“Home Here”
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
As Jersey City shifts under our feet, Lucy Rovetto's team asks where, exactly, we are at.
There is never a good time to learn that your town is facing a budget shortfall of a quarter billion dollars. But getting the bad news in the winter of 2026 is particularly dispiriting. Jersey City has very little latitude for error. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been operating on these streets. As we’ve seen our neighbors taken away in unmarked cars, we know we’re looking at the possibility of a long, combative summer. Pushing back against a force as overwhelming as the federal government is going to require more than coordination and compassion. We’re going to need resources. And the town, as JCAST curator Atim Oton warned us before Studio Tour 2025, is broke.
It should not have come to this. Jersey City has the capacity to cover its bills and live within its means. Ours is an educated town with a broad economy. There are many wise people in the community with the requisite patience to delay gratification for the sake of the general welfare. Unfortunately, we’ve struggled to elevate those people to positions of authority. The leaders we’ve recently had have, we’ve learned, raided the rainy-day funds. Out of vanity and ambition, they’ve stripped our defenses, and left us a public-relations predicament. Nobody has much sympathy for a wealthy place crying poor.
Big dominoes have fallen. More will drop. Everybody engaged in a project touched by the city government is justifiably nervous. Will the Arts and Culture Trust Fund last? For now, officials are saying the right things. We were aghast when the federal government withdrew money it had pledged to artists. We can’t imagine that sort of bad behavior happening here. Yet fifteen years ago, it seemed highly unlikely that our city’s University would lose its autonomy. Several budget crises and years of mismanagement by the administrators later, NJCU is getting rolled up into Kean University, and the vibe on campus is one of psychic impoverishment and despair.
That extends to the art department. The Lemmerman Gallery, which has always been the prettiest place on campus to see a show, is closed. Curator Lucy Rovetto's “Home Here” takes over the larger and blockier space in the Visual Arts building (100 Culver Avenue). You’d expect that an eleven-artist group show about residency and belonging at a time as fraught as this would be pretty thorny. You’d expect that it would be full of expressions of fear. You’d guess right.
Yet it is not an alarmist show, and never is it timid. Instead, these artists are worried that the corrosive forces of modern life are messing with our collective memory. Without precise recollection, we won’t know who we are, and we won’t be able to tell whether our homes are places of comfort or turbulence.
Astute local gallerygoers will recognize “Home Here” as an expansion of a 2024 exhibition shown at the Museum of Jersey City History. Rovetto has slightly expanded the roster of artists, and New Jersey City University has provided more space for these installations to breathe. She’s maintained the connection to a local legend: Ward Mount, a New Jersey City University professor who lived in the Heights for decades. Mount, born in the nineteenth century, was presented as a “Mother of Many Daughters,” and a forerunner of the idiosyncratic female artists who followed her. At MJCH, Mount’s painting was firmly centered; in “Home Here,” it’s more of a guiding spirit.
The most notable new daughter in the show is also the most likely artist in town to slap a commemorative marker on Professor Mount’s door. Along with her Were Here JC partner Duquann Sweeney, Jin Jung, has dotted the city with blue ceramic discs, each about the size of a child’s face, each entreating us to remember something that happened on that spot. Much of this is stuff we’d rather forget, including massacres, hate crimes, and Hurricane Sandy. But Jung is determined to make sure we don’t forget. For “Home Here,” she’s hung nine of her markers on a wall tricked out to resemble Liberty State Park, and dropped an annotated map of the town next to the grid. It feels like a muscular response to the fears of erasure we’re all having — an expression of faith that ordinary people armed with language and compassion can stake out some territory and create our own networks of meaning.
The hard look that Jung is asking for is a tough thing to take. It’s easier to be sentimental about home than it is to be frank about the ways in which it might be unstable. Ideally, our home is a safe place; in reality, it’s often anything but. In “Home Here,” Tina Maneca turns a corner of the Visual Arts Gallery into a girl’s bedroom that looks, superficially, like a suburban sanctuary, but it is also a zone of trouble. Maneca has sewn dimebags into the fur of the stuffed animals in the bassinet, and embroidered chemical symbols for drugs into the plushest of surfaces. What initially seems like a crucifix over the bed turns out to be a hood ornament lifted from a (crashed?) car. Even the wallpaper in blocks of colored rectangles becomes unnerving the more its strange stitched surfaces presence themselves.
