The mid-April reopening reception for the celebrated Pierro Gallery was the place to be for art lovers from the Oranges and beyond. The event celebrated the community-based gallery’s spectacular new space, its long legacy and its fine reopening exhibit, Showcasing South Orange.
“It was jam-packed, shoulder to shoulder,” said acclaimed South Orange-based artist Judy Targan. “I was greeting friends, fellow artists, curators from the past 30-plus years.”
Targan, the recipient of the inaugural South Orange Shero Award in the Arts this past March, is among the 31 South Orange artists chosen from over 300 submissions in a blind open call for the reopening exhibition in the state-of-the-art, first-floor space.
Village Manager of Arts and Cultural Affairs Blake Smith reeled off the details. “We had over 500 people rotating between the gallery and our new second-floor café. The encouragement, enthusiasm and energy in the room were breathtaking,” Smith said. “I had more hugs than in the past five years combined.”
The gallery is a crown jewel in the $15 million, multiyear renovation of a long ago private 1895 clubhouse. Now 44,000 square feet, it also boasts performance centers, a dance studio, multiple community rooms, two gymnasiums, art rooms, that café with a second-story terrace, and a temporary home for the South Orange Village’s public library which is getting a face-lift and expansion of its own.
Pierro Gallery Origin and Legacy
Many Arts Beat readers are familiar with the Pierro Gallery’s origin story and long reputation as both a local treasure and a regional destination. Artist and educator Lennie Pierro and artist Judy Wukitsch, husband and wife, were South Orange residents deeply committed to community-building through the arts. Pierro spied an out-of-the-way second-floor space at the Baird Community Center while on a tour of the rambling building. Surrounded by playing fields and tennis and basketball courts, the facility was largely sports-centered.
Pierro and Wukitsch envisioned a community art gallery in those neglected rooms. With the help of tireless committee members and volunteers, two months later on May 22, 1994 the South Orange Art Gallery opened. Under Wukitsch’s 16-year directorship (she retired as the town’s assistant director of cultural affairs in 2010) memorable exhibits and talks followed. After Lennie’s untimely 2001 death, it was renamed the Pierro Gallery. A history, plaque, and artist Peter Jacobs’s giclee print portrait of Pierro hangs to the right of the new gallery’s glass doors.
Wukitsch returned to South Orange for the April 17 opening to speak: “It is almost unheard of for any fine art gallery, especially one operating under the aegis of the town’s Recreation and Cultural Affairs Department, to succeed for so many years,” she said. “Along with their support, the gallery was built and continues to thrive because of the gallery’s leadership and the creative energy and time from the many volunteers and artists to maintain the reputation the Pierro Gallery represents today.”
In a recent interview, she echoed amazement at the outpouring of support from both past and current artists, volunteers, supporters and residents. “It was like a homecoming,” Wukitsch said. “South Orange is growing — and the space is absolutely gorgeous.”
The Space
Gorgeous is the word. Cross the Baird Center’s welcoming veranda into the new lobby. There you are greeted by two helpful members of the Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs and your first glimpse into the gallery.
Straight ahead from the entrance are wide glass doors inviting you to explore the exhibit within. On a recent early May Saturday afternoon, the Baird was a happening place. The gallery enjoyed a steady stream of visitors. For some it was their afternoon destination; for others a happy discovery. Beautifully lit, the spacious gallery boasts moveable walls both increasing display space for the art and allowing for conversations among the pieces.
Blake Smith, who curated the show, had a strong idea of both what she and the Village Council wanted for the first show and how she wanted the art displayed. “We want to celebrate the on-going depth and diversity of the arts in the Village,” Smith said.
Smith and Maplewood resident Brian Rumbolo mounted the exhibit. “Rumbolo has long professional experience hanging museum, corporate and private collections,” Smith said. “We bounced ideas off each other.”
Selected Highlights of Showcasing South Orange
The results? A splendid juxtaposition of wall art in many mediums—acrylics, oils, gouache, watercolor, wood block, cut paper, photography, collage as well as sculpture on strategically placed pedestals. Of the latter, Smith embraced Macaulay Campbell’s majestic, stylized alabaster bear, “Oso Polar.” “It gives a presence to the room,” Smith said.
Both she and Wukitsch praised fiber artist Ellen Weisbord’s sculptural piece and her tireless work in arts education and for the community over many years.
