Issue 150: The return of the newsletter!
Plus: Mana open studio, literally everyone is running for congress, and how to save the Pompidou if we want to save the Pompidou (I swear I don't even know anymore).
Good morning and Happy Mother’s Day! I, for one, am not a mom, but I hope that by the time you’re reading this I will be enjoying a wonderful Mother’s Day buffet at The View, the strangely contentious new dining venue in Lincoln Park, which is having a seating at 11am that was announced on Instagram and then really not followed up on but that means everything is ok, right? I hope to have a full review by next week. But more on that another time — for now, I hope you’re enjoying your Sunday and celebrating the moms in your life and, as always, thank you for reading!
Mana open studio!
That’s right, it’s next Sunday! Sunday, May 19th, from 12-6pm, come by Mana Contemporary (888 Newark Ave) and see the work of tons of local artists. I’ll be there and in space B93 if you’d like to come by and say hi. There will be performances and a DJ throughout the day, and the whole event is free and open to all.
Everybody who lives in NJ10 is now currently running for Congress
When residents in congressional district 10, which include me, go to vote in the Democratic primary in June, we will have no choice but to vote for a person who passed away a few weeks ago, Donald Payne. It’s weird, it’s sad, and it’s certainly nothing that any of us was taught was a healthy, functioning democracy, even if you thought Payne was overall a good congressman (as I do).
But, don’t you fear. In just a few weeks, residents of the same district will suddenly be asked to choose one of almost a dozen candidates in a special election for that same position. That’s right, after only a few weeks after having to vote for a literal dead guy, we get to vote in an election where something like only 10-15% of the vote will determine at all, and that’s only that amount of the painfully low turnout expected in this special election. The whole campaign from start to finish is going to be incredibly fast and in the dead of summer to boot.
I have personal beefs with not one but two of the candidates (sigh); more on that another time. For now, the front runners of the race seem to be LaMonica McIver (Newark City Council President and pick of Ras Baraka, Leroy Jones, and other heavy hitters in Essex County), Hudson County Commissioner Jerry Walker, and Derek Armstead (the mayor of Linden). These all seem like candidates that are really worth digging into and learning more about, and I’m looking forward to doing that.
But the thing that’s super interesting to me is how this has become a must-win for Ras Baraka. Baraka, the mayor of Newark and candidate for NJ governor (and main progressive challenger to Steve Fulop), has his work cut out for him as someone who has endorsed one of the candidates and will be eager to show his local GOTV muscle. He has to show Democratic leadership that he can command Black votes in Essex/Hudson County in order to even get a chance to really challenge the other guys in the race for governor statewide. If he can’t pull out a win in a special election, I don’t see how he possibly continues to run for governor in any serious way. From his POV, McIver has to win.
That seemed pretty easy at first before ten other candidates jumped into the race. Now, I’m not so sure. I want Baraka in the governor’s race because his voice is really important for voters to hear, so I’ll definitely be watching this closely to see how he maneuvers this suddenly very challenging race.
JC Heights Congressional Forum
Meanwhile, over in the Heights, the fight for NJ08 rages on. Next week, all of the candidates — including a rare sighting of the Republican one — will be appearing at a forum at Christa McAuliffe School (167 Hancock Ave) on Monday, May 20th, from 7pm-9pm. It’s free and open to the public, but you are asked to register if you’d like to attend.
Ongoing Pompidou drama
I’ve been pretty upfront about feeling very mixed about the Jersey City Pompidou project. On one hand, having an amazing art museum walking distance from my home is incredibly appealing. On the other, I really wonder about the city’s priorities if they’re spending money on a project like that with so much need to go around and our infrastructure falling apart at the seams. Aren’t our streets pretty synonymous with potholes? Aren’t our schools really struggling?
As this project has worn on, I have found myself a new worry about the project, and that’s based on the question of whether or not we have the wherewithal to even handle it in a somewhat un-embarrassing way. Look, if the city and state want to pour money into an art museum, I’m not going to try to stop them. But if they do that and then the whole project collapses out of mismanagement and a total misunderstanding of what the project really is, the halo effect of that on this city and its tiny little art community will be horrendous.
