“Woven View,” by Samar Hussaini, can be seen at Akwaaba Gallery in Newark as part of Garden State Art Weekend.
Tatyana Kazakova’s pained, grief-choked, beautifully brutal paintings at the Grover House in Caldwell will be on display. So will Sarah Canfield’s colorful investigations into the cool heart of the machine at BrassWorks in Montclair. Nanette Carter’s portraits of stress and imbalance on Mylar will be viewable at the art museum on the other side of town.
Just about everything I have written about over the last couple of months, in fact, will be waiting for you and your eyeballs during Garden State Art Weekend (April 24-27), a blowout of free events, openings, showings and exhibitions happening all over the state.
It is sophomore year for the statewide initiative and, once again, the headquarters for this coordinated effort to get viewers out to galleries will be Manufacturers Village in East Orange. More than 60 artists, many of them among the state’s most accomplished, maintain their studio spaces in the historic factory complex. This weekend, almost all of them will be open and tour-able, including the studio of Garden State Art Weekend founder and organizer Christine Romanell (she is on the second floor of Building 1, near the audacious ceramicist Ruth Borgenicht and the painter and color alchemist Gail Winbury). It would be possible to spend the whole Weekend wandering Manufacturers Village.
But if you are reading this, you are probably too restless, and too hungry for new things to see, to stick in a single location. If GSAW teaches us anything, it is that there are interesting things happening all over the state — often in places where we wouldn’t think to look.
Here are six other stops worth investigating on a spring weekend distinguished by exhibitions of New Jersey creativity.
“Robinson Crusoe’s Umbrella,” by Jill Scipione.
“USEful?” at Eonta Space, Jersey City
It is located in a small residential building on a dead end next to a cemetery. But those in the know will tell you that Eonta Space is one of the creative cornerstones of a very fertile Jersey City visual arts scene — a place filled with visual mischief and the uninhibited expression of the pleasantly twisted imaginations of its founders. Two of them have work in “USEful?,” an entertaining group show featuring new curiosities from a well-established team of Hudson County provocateurs. Eonta principal Dan Peyton contributes miniature houses with their walls jigsawed together with stained glass; his partner Bayard invites attendees to get comfortable on a massive throne made from shaggy strips of torn fabric (he has even got a cloth crown and scepter ready for those willing to role-play a little.) Tina Maneca weaves man-sized baskets out of metal, Cheryl Gross edifies gallery-goers with an accordion-style fold-out of animal characters, and Jill Scipione pops open a gorgeous, homey felt umbrella that looks as if it has been made out of moss. Those with more functional umbrellas may stay drier. But where is the fun in that?
“Reclaiming the Invisible” at the Paris Koh Fine Arts, Fort Lee
Right at the foot of the George Washington Bridge, there is a jewel box of a space with a programming emphasis on winsome Asian-American art. “Mindscapes: The Artistic Universe of Heejung Kim,” the gallery’s March offering, was one of the most hypnotic shows mounted in New Jersey in 2025 so far: bouquets of glittering paper dots in circular arrangements, mandala-like paintings filled with elemental symbolism, and strange, bone-white wall-hung sculptures that looked like spare parts that had crashed to earth from a visiting spaceship. It felt like stepping into a constellation. Paris Koh has followed “Mindscapes” with “Reclaiming the Invisible,” a three-artist group show that features work from Sooyeong Chang Lee, Min Kyeong Lee and Bong Jung Kim, who blends scraps of electronics, chipboards and electro-waste into his springlike pastel paintings so seamlessly and harmoniously you may think they are flower petals. It is another expression of grace from a beautiful gallery that deserves to be known better.
A detail from “Contiguous,” by Judi Tavill.