I broke into a big smile at “Behind the Lens,” an exuberant acrylic from Wild Cherry Art’s Leslie Goldman. With bold colors and equally bold brushwork, it’s an enthusiastic welcome to the show. The thickly applied paint put me in mind of a long-missed Village tradition: scoops of Gruning’s cherry vanilla ice cream in season.
Matching Goldman’s exuberance is Curtis Grayson III’s joyous 2023 “Black Girl Magic,” acrylic and collage. His trio of young girls jump off the canvas with a contagious energy.
Judy Targan’s “Land, Sea, Sky 23” and “Summer Walk 5,” both pieces in oil and acrylic on wood, keep up the optimistic message. Targan, at 92, is the oldest of the exhibitors. “I wanted to paint hope,” Targan said in a recent call. “These are my most recent fantasy landscapes. The oil was barely dry when Blake visited my South Orange studio.” Both paintings deepen her signature forms and assured color sense.
Columbia High School junior Abby Pasternack is the youngest artist. Her sly 2022 “Emotional Baggage Claim” in black, red and a very cool gray/blue gouache on paper boasts imagination, compositional skills and sharp social commentary that belie her age.
Other artists have more ambiguous, darker outlooks. Giselle Reyes’s intriguing quartet “American Landscape, 2022” are miniature constructions in paper, resin, turf and acrylics. Echoing the seasons, each tree and human inhabit a hollowed-out Reader’s Digest Condensed Book. Each make a big statement in tiny forms about man’s place in nature. Ross de Peloubet Thompson’s two oils on canvas, “Iris and the Boreads, 2017” and “Imperial Smoking Room, 2019” nod at fantasy illustration. In that smoking room, his smug, ice-cold agents of death belong to no particular nation or century, past or present.
Thompson’s works are attracting a lot of teen-talk. “I hear kids after baseball practice saying to their friends, ‘These are so cool. You got to see this,’” Smith said.
That’s the beauty of this space and this exhibit: Teenagers taking a break from sports, chancing on the gallery and being drawn into the wonder of arts. The afternoon I was there, little kids—perhaps at the Baird for a dance or craft class—were pulling a parent over to look, to discuss, to imagine.
There is much more art in the 48-piece show to see and think about.
The poignant social commentary of David C. Giles’ four 2024 pen and watercolor works are indictments of a society where the emotionally or mentally disturbed homeless are seen, but not seen. “A fourth of the proceeds from the sales of Giles’s works are slated for the South Orange-based Jespy House, which provides vital services for the intellectually or developmentally disabled,” Smith said.
“One hundred percent of all exhibit sales goes to the artists,” Smith added. “It is important to us that money goes directly to the artist.”
Sharp social commentary similarly informs George Brandon’s collages, the affecting “Blues and Dreams of a Traveling Musician, 1947” and the powerful “Our Forefathers Contemplated Capital Punishment,” both paper collage on canvas, 2019.
My husband-museum buddy-amateur print photographer was drawn to professional photographer’s Steve Vaccariello’s 2019 silver gelatin print, “Hope,” with its horizontal dancer and her vertical, gravity-defying drape. I contemplated the quiet majesty of Burt Allen Solomon’s meditative 2024 silver gelatin prints, “Untitled, Havana Cuba,” and “Untitled, Casablanca Morocco.”
And Thomas Witte’s dizzying marvel “Dare, 2017” in hand-cut archival paper stopped me in my tracks. Abstract from across the room, it yields its secrets on closer look.
Bonus: Faith Ringgold
Down the hall from the Pierro on the first-floor south wall, Smith and Rumbolo honor a recent gift to the Baird from an anonymous South Orange family: In 2012 Faith Ringgold paid homage to the American Civil Liberties Union — she had been a client — with a red, white and blue justice work honoring the organization. A limited-edition line print now commands a quiet corner. Hanging adjacent to a window seat, gallery visitors can gaze outdoors or contemplate what’s within.
Showcasing South Orange runs through June 12 at the Baird Community Center, 5 Mead Street, South Orange, New Jersey. Open Daily 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. No Admission. Handicapped Accessible. All works are for sale. Prices start at $100. Kevin O’Connell’s atmospheric 4×6 inch acrylics of South Orange’s street gas lamps are very popular. He’s been taking multiple orders.
Learn much more about the Baird Community Center programs, activities, events and spaces
at their website.
The buildings long history is available here.
