Top 15 NJ art shows of 2024: Elana Herzog, Nan Ring, Richard Whitten and more

ETIENNE FROSSARD

Works by Elana Herzog, on display at her “Ripped, Tangled, and Frayed” exhibition at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit — Tris McCall’s pick for best New Jersey art show of 2024.

When I left the Vanessa German exhibition at The Montclair Art Museum in March 2023, I knew I had seen the show that would top my year-end list of favorites. It was, I reasoned, exceedingly unlikely that anything would shake me as fiercely as that exhibit did. As it turned out, Victor Ekpuk’s eloquent, symbol-rich show at The Bainbridge House in Princeton came pretty close. But when it was time to make an assessment of what I had seen in ’23, I barely wrestled with the result. German came in at No. 1, Ekpuk was No. 2, and that was that.

This year was different. The shows that top the list that follows were ones that I liked very much on initial viewing, but they didn’t seize me by the collar and turn me upside down the way German’s exhibition did. I left unsure whether I’d still be thinking about them in a week. A week passed, and they were still very much on my mind. Then a month passed, and several months, and every time I thought back to them, they seemed to gain intensity. By the end of the year, they had become part of the frame through which I apprehended the new art that I was seeing. They had gone from agreeable to undeniable. Like all truly great shows, they continued to run in my head long after I had left the gallery, and even after they had been taken down.

It was my pleasure to travel all over the Garden State to see shows this year. As much as I saw, there was, by necessity, plenty I missed: It’s a big state with many terrific galleries and museums. There was a lot of ground to cover. If you are a gallery-goer yourself, it is likely that your list is completely different from mine. I’d love to know what your favorites were, in the Comments section below.

Paul Leibow’s helicopter-like sculpture at his “33 1/3” exhibition.

15. Paul Leibow’s “33 1/3 (Long Playing)” at Monmouth Museum, Lincroft

It is possible that the record industry wouldn’t have taken off as explosively as it did if records themselves weren’t such winsome objects. Shiny black vinyl discs scored by hundreds of circular grooves? That is like something designed by a monomaniacal conceptual artist. Early record players, too, were fascinating objects, decked out with gill-like speakers, unaccountable tweed padding, and glitter, and festooned with logos of superheroes, mythological beasts, and whatever else the makers at Magnavox thought might move some units. At his Monmouth Museum solo show, the mischievous Paul Leibow reveled in every physical aspect of the record biz, sawing slats into discs and building Tinkertoy structures with them, fitting mirror balls on turntables, and turning clamshell portable record players into staging areas for robot fight games. Yet nothing about the show felt destructive — not even the arresting sculpture of a phonograph falling to pieces. Instead, Leibow seemed to be playing with the fissile energy of rock ‘n’ roll marketing, and maybe even rock ‘n’ roll itself. This extended to the giant helicopter with an album where its propeller should be, which Leibow parked right in the middle of the gallery.

14. Ellen Harvey’s “Disappointed Tourist” at Rowan University Art Gallery and Museum, Glassboro

Postcards are glib. They aren’t meant to be critical of the places that they advertise: Instead, they are Chamber of Commerce-approved images designed to testify to an attraction’s enduring significance. It may have been the blithe self-confidence of postcards that drove Ellen Harvey to a stomach-dropping act of visual satire. “Disappointed Tourist” consisted of huge, handsome postcards of her own making — scores of them — advertising places that are either no more or that never were. She arranged these images of the Grenfell Tower, the receded Chacaltaya Glacier, Tulsa’s destroyed Black Wall Street, and other doomed and desolate spots in a massive grid on two walls of Rowan’s gallery. In so doing, she poked fun at our fascination with disaster while reaffirming the curious persistence (in our minds, anyway) of that which has been rudely wiped from the earth.

“The Crossing,” by Ginger Andro and Chuck Glicksman.

