JCAST 2025
- Eye Level
- Oct 7
- 10 min read
From Greenville to the Heights, throwing peace signs at these dark times.
I don’t know how apocryphal it was, but I used to hear the informal designations all the time. Newark, I was told, was the place to get a kilo. Hence its nickname: Brick City. If you had a beef, you might take it up in infamous Illtown, properly known as East Orange. But people didn’t fight in Jersey City. This town was considered gang truce territory, and this was the secret meaning behind our not-so-secret handle. Our nickname was Chilltown. We even had a Chilltown Magazine. I wrote for it.
These days, Illtown is home to Manufacturers Village and hundreds of new market-rate units near the Brick Church Station. It doesn’t seem too violent anymore, if it ever did. Newark is still the Bricks, but almost everybody I talk to in the arts community associates the nickname with the industrial architecture. And Chilltown we remain, even if the handle has faded a bit. The concept of Jersey City as a place of wary relaxation occupying a space between big rivers, a breather, an island of sorts on its own Garden State version of Caribbean island time, neutral territory before the United States really gets going in all of its pitiless ferocity — that’s still around. That’s a permanent part of our identity. This is no town for sluggers. Even our roughnecks look askance at aggressiveness. Lately, the rest of the world keeps reminding us that our preferences are reasonable ones.
A single photograph brought me back to Chilltown, even though I’d never really left: Diana Dominicci Stewart’s shot of an altered signal at an intersection in McGinley Square made infamous by a recent ICE raid nearby. Some wag turned a road sign into a Chill sign. A vigilante artist, alarmed by the incursion of trouble in a place where dissension is unwanted, stood up for our prerogatives.
Stewart’s documentary photo comes like a mark of punctuation at the end of “ICU/USA,” the Eonta Space (34 DeKalb Ave.) show that felt like the uneasy conscience of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Jersey City Art and Studio Tour. This how we plan to handle the turbulence we face. We’re going to reaffirm our values through our own time-tested methods — jokes, riffs, culture-jamming and sly commentary, prankster interactions with the urban landscape, entreaties for mercy and strategies for de-escalation, with the wadding of affection and genial self-deprecation stuffed in the barrels of any rifles pointed our way.
JCAST ’25 felt like an extension of the recent Jersey City Fridays event in which everybody, all over town, decided to bring a peace offering of painted blooms. Flowers are a hippie symbol, and we’re more than a bit of a hippie town — or at least our art scene is. We’re going to armor ourselves with our kindness, and hope it gets us by; we won’t meet ugly threats with uglier ripostes, we will remember that the abyss stares also into us.
At a brilliant group show in a backroom space in the nascent Liberty Arts District (90 Forrest St. at JC Walls), our best-loved street artists and muralists smothered the walls of a pit-like room with glorious color and expressions of perseverance through tough times. Mustart, DISTORT, Ceaze, Clarence Rich and others all brought along their most congenial works. The bright-eyed human (and humanoid) beings in these pieces were visibly beset by trouble. Nevertheless, they look upward, and outward, without malice. Keith Van Pelt of Deep Space Gallery sanctified the late Jam Master Jay with a narrow, glorious stained glass piece as tall as a man. Acro did as the playful vandal in the Stewart photograph did, turning a liberated stop sign into a declaration of refusal to cease. Kopye, in a remarkable piece, bestowed upon the community a single yellow rose, thorns concealed, holding up bravely under a dusting of white aerosol.
Acro’s improvised octagon introduced us to a character: a heavy-lidded pup with a baseball cap and a sly smile, low key, unassuming, but with the side of his face tipped up a bit in a cautious gesture of welcome. We know this guy and we like him. He is likely to remind us of a rowdy but lovable neighbor. Perhaps he reminds us of our own animal spirits.
Animals can be badasses — particularly alley cats and junkyard canines — but they’re also adorable, and they want to be pet. When we present ourselves as animals, we’re asking the audience to look beyond our bark and our refusal to be tamed and see us as friends. Anthropomorphized beasts elicit the sympathy of viewers. Even invaders are unlikely to hurt a dog on purpose. Thus there were animals all over the JCAST galleries, totems of the wild spirit of a community with members who can be fierce when cornered, but mostly want to flutter on and amble on unmolested. If the June JC Fridays belonged to the horticulturists, Studio Tour ’25 was busy with zoologists. It felt like an escalation, and a thickening of a psychic shield. The flowers of June weren’t enough to appease a hostile world. Maybe puppies would do the trick.