“Judi Tavill: Continuum” at The Center For Contemporary Art, Bedminster
Even veteran ceramicists are likely to do a double take when they see the strange and fascinating pieces by Judi Tavill for the first time. How does she manage to fit so many loops and strands of fired clay into her fierce black-and-white knots and nests before she fires them? Then there is the coloring of her ceramic tendrils: some milky-white, some the black of anthracite, and many fading from one shade to another, busy with fine lines that, from a distance, look like they could be cracks, or cilia. They are not. They are thousands of lines drawn on the surface of the sculptures. The sinuous quality of the sculptor’s graphite pathways combined with her serpentine surfaces bestows an organic quality on Tavill’s pieces — some look like they are coiled and prepared to strike, and others as if something inside them is ready to hatch. What sort of creature might emerge from within a three-dimensional Moebius strip? Nothing we’re accustomed to, I’m sure. Tavill was a participant in the excellent “New Sculpture/New Jersey” show at the Morris Museum in 2024. “Continuum” is an opportunity to get lost in the beckoning brambles of her peculiar vision.
“Color Vibrations” at Akwaaba Gallery, Newark
What is the prettiest gallery in New Jersey? Ask 12 artists, and you are likely to get a dozen different answers. Say Akwaaba, though, and nobody is going to argue too much. Laura Bonas Palmer’s handsome, spacious room on the west side of Newark has hosted scores of strong shows and helped to elevate the profiles of some of the state’s most talented artists, many of them African-American. The mostly abstract “Color Vibrations,” the latest Akwaaba show, turns the spotlight on six local favorites. These include Mashell Black, slinger of thick black lines, dynamic jagged-edged shapes, and smeared color fields of butter-yellow and traffic-cone orange; Ezedire Victor Agbakwuru, summoner of vague human figures made of blunt strokes from bright oil sticks; and Antoinette Ellis-Williams, whose digital collages are busy with whorls, staticky parallel lines, and symbols without clear referents. The star of the show, though, is a relative newcomer: Samar Hussaini, a Palestinian-American artist with an impeccable sense of balance, color and drama, a knack for incorporating patterns from the Levant into her paintings, and a line of unwearable but mesmerizing dress-like sculptures.
“Big Bird,” by Scott Harbison.
“Spring Fever” at Galerie Lucida, Red Bank
With their wide, astonished crossed eyes and antenna-like ears, painter Scott Harbison’s creatures often look like they have seen something alarming. Don’t worry about them too much, though: Despite their tar-black bodies and their physics-defying proportions, they are all adorable. Looney Tunes teaches us that anything this weird and cute is bound to find a way to dodge adversity. Last year, Harbison’s impossible menagerie migrated from an imaginative cartoon to Lucida in Red Bank for a solo show. It was a good match. Few serious galleries anywhere are as playful as this one. He has got three pieces in “Spring Fever,” the latest Lucida show — a very worried and long-necked bird and her egg, two devil-dogs, and a google-faced what-is-it shares space on these walls with Wynn Gay’s oil-painted portraits of Froot Loops, Eleanor James’ skeletal horse in a field of roses, Carol Magnatta’s heavy-lidded and visibly exhausted showgirls, and other pieces from similarly freewheeling artists.
“Not Built in a Day” at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit
There is compelling stuff in the main galleries at The VAC in Summit: a digital multimedia show from a Baltimore-based collective and an installation by a Persian artist that speaks of home, migration, dislocation and longing. Those would be reason enough to go. But in the hallway “strolling” gallery, there is something even better — an exhibition of new works from one of the state’s finest linocut and woodcut printmakers. Michael Dal Cerro shows us cityscapes that are at once alien and familiar. His dense, multi-tiered cities overflow with vegetation: plants in atriums, vines on walls, foliage bursting from terraces on high stories. Mass transit purrs on viaducts and elevated tunnels, light glimmers from rows of windows, cantilevered skyscrapers shadow the streets, and there is hardly a trace of the sky. As for people … we know they are there, even if we can’t see them. It is no exaggeration to call these cities for the trees — idealized urban spaces designed for symbiosis between flora and fauna (us). On spring days, on a weekend devoted to creativity in the Garden State, they are a marvelously appropriate place to visit.
For information on all Garden State Art Weekend offerings, visit gardenstateartweekend.org.
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