13. “Crossing the Hudson” at MORA Museum of International Art, Jersey City

The Sculptors Guild was founded in New York City in 1937, and the storied organization still feels beholden to mid-20th Century aesthetic virtues. As New Jersey curator Tina Maneca’s “Crossing the Hudson” show demonstrated, that is not a problem in the slightest. The exhibition was old-fashioned in the best way, foregrounding bronze casts of human shapes, amalgams of disused parts and repurposed machinery, splintered mannequins and spooky dolls, lead pipes, and plenty of political critique and calls for environmental awareness and justice. Everything in the group show had intellectual and physical heft, including a room-sized replication of the Brooklyn Bridge composed of cables, mirrors and shadows. In short, “Crossing the Hudson” was the sort of substance-over-novelty exhibition — one with masterful execution and plenty of inventiveness — that New York museums used to specialize in, but hardly ever feature anymore. You’re welcome here in New Jersey any time, Sculptors Guild.

12. Edward Fausty’s “Refuge” at Watchung Art Center

During the lockdown period, the woods were a lifeline — a place to hide from an invisible killer. Yet no matter how deep in the Garden State forests we traveled, we couldn’t get away from what was happening in the world around us. All refuges, we learned, were penetrable, and no defense was complete. Edward Fausty, an artist who will always be known for grand, exquisite, dramatic color prints of warehouses and bridges, might have seemed like an unlikely candidate to capture this dynamic. But he lives in rustic Boonton these days, and he has lately been directing his camera (and his eye for telling and emotionally evocative detail) toward the natural world rather than the built environment. In “Refuge,” he folded elegant, beautifully composed photographs of the Jersey woods so they resembled pages of a large open book, and set them against an outpouring of capital letters. This match between geography and orthography would have been striking on its own, but it became even more fascinating and chilling once it became clear that Fausty was spelling out the genetic sequence of the COVID spike protein. In one piece, the letters completely overwhelmed the little photographic pamphlet inside and turned it black. With characteristic mordant humor, Fausty called it “Dark Chapter.” We’ve all read it.

This work by Judith Nangala Crispin was part of the “Under a Southern Star” exhibition.

11. “Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography,” presented by Princeton University Art Museum at Art on Hulfish

Australians know fire. Arguably, no place on earth has been scarred any more brutally by the climate crisis. “Under a Southern Star,” a roundup of Down Under experimental photography curated by Deborah Klochko, Graham Howe and Ashley Lumb, was full of flame. It licked at the heels of aborigines, chased animals up trees and, in one shattering print, coalesced in the familiar shape of Ayers Rock, the continent’s spiritual heart. Even shots of parts of Australia that weren’t smoldering felt jeopardized by proximity to the blaze. All of this fire-fighting, metaphorical and literal, has hardened Australians, the show argues, and survivorhood has become part of the national identity. But the photographers in this uncompromising group show did not forget about the denizens of Australia who couldn’t escape the heat. Judith Nangala Crispin pressed the bodies of dead animals directly onto light-sensitive paper, and stained her pieces with blood, sand and common chemicals. What sounds gruesome was, in practice, elemental, gripping and gorgeous. Just like Australia itself.

10. Caroline Burton’s “Way Finding” at New Jersey State Museum, Trenton

Old tapestries, loosely woven wool throws, bicycle tire treads on a dirt road, stretched fishnet stockings, shed snakeskin, the geometric play of farms seen from above: Caroline Burton’s large hung canvases suggest all of these things. Looks deceive. They are acrylic paintings, meticulously fashioned, stark and sometimes quite spooky. Even her color choices generate an illusion. What seems at first to be grayscale turns out to be, on closer inspection, a judicious blend of muted hues. At The State Museum, Burton filled an entire chamber with these pieces and immersed visitors in a singular spectral vision and an experience of strange velocity. The show felt like an afterimage of a trip across the prairie, filled with silos and farm towers and the rhythms of irrigated plots of land. Though “Way Finding” felt superficially abstract, the show was imbued with a powerful sense of place — one that culminated in an impressionistic but unmistakable image of the Four Corners states, drawn by a spectral cartographer in the American netherworld.

