrolls he’d fashioned out of used spray paint cans. Trish Gianakis hung spherical cages from the ceiling of the Fine Art Gallery at St. Peter’s, Kubra Ada made the walls at EONTA Space bloom with her marbled paper designs, and a team of iconoclasts at New Jersey City University shook up the stilled life until it popped and fizzed.
JCAST presented Jersey City as a place of wonders — a home to artists, recognized and obscure, making their voices heard and visions visible. But for it to be properly told, the story of the thirty-second version of the annual Tour must foreground on an institution that hasn’t always been well integrated into the scene: MANA Contemporary, the massive and moneyed arts complex at the western end of Newark Avenue. This year, MANA jumped into the deep puddle that is Jersey City arts with both feet, and made a nice, big, muddy splash. To the clatter of drums on the street, the Tour opened at MANA on Thursday night; the complex took over two spaces on the far side of Dey Street and turned them into community galleries. Under a Senate St. tent, MANA even fed people.
Most importantly, MANA was accessible, and tour-able. Not every artist in the complex opened his or her grey door to the public, but enough did — on both weekend days — that the arts center hinted at the conceptual unity and communitarian spirit that its designers have always promised to create. In the past, MANA Contemporary personnel have sometimes behaved like the rock stars who play at the Prudential Center in Newark but still insist on greeting the crowd with a lusty “hello, New York.” In 2022 MANA was no car that had caught a flat on the way to the tunnel. It was a cornerstone of the town’s biggest cultural event. As an acknowledgment, here’s a rundown of eleven marvelous artists whose work I experienced at MANA last weekend. Bookmark this for the next time MANA opens its studios, which will, no doubt, be soon. Right, guys?
Featured work: Carlo Ontal “Fish and Bread”
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