New Jersey Arts Annual, Exploring Our Connections runs through Jan 5, 2025
Family, Community Belonging runs through the fall of 2025
A Shared Love runs through Feb. 16, 2025
On a recent Saturday afternoon, the Montclair Art Museum galleries hummed with visitors—families with young children, teens, arty types, couples on dates, friends, older viewers.
Three outstanding MAM exhibits are running now: The New Jersey Arts Annual’s Exploring Our Connections, the museum’s companion show, Family, Community, Belonging drawn from its permanent collection as well as A Shared Love: Treasures of American Painting (1878-1919) from the Carol and Terry Wall Collection. There are many conversations among the three shows, a few noted below.
Arts Beat’s focus is on the Arts Annual and three Oranges artists with admiring nods at a few others. All 63 works in this juried exhibit are winners which enthrall, invite discussion, and prompt reflection and memory.
The New Jersey Arts Annual and Its Relation With the Montclair Art Museum.
First, some background on the New Jersey Arts Annual and its long relation with the Montclair Art Museum. Established and sponsored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, since 1984 the Annual presents outstanding NJ artists in a NJ arts center. A theme is announced in early winter. Artists are invited to submit three current pieces by early April.
The host institution plays key roles in the process. Montclair Art Museum’s longtime Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky shared some of her and her MAM team’s contributions.
“I invite the three jurors and work closely with them,” Stavitsky said. “The jurors have the main responsibility of sifting through the submissions and making the initial selections.” To judge the over 1,000 entries, Stavitsky recommended two highly regarded artists, Kimberly Callas and Philemona Williamson, and art historian Todd Caissie. (Williamson, who works out of her East Orange Manufacturers Village studio, is in the museum’s permanent collection and enjoyed a 2017 MAM retrospective, Philemona Williamson: Metaphorical Narratives.)
“I am pleased Todd, a member of the Osage Nation, could join the two artists on the panel,” Stavitsky said. Since its 1914 founding, MAM has championed both historic and contemporary Native American art.
Stavitsky brought her years of experience with the MAM gallery spaces to both the initial process selection and, with MAM Chief Registrar and Exhibition Designer Osanna Urbay, to the design of the show. Stavitsky chose Mom by Copie Rodriguez as an exhibit signature piece and mounted oversize paintings by Ben Goldman and Grace Graupe-Pollard in each of the show’s two biggest galleries. “I suggested accepting two works each by Ben and Grace to anchor those spaces,” Stavitsky said. The result is a spectacularly designed exhibit, giving space and import to works in many mediums, styles, and scales.
Works by three Oranges artists–all with national recognition—highlight the diversity and impact of the 2024 New Jersey Arts Annual. Here’s a closer look.
Virginia Schaffer Block
Virginia Schaffer Block now lives West Orange after 45 years in Montclair. Long a pivotal force in Montclair’s arts community, she is one of the five founders and first, five-year president of Studio Montclair, a leading artist collective currently with two galleries on Bloomfield Avenue. Now retired from advertising, Block has always maintained her fine art, showing extensively in area galleries and exhibits including at The Butler Institute of American Art, The Kansas City Jewish Museum, and the NJ Center for Visual Arts.
For the past few years, Block has worked in tandem with MAM President Ira Wagner to mount corresponding exhibits at the museum and at the Studio Montclair spaces. The location and theme for the 2024 Annual compelled Block to enter. “I created three new pieces,” Block said. “In the past I did portrait work, but now my work Is more abstract.” Block started going through old family photographs and memories. “I thought about my family history, about the tie between community and a tangible place.”
Each of her parents was from an ethnic minority facing 20th century nativism. Outsiders, they sought security in secrecy and anonymity. “We moved ten times before I was 18. Then, each move, each new town was an adventure,” Block said. “Now I recognize the void of not having grown up as part of a community.”
Block went into high gear and created three collages. “They chose the most literal, the most personal one,” she said. Unveiling and Discovery is a multi-layered meditation on family, place, deracination. Collage, photo transfer, painting, drawing, and an acrylic wash harmonize disparate fragments–a dress pattern, a baking doily, a dollar bill, old maps. Each element addresses attachments, loss, the passage of time. Handwritten lettering identifies each place name. A lyrical, intimate piece, the words and images become an elegy inspiring personal recollection.
I asked each artist to name another piece that talks to their entry.
Block pointed to two works, Susan Sinek’s My Sister and Brother-in-Law Together Apart and Livingston-based Ellen Hanauer’s Upcycle. Block and Sinek both speak to connection and disconnect. Hanauer deconstructs and reconstructs the garments of recent immigrants, evoking each of her grandfathers’ Ellis Island arrivals, early poverty and resilience.
Kate Dodd
Multi-media artist Kate Dodd also named Upcycle as a countermelody. Bursting boundaries, both her Parental Poncho and Hanaeur’s Upcycle are impossible garments that spark questions and elicit strong responses.