“Reservoir of Expression,” by Tenjin Ikeda.

9. Tenjin Ikeda’s “Expressive Impressions in Linoleum” at Maplewood 1978 Arts Center

The Garden State hosted many terrific shows during Black History Month 2024, including a group exhibition at Akwaaba Gallery in Newark, the deep and probing “Contemporary African Spirituality in Art” at The Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University, and an Afrofuturist blowout at The Paper Mill Playhouse. My favorite, though, was one of the humblest. Tenjin Ikeda’s crisp, symbol-stuffed linocut prints, mostly in black and white but enlivened with flashes of color, emphasized clarity, texture and personality. Though “Expressive Impressions in Linoleum” felt like an extension of a European artistic practice, Ikeda made his connection to African cultural traditions clear. Images recurred from piece to piece: the buzzing dragonfly, the seashell, the blooming flower, the spinning spider, the cowrie-cloaked shaman with his suit of sigils. Yet the real stars of Ikeda’s prints were his open-faced human characters. They came straight at the viewer with their eyes, hands and hearts open, and pulled us into his teeming, buzzing world.

8. “New Sculpture/New Jersey” at Morris Museum, Morris Township

Should you place a hulking, whirring robot in the middle of an art gallery — one made out of antique drill presses, no less — that robot has a pretty good chance of stealing the show. That Josh Knoblick’s “Tri-Axis-Triad (Walker Turner Cubed)” did not run away with “New Sculpture/New Jersey,” a flashy, crowd-pleasing convention of some of our most audacious artists, is a testament to the vision of curator Bryant Small, a manager who knows how to fill out a starting lineup. Knoblick’s metallic beast shared space with Sunil Garg’s gently rotating and LED-lit wraiths made of chicken wire, Robert Koch’s black steel seed-pods, Christine Barney’s gorgeous, light-catching blocks of tinted glass, Brian Gustafson’s exquisite glass umbrellas, the great Valerie Huhn’s body armor (draped over a faceless, hoodie-clad young man in a pose evocative of Trayvon Martin) assembled from reflective squares adorned with colored, glittering fingerprints, and other scene-stealers. Generally, videos of artists talking about their processes are as unwelcome an intrusion in an art gallery as a blaring TV in a hospital waiting room, but the film accompanying “New Sculpture/New Jersey” was so exquisitely done that it felt like a genuine enhancement of a show that was already overloaded with excitement.

“Words Have Weight,” by Kate Dodd.

7. Kate Dodd’s “New Work” at Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, Clinton

An anvil made from little strips of printed paper. A helmet pricked by pins fashioned with coins. A duck — or is it a decoy? — composed from the pages of an atlas. Kate Dodd has never been short of imagination. But her “New Work” show on the ground floor of the Hunterdon Art Museum also demonstrated a deep mechanical interest in the way that things are connected, and an environmentalist’s concern with the consequences of waste and overconsumption. Dodd beckoned us inside a structure built from thousands of discarded cosmetics products. Inhabiting this piece felt like stepping into the hollowed trunk of a redwood watered by human vanity. Roots and shoots of connected lipstick cases spread across the floor and climbed the walls to dance in the rafters and wind around the wooden ceiling like ivy. These strands crawled from the gallery and heaped up in a rude bunch in the lobby, welcoming museum visitors to the world according to a Garden State original.