This installation harmonizes with the show that just closed at NJCU: Stephanie Romano’s “Reconciling With the Empty Space,” a paean to a family member lost to a brain tumor. In the same corner where Maneca’s implied subject dwells in a comfortable sort of peril, Romano built a shadow-version of the house where her late father lived. Romano provided us with the catscans and evidence of loss of consciousness and creeping irreality, and stitched thin threads into ceramics just as Maneca seems to stitch straight into the wall. These etchings by needle are tiny acts of mark-making by a subject who may be overwhelmed by the immensity of what she’s facing, but who is determined to leave a record anyway.
Katelyn Halpern, another participant in “Home Here,” was up to something similar in “Disaster Place,” a terrific 2022 show mounted at Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison Ave.). Hers was the home as a blasted plain, rendered in black and white, full of ambiguous scribbled messages, and thick with the residue of conflict. In all three shows, the artists are being terribly candid, determined to register home as it is, in all of its challenges, treating memory as a kind of perilous art-making practice. In order to properly capture reality, these daughters of Ward Mount seem to be saying, we’ve got to use our imaginations.
Conjuring dreams of home is sometimes as simple as looking at a photograph. Polaroids prompt nostalgia no matter what they depict. It’s something about the muted colors, the grainy composition, that sun-baked-on-the-dashboard curve, and the white frame that denotes separation between what we’re thinking about and what we’re capable of experiencing. In Jennifer Roberts’s emotional hailstorm of an installation, she’s covered the walls of a gallery nook with old snapshots. Are some of these her family? Possibly. Are some rank strangers? Almost certainly. But they all seem familiar: missives from a territory that feels safe only because we can’t reach it anymore.
The artist has turned a few of these into paintings, including a striking little image of a mother and daughter, a greyed-out and wistful Madonna and child, on a dark sofa, right next to a station-wagon brown record player. A Peggy Lee album, upside-down, leans against a long row of vinyl in plastic wraps. This could be anyone’s living room, at any time, in any of our lives.
The volatile mix of restlessness and relaxation in Roberts’s painting is typical of looks backward. We’re comforted by what we recall and disturbed by what we can’t. Yet just as Maneca stitches her corner and Jin Jung hangs her ceramic dots, Roberts is determined to use the tools at her disposal to chronicle something important, or at least important to her, before it fades away.
The necessity and fragility of memory — and the media we use as an aide-memoire — is central to the heaviest piece in “Home Here,” and the one I’ll remember best from this show. Nicole DeMaio has draped the contents of a young woman’s room on a white wall. The objects that get this treatment place us somewhere in the 1990s: lacy sheets and Mardi Gras beads, Toms River alumni lanyards, a couple of linked Tamagotchis, the empty box for a Jane Fonda workout tape, and the tape itself, guts extracted and hung in thick black loops above a listening station. Everything in the piece is identifiable for what it is, or was, and everything contains recorded information. Accessing any of it is a different matter altogether.
If DeMaio’s installation is a teenaged dispersal, a Big Bang with particles of emotional significance flying into the dark matter of time and entropy, Jaz Graf’s ghostly response feels like a study in cohesion. Rovetto positions Graf’s tombstone-like archway of earth and vine, big enough to accommodate a human, or at least a human shadow, directly across the room so they can leer at each other. Everything about DeMaio’s piece projects outward; Graf’s vision sucks us inward. It suggests oblivion, and the great non-specific that awaits us all.
Birth on the north wall, death on the south, and in between, everything we can collect and shape into memories that won’t erode and can’t be taken away. In between the Graf and DeMaio installations, Pat Lay, poet of the computer chip card, has assembled a seven by seven grid of white squares with markings reminiscent of an old-fashioned motherboard. Little rotors, rows of comb-like metal sheets, machine-guts and grooves like connections on a processor have been carefully arranged and presented on a bleached field. This is the memory-storage apparatus as a desert landscape — an architectural model-style reimagining of the digital beast to which we’ve trusted our recollections. And rising above this plain is the symbol of the persistence of human endeavor across the centuries: a pyramid. In the sandstorm conditions of 2026, may our own besieged homes be similarly sturdy.
(The artists of “Home Here” will lead an exhibition tour and a gallery talk at 100 Culver Ave. on March 1 from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. I find it pretty emotional to be on the NJCU campus these days, and you may, too, but that may heighten your susceptibility to this show. That's a good thing.)