Several shows were menageries outright. At experimental ceramics lab Evening Star Studio (11 Monitor Street), the beasts took over. The statuettes and figurines of “Animal Instinct,” an eight artist group exhibition, included the wan, worried faces of creatures, mostly quadrupeds, made by the team of aCowsTail and aCrowsFeet. These little fellows looked up, sheepish and snaggle-toothed, as if they were confronting beings of greater power and malevolence, deciding whether to hold fast or bolt.
Steadier, if no less threatened, were the handsome sculpted snakes of ceramicist Arkady Thompson. These drooped like garlands from studio shelves and coiled up in the room’s corners: a yellow plumed fantasy serpent, a bone-white customer with moss-colored scales, a ropy black adder with a don’t-tread-on-me stare. But the masterstroke of this endearing show was its lowliest element: a quartet of lovingly fabricated and fired slugs, glistening with clear glaze, made by gallerist Beth DiCara. While other beasts scaled the walls, they found a suitable habitat on the gallery floor, handling the curves of a tiny tiled hill.
Sometimes the connection between the vulnerable animal kingdom and human aggression was made explicit. The “Poster Stellars Exhibition,” a party on paper at NJCU’s Lemmerman Gallery (2039 Kennedy Blvd.) was enlivened by Violeta Dontcoya’s plaintive image of a yellow dog, pert and expectant, recommending kindness. Up in the Heights, Farzad Labbauf opened his home studio and shared his tripping-Disney images of a fragmented Snow White, composed of scores of parallel pill shapes, with a shattered bluejay in her outstretched hand and a gas pump and poison apple in the foreground.
Then there was Guillermo Bublik, a mainstay of Jersey City art shows before decamping to Stirling, back at 150 Bay Street with a clutch of new work. Surely he did not intend his drips and rivulets of black ink, delicate and diaphanous as Japanese calligraphy, to cohere into shapes reminiscent of fragile animals. The universe had other designs. I saw a bird, a buck, a weir of fish, and a pair of spiny crustaceans, close but barely touching.
But the most crowded ark in town popped its lid and spilled its contents at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.). The works of “Animalia,” deftly rustled up by curator Andrea McKenna, stampeded out of the main exhibition space and took over the walls of theater foyer. More than forty artists summoned animal spirits in clay, paint, paper, ink, and beads. It was a varied show unified by its protective overtones, its savannah energy, and its clear link between the fauna and an imperiled planet.
Magical realism touched many of these canvases, particularly those of Ever Blanco Valverde, whose pieces radiated intense concern for his nonhuman subjects. In one, a flock of birds airlift a quizzical but trusting cow to points unknown. In another, the earth is shielded by a whale that hovers in the sky like a great sail. The symbolism might have been immediately apparent, as it was in Francisco Silva’s painting of a polar bear on an ice floe, its home in the wilderness bleeding away into the vast sea. But as habitat destruction continues unchecked — including the degradation of our own habitat — it felt awfully relevant nonetheless.
Then there were the animal scenes that held reserves of mystery, like Lucy Rovetto’s barnful of pink polka-dotted steers, bunched up and beautiful, soulful, immersed in their own inscrutable bovine experience. Whispers of the slaughterhouse become more intense in Jen Morris’s arresting ‘Sacrificial Lamb,” in which a haloed ewe with its legs bound rests uncomfortably on a flower-strewn plinth. Is this the Lamb of God, or just a creature from a factory farm trapped in a carnivorous world? Is there even a difference? The twine wrapped around the animal’s legs makes its hooves resemble ballerina flats. On its fluffy face was a look of resignation that stopped just short of beatific.
Other animals were more dangerous — but only when cornered. Gail Boykewich’s wild dog snarled from the north wall of the gallery, while painter Robert Policastro’s tiger, proud of its tawny stripes and professionally charismatic, glowered from the west. Sarah Langsam’s pair of housecats, made entirely from congealed sawdust, were just as self-possessed. Mark Kurdzeil, painter of dramatic and psychologically complex scenes in distemper, set a great cat and a bird at the entrails of a disemboweled sleeper who didn’t seem to mind the beasts rummaging around her innards.