6. “Uncontained: Reimagining Basketry” at Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton

This was another outstanding year for the modest arts institution in the historic stone building overlooking the south branch of the Raritan River. The Hunterdon Art Museum has become the best place in the Garden State to see exhibitions (yes, you read that right) by de-emphasizing painting in favor of other forms of art, including experimental ceramics, quilting, doll-making and needlepoint. This summer, curator Carol Eckert extended that inquiry into less-publicized art practices by turning the spotlight on baskets, and drawing connections between basket-making and textiles, architecture and urban design, and things weird and biological. Ed Williford’s “Oval Halves with Crescents” was the basket as a cracked insectoid egg, held together by filaments and black cilia hanging from its diaphanous surface. Mo Kelman’s “River in the Sky” splayed a basket on the wall, and surrounded a tiny construction site in balsa wood with a tarpaulin of netting. Stephen Talasnik twisted stone shafts into a tiny hurricane; Becca Baroli turned steel swirls into a great upturned pipe; Dennis RedMoon twisted, weaved and buckled leather belts into the shape of a human being. Notably, none of these barbed, audacious baskets contained anything, and some of them seemed built to reject whatever its holder might want to put inside. But if Little Red Riding Hood took any of these barbed fabrications into the woods, my guess is that the Big Bad Wolf might develop some misgivings.

Didier William’s “What We Will Make Together.”

5. “Repossession: Didier William and Paul Gardère” at Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick

The Zimmerli is a big museum by Jersey standards, and it throws shows commensurate with its size. They are almost always worth a visit. But the best reason to visit the building on the Rutgers campus this year was tucked in the back gallery on the basement floor. “Repossession” paired work by Mason Gross professor Didier William with that of the late Brooklyn-based painter Paul Gardère in a manner that enhanced the hypnotic power of both artists’ visions. These two Haitian-American artists made their work at the smoldering connection between Caribbean and North American styles, and neither man was interested in downplaying contradictions or disguising the violence inherent in cultural collisions. William’s human figures, made of thousands of eye-like marks in hot-colored acrylic, seemed to be charged (and perhaps tortured) by electrical current. Gardère, who laid paint on his canvases in thicknesses that suggested fertile soil, put symbols and signs from Haitian folk art in dialogue with forms associated with traditional European portraiture. A feeling of raised stakes and desperation radiated from each of the works in this small show — as if one artist was reaching out to the other in a gesture of comfort, communication and warning.

4. “The Universe of Ben Jones” at William Paterson University, Wayne and New Jersey City University

This sumptuous retrospective of the influential, charismatic 80-something Jersey City artist Ben Jones was so exhaustive that one show simply wasn’t enough. “The Universe” premiered at Jones’ alma mater William Paterson University (he graduated in 1963) and came back for an energetic encore at the Lemmerman Gallery at NJCU, where Jones taught for decades. At both schools, co-curators Midori Yoshimoto and Casey Mathern presented “The Universe of Ben Jones” alongside “Constellations,” a show that featured works by Jones’ students and proteges, many of whom — like Danielle Scott, Josie Barreiro, Mustart, Gianluca Bianchino and Ray Arcadio — have gone on to become prominent Garden State artists themselves. But the main event was devoted to the career trajectory of a queer African American artist who spent his life forging a singular visual language — one steeped in Northeastern urban life, mystic symbolism and his passionate but idiosyncratic take on Christian spirituality. Jones’ paintings, sculptures and prints were boisterous, unruly, righteous and frequently searing. His allusions to hip-hop, Caribbean and African folk art, and commercial art were full-throated and well realized, but they were always his alone, and best understood in the context of his body of work. It is a mistake to think that we can ever get to know a human being through his artistic production alone. Yet if you were one of the lucky ones who saw “The Universe of Ben Jones,” chances are you walked out of that gallery feeling like you had made a new friend.

Richard Whitten’s “Tellurian.”

