Eye Level website will be devoted to visual arts in Jersey City

The Eye Level website can be found at eye-level.net.

When I moved to Jersey City at the turn of the millennium, the place to be was the Arts Center at 111 First Street. The word was that it was something like a laboratory and something like a spaceship: a former tobacco factory in a mostly deserted part of the Downtown populated from the sprawling ground floor to the spacious top story with visual artists. It was a place to learn, a place to party, a place to get lost and found and lost again and, above all, a place to hear creative voices. The artists at 111 First Street were anarchic and anti-establishment as a rule, but that didn’t mean they weren’t industrious. They had pressing things that they wanted to communicate to us, and each tenant spent days, months, years, refining his or her craft. When the community at 111 threw open the doors to the public during the annual Studio Tours, it was as if a great transmitter in the middle of the city had switched on.

The Arts Center is, alas, long gone, knocked down by its owner to make way for a condominium tower that has never been built. Its neighborhood, once a post-industrial netherworld, has become one of the priciest and most exclusive in the state. Most of the artists who were part of that remarkable, inimitable community have been scattered. But the spirit of 111 First Street is alive in Jersey City — and that is as true for artists who remember the Arts Center as it is for those who don’t. Visual art is much more than a vocation here. It is the language we use to express who we are: as citizens, as human beings, as neighbors, as residents of a town that is changing with cartoon-like speed. As I have learned, almost everything that happens in the second biggest city in the Garden State, from music concerts to political campaigns to street protests, has a visual art dimension. To understand Jersey City, it is imperative to know our visual art.

TRIS McCALL

I want to understand. When I walk into a local gallery, I can feel the urgency. I can sense, immediately, that the artists on view are determined to put something across to the viewer. Given the intensity of the drive to communicate — one I simply don’t feel in the galleries on the other side of the Hudson — it would be rude of me not to listen and respond.

I have written about Jersey City art for NJArts.net and other outlets such as Jersey City Times and the Jersey City Independent, but I have always wanted to cover as much as I could on a comprehensive site of my own and, in so doing, make what sense I could of the town I have called home for more than two decades. An Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant has made that possible. On Feb. 11, I launched Eye Level (eye-level.net), an online journal dedicated to covering and reviewing visual art shows in Jersey City.

The specifics: There will be a new review on the main page of Eye Level every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. I may also add reviews, reactions and other posts to the site during the rest of the week. Because it’s my site, I’m going to stretch out a little, come at these shows from funny angles, and even get experimental from time to time. But no matter what I try, my goal will be the same: I’m going to try to capture my reactions to these shows as fully and honestly as I can.

I opened the site with three reviews that, I hope, cover some stylistic and geographic territory — a summary of Kwesi O. Kwarteng’s harmonious textiles show at Art House Productions, a look at a shattering sculpture exhibition at Casa Colombo, and a close engagement with Pat Lay’s transhumanist busts, ceramics and wall scrolls. There will be many more to come. I will keep adding names and dates and neighborhoods to the index all year long.

At the same time, I won’t be slowing down my contributions to NJArts. net or Jersey City Times. There is no shortage of events to cover in the Garden State, and I will have plenty to say about all of them.

I did not enter the halls of 111 First Street as an arts-educated person. I had never toured the Louvre or even taken a class; I couldn’t have told you anything about movements, manifestos or trends. But in a way, that was an advantage. It meant I had no preconceptions. I was free to form an impression of visual art based on the artists I encountered in the building, their urgency and their fire, and their peculiar relationship to the city we shared.

I have since learned how to tell a Rembrandt from a Rothko or a Rauschenberg. But to this day, my arts heroes — and the standards by which I measure the art I see — are, to name a few 111 tenants, the mesmerizing landscape photographers Shandor Hassan, Kay Kenny and Edward Fausty, the painters James Pustorino, Sandra DeSando and Loura van der Meule, lightbox mischief-maker Norm Francouer, and the fiber-spinner Maggie Ens, who encouraged us to let our hearts open. (I’m still working on that, Maggie.) These artists broke the ground for us. That which they planted is flourishing, even if we don’t always recognize the hand of the original gardener.

In the spirit of remembrance, celebration and giving credit where it is due, Eye Level comes to you from a Jersey City person who recalls 111 and everything it stood for. Because while the Arts Center is history, the arts remain our center.