There were also incisions aplenty in the twee but incendiary work of painter and sculptor Sherly Fan, a subtle provocateur who I don’t write about often enough. Fan, possessor of a studio space at Project 14C (157B 1st St.) confronts the outside world with laughter, a bouquet of flowers, and a stuffed animal. She armors herself with playfulness. But she’s also as shrewd as they come, confounding her audience with pictures of wee beasties who don’t want to be considered cute, no matter how fetching she’s made them. This weekend, butterflies and green grass emerged from a slit in the belly of an alarmed-looking bunny. Blooms grew from the poorly-sutured wounds of a lamb. A nearby painting laid out the artist’s disposition, and perhaps yours, too: a cat, adorable and furious with a candy heart-shaped nose, begins by stating that it hates humans, then revises that to concede that it’s afraid of humans, and then crosses that out and admits that it wants to love humans. It can be tough to do.
And if it couldn’t, who could blame that kitty? Is love for humanity a reasonable aspiration for a beleaguered nonhuman being to have? Speaking to a tree is even tougher than communicating with an animal, but Larissa Belcic of Nocturnal Medicine has never let alterity impede her compassion. One floor away from Sherly Fan’s studio, Belcic welcomed visitors to a 14C Special Project studio that was earth-shaking, in the sense that one often must shake the residue of the earth out of a rug.
Standing in her studio felt like getting swallowed and digested by a redwood. Her installation, amplified by sound, incorporated pounds upon pounds of dirt. The artist smeared raw earth on large tapestries in patterns that felt indebted to ancient religious rites, suspended them in a circle, and bathed them in deep amber light suggestive of sunrise. “Dirt Club” didn’t just feel prehistoric — a Powerhouse Arts District riff on Stonehenge — it also smelled primordial, too, wet and elemental and laden with mineral significance, deep reverberations and collective memories. Of all the encounters with the wounded world at JCAST, here was the most tectonic.
Other artists chased a similar union between flesh, fiber, and stone. Isabelle Duverger was everywhere this weekend, contributing several of her evocative (and weirdly sexy) golden paintings of women’s legs with root systems for feet at “Past Present Future,” a wistful, eloquent exhibition at tiny Project Greenville (128 Winfield Ave.) that traced the ways in which humans and their communities come untethered in time. Those “Rooted” canvases made another appearance at the Tour Headquarters (150 Pacific St.), where Duverger and frequent collaborator Laia Cabrera decked out a side room with filmed images that radiated longing for a relationship with the physical world.
Curator Donna Kessinger took advantage of the spaciousness of the Bergen-Lafayette factory to find nooks for many more projected works than we’re accustomed to seeing in Jersey City exhibitions, which was refreshing. Still, it was the painters who left the deepest impressions: Ibou Ndoye’s blue-skinned trio of snake-necked characters with gritted teeth on a great, bossy, magnetizing oval canvas, and “A Song 4 Assata,” KORTEZ’s beautiful black and white play of shadow, centrifugal force, and ripples in greyscale.
Can harmony with the landscape truly provide a balm for a fractured soul? Is stitching together a wounded earth — if only in our minds — a means by which we can resist the corrosive influences that seem to surround us on all sides, threatening our serenity and prodding us toward irritability and pugnacity? Kwesi O. Kwarteng thinks so. His tapestries were highlights of “The Art of Convergence,” curator Shantel Assante-Kissi’s poised, pained twenty artist group show at the Bethune Center (140 Martin Luther King Dr.). By pulling together fabrics from all over the world into vibrant riverscapes, he’s thumbing his nose at the current fashion for cultural division, and reminding us all that nationality is permeable and ethnicity is a flow.
On the other side of town, Alyce Gottesman was up to something not dissimilar in a home studio deep in the residential blocks of Ward D. The artist stitched shapes from fabric swatches directly on to paintings that were already plenty descriptive. In so doing, she provided more than texture. She gave her landscapes narrative: dawns, sunrises, stars, plants, things growing, and creeping, and haunting.
Did all that journeying make JCAST ’25 too diffuse for its own good? Maybe. Jersey City is large. Getting to the Heights from Greenville is time-consuming no matter how you choose to make the trip. By the time you arrive, much of the afternoon is gone. But the decision to shift the Tour’s official center of gravity south was an audacious one, and it had its own rewards. Those who visited Headquarters might have crossed the street and stumbled upon the usual location of Pacific Flea (149 Pacific Ave.) There, young people were engaged in a timeless Art and Studio Tour activity: improvising. They were taking random Polaroids and taping them to an art wall; they were shopping; they were sitting on lawn chairs and talking about creative projects. Photographs by area artists, including Greenville chronicler Duquan Sweeney, hung from wires. Copies of The Area of Refuge, a photo magazine, were available on a desk. It was convivial. It was welcoming. Some might even say it was chill.