3. Richard Whitten’s “Set in Motion: Kinetic Worlds” at Morris Museum, Morris Township

You’re in the laboratory of a wizard-scholar. He’s not around, but neither is anybody else. Thus, you are free to investigate. You don’t know how you got in, but as you look around, you notice windows in the distance and archways to your left and right. All around you are machines: red and white machines, operating without grease, without dust, without friction, without noise, casting long shadows on the walls. What do they do? It is unclear, but it seems like it must be important. You could turn one of these wheels, crank a knob, or lay a hand on one of the pendulous levers, but you don’t dare. The mechanisms seem linked to the cosmos somehow. Disturbing them might have consequences more grave than any you might imagine. The machines seem timeless: indebted to DaVinci’s notebook sketches, pulp sci-fi covers, Barnum & Bailey, Dungeons & Dragons. They run on gravity, tension, counterweights, flywheels, magic. There is not a plug or a cable anywhere. Is this wizard and scholar a conscientious objector to the power grid, or have we slipped back in time, between the centuries, to a place that is anywhere and nowhere at once? Then you realize: you are not in a lab at all. You are simply surrounded by the paintings and model machines of Richard Whitten — the angled corridors, the turbines, the ropes, poles and pulleys — and they are so engrossing, and they have cast such a strange and enchanting spell, that you spaced on reality for a moment, or perhaps longer. Whew. You made it back. Do you feel lucky to have eluded the wizard’s world? If so, why does it keep showing up in your dreams? Why are you itching to go back?

2. Nan Ring’s “These Almost Lost Pieces” at BrassWorks Gallery, Montclair

It’s not easy to do. But if, through posture, gesture, color, attitude, illumination and texture, you can pack enough cues into a single canvas, you might tell a tale as well as any filmmaker or author can. If you can do it over and over — if you can put your canvases in relationship with each other, so that narrative gestures recur and emotional and symbolic logic can gather momentum … well, that’s an exhibition as engrossing as any movie. You can imply setting, personality, backstory and even the passage of time. Everything in a Nan Ring canvas is suggestive, a clue to a wider story, and that includes the angle of the light that falls on the bodies of subjects that are better called characters, and the intricacies of their surroundings — all that she has decided to include in the frame, and all she has decided to leave out. In “These Almost Lost Pieces,” Ring’s paintings captured people in transition, fading from one state to another — and, by implication, the fading memories of the people who aren’t in the frame, but who you know are there. The verses of Ring’s poetry, which hung on the wall alongside the paintings, didn’t solve the mystery of “These Almost Lost Pieces” as much as they deepened and complicated it. Inspired by female artists who were adjacent to (and sometimes eclipsed by) the careers of more famous men, this fascinating show was restless, sexy, jealous, yearning, and touched by shadow and sunlight in equal measure. Constantly in the act of becoming, and the act of coming apart.

“Big Little Haiti,” by Elana Herzog.

1. Elana Herzog’s “Ripped, Tangled and Frayed” at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit

“My body became a wick,” Elana Herzog tells us several times by inscription in this shattering show, “and only a blanket could cool me.” (The line is taken from a poem by Brenda Coultas, written as part of a collaboration for the show.) Alas, the blankets and throws in “Ripped, Tangled and Frayed” were in no condition to douse a flame. Herzog heaped tattered textiles on a pallet and hung torn sheets from dowels. She let her fabrics decompose, and her threads snarl into thick bunches. Chenille hand-me-downs in terrible condition — the kind that a grandmother might leave to a reluctant heir — were mounted on the wall and rudely kept in place with metal rivets and staples. Either by accident or in an expression of pure frustration, Herzog punched a dent in the wall beneath one of these badly worn sheets. All of this decay could be seen as a metaphor for the fragility of the ties that bind and the futility of trying to hold together relationships (especially family relationships) that were damaged beyond repair. But it was also a testament to how spectacular fibers in half-life look: the split ends, color diffusion, knots made by time and corrosion, vicious tears and fading dyes, and the pure agitation of stitches that have drifted out of joint. It turns out that textiles transmit entropy better than any other conduit. This was emphatically underscored by the show’s centerpiece: a great log, down on the floor in the middle of the gallery and imperfectly wrapped in fabric. These were tourniquets too small for the job. And that job extended from the gallery to the grassy verge outside the Visual Arts Center, where the wrapped wood log extended, pointing to the parking lot, following us back to our cars, dogging us, promising to stay with us, reminding us that all things eventually come unstitched. And that even when they do, they can still be horribly, impressively, wonderfully gorgeous.