A celebrated artist, more than one artist friend has confided, “Dodd is a creative genius.” A past Annual honoree, she recently enjoyed a major one-woman show at the Hunterdon Art Museum. Her works, including major public arts projects, are seen nationwide. A transplant to Orange’s Valley Arts District, Dodd long lived in Maplewood and South Orange where her now adult children attended school. She taught arts education at SOMA’s Columbia High School for many years and her area public art works using recyclables are both memorable–and sometimes controversial. “My first temporary installation in the Duck Pond evoked some taxpayer ire,” Dodd said.
Dodd also has strong ties with the artists of East Orange Manufacturers Village where her studio is a mecca for art lovers during EOMV’s Open Studio weekends.
Dodd’s Parental Poncho is a show stopper. Conceived as a freestanding sculpture, at MAM its installed that its elements cast shadows—a ghost piece dancing with the original. Dodd’s Artist Statement best encapsulates her world view: “This piece is from my Outer Wear series, which consists of clothing-like sculptures that express a longing for protection from both the mistakes of the past and the revenge of the future.” (Note: An artist statement accompanies each Annual piece )
From a distance, I thought “peacock’s tail?” Close up the work reveals its sobering components and dual themes of human frailty, of parents never able to fully shield children.
Dodd explained its origins. “My Dad—an architect–was throwing out an envelope filled with his and my late mother’s CAT scans. I salvaged them. I like to work with multiples, and CAT scans require multiple films,” Dodd said. Dodd affixed the scans to used grocery vegetable lids and cut out the ovals. She cut wishbone-shapes from the film scraps. The pieces are held together by plastic brads with red centers. “Art supply stores sell brads in different colors for scrapbookers,” Dodd explained. “I chose red to stand for blood, capillaries, connections.
It’s not a piece you will forget.
Kirk Maynard
Also living in Orange’s Valley Arts District, Kirk Maynard is a second-generation Guyanese-American and at 31 among the exhibit’s youngest artists. He was Dodd’s colleague for two years at Columbia High School. “I went into art because I wanted to teach, but I could not be both a fulltime art teacher and a fulltime artist,” Maynard said. For the past few years, Maynard has been enjoying prestigious artist residencies and exhibits including at MASS MoCa, throughout Philadelphia and at the CFEVA gallery there, and a one-man show at the Smith College Oresman Gallery. Public Radio’s WNYC and its noontime program All of It with host Alison Stewart chose Maynard for one of four Annual-artist interviews. (Audio links to all four talks are on the MAM website.)
Think of Maynard as a spiritual inheritor of Jacob Lawrence’s series interpreting the Black experience in the 20th century or Nina Simone singing the Civil Rights anthem “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Maynard paints weight, both formally—the substance of his figures—and symbolically–the burden of marginalization, injustice, opportunities denied. “An initial inspiration for the series was Trayvon Martin’s murder,” Maynard said.
Maynard orchestrates his prodigious skill with oil pastel to give dimension to two hoodie-clad figures isolated against a muted yellow background. “Oil pastel never fully dries, I can create textures,” Maynard said. “For the hoodies, I chose red and green, complementary colors opposite one another on the color wheel,” Maynard said. “The yellow was to give warmth.” (The painting’s solemnity and gold-like background take me to the Met’s Simone Martini, Madonna and Child, c.1326.)
Here, too, clothing is a signifier. With Periphery #22, we see the partial profile of a young women offering comfort to a young man, his face obscured. His posture embodies the pain inflicted by a society where Travyon Martin’s crime was wearing dark skin and a hoodie.
Maynard went to the MAM’s Family, Community, Belonging and Elizabeth’s Catlett’s (1915-2012) 1987 lithograph These Two Generations for his companion piece. Both Periphery # 22 and the lithograph are figurative works that say much about the African-American experience. “I was fascinated by her piece,” Maynard said. “It illuminates the essence of the two different generations, the two profiles looking into disparate distances. As a representational artist, I loved seeing the different facets of the composition coming together.”
Walk to MAM’s adjacent south galleries and see for yourself.
A Few More Connections
In an exhibit with many well-known area artists, I found a personal connection. In the 1990s, I celebrated musician Bob Mellman and artist Janice Belove’s wedding. Now, the Montclair-based Belove’s deftly composed and boldly colored Road Trip lands with gentle humor on the generational outcome of their marriage: Parents sit in the family car’s backseat, two adult sons command the front. We see the artist’s preliminary sketch for Road Trip on her iPad. Perfect.
Another figurative artist featured in the All Of It interviews is Plainfield’s Maria Mijares, who grew up in East Orange. Her outdoor murals make pedestrians pause throughout Hudson County. Here, 4 Fashion Girls presents two confident women of color—sales associates at a clothing store. They pose besides a painting within the painting of two soignee 1950s types, an engaging take on clothing and identity. Two other paintings captivated: Kristin Künc’s The Black Mirror and Livingston’s Qingling Gua’s Background III 080. Each found an unexpected counterpart in a 19th century oil in the Wall Collection, one by William Merritt Chase the other by Mary Cassatt. But that’s a conversation for another time.