Now, of course, the whole project is being threatened as the state is reconsidering their funding of it. Basically, there’s a gap in the budget that the city hasn’t accounted for, and that has the state reconsidering whether they want to give them the money they promised. Normally, that gap would be addressed by a savvy fundraiser pitching it to donors — and this would have been done months ago — but that doesn’t seem to be happening based from updates in the media. The best I can tell, the city has taken on a “if you build it, they will come” sort of model, meaning that if we just get this money from the state then surely donors will show up, right? (Spoiler: ask any museum fundraiser if this ever happens. No, if you want donors, you have to go out and get them — they don’t just show up at your door and hand over millions of dollars to close the gap in your budget; once you have them you have to continually engage them and work with them to keep the money flowing; there is a lot of competition for those people’s/corporation’s time/money/attention.)
I saw a twitter thread this week that I thought unintentionally, in a Freudian slip kind of way, revealed a lot about the Pompidou project and all the problems that have come with it and could still be coming down the road:
Ok, look — no one should ever take anything posted on Twitter truly seriously, and I don’t want to be an insane stickler over this. But I thought the choice of artists Fulop used to convey the importance of this project was interesting — Picasso, Monet, Basquiat — and illustrative (and also pretty cringe, for reasons I’ll break down below). If you don’t follow art closely, this may just sound like a collection of three names of famous people, and so what. But I really think this kind of carelessness, this kind of “whatever — all art is the same” sort of behavior is really indicative of where this project is going very wrong.
What’s in the collection of the main museum is what eventually gets loaned out to the museum’s satellite spaces for different exhibitions. And of all the names mentioned, Picasso jumps out at me as one of those artists you go to the Pompidou to see. There are sixty-five paintings by Picasso in their collection and the museum in Paris recently hosted an exhibition of nearly a thousand works of his drawings and prints. The museum has invested heavily in his work and made it a real cornerstone of their collection. If you’re a huge Picasso fan and you really want to dig into his work, this is the place for you. It’s reasonable to expect that if the Pompidou were to open in Jersey City, sooner or later a Picasso or two might pop up here, because they have plenty to share among their various locations.
Monet is another story. There is a significant Monet museum in Paris, which might account for why the internet is telling me the Pompidou only has one Monet in its collection. Still, it doesn’t really bug me that the mayor would assume that the museum has more in its collection — I see how that would be an easy error to make just thinking off the top of one’s head. Monet, European and working in the 19th century, seems like someone who would be there. But also, probably safe to say we’re not getting a Monet to visit JC anytime soon, because they just don’t have that many. Eh, he got one right and one wrong so far, who cares.
But the one that got to me that he had on his list was Basquiat. Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American painter working in the 1980s; he’s also the lone POC on the list. He was a tremendously prolific artist in his lifetime, but he also died at 27. While his output was really strong during the time he was alive, he just simply didn’t live long enough to produce as many works as an artist who lived longer, and as a result there’s simply not that many paintings that exist, period. While his career has had a second wind through licensing deals his estate has entered into posthumously, there’s really a very finite amount of works that he was able to complete before his tragic death.
I wasn’t shocked to see that the Pompidou only has two Basquiats in their permanent collection. They’re a decent choice of two — Slave Auction, in particular, is a very impressive piece — but there’s still two to be shared out among the Pompidou’s several locations. Chances are the JC version of the museum won’t get to see either, or if they do, it will be a very rare and fleeting sight. And what’s more, if you’re really a Basquiat fan, there’s a lot of them in NYC already — the Whitney has six pieces in their collection, MOMA has at least twelve, and the gallery that represents his estate is right in Chelsea while we’re at it. (If the goal of this project is to expose the poor people of JC to his work, couldn’t we just rent a bus and bring them to NYC to see it? I mean, I’m at these places all the time — they’re not hard to get to.)
But the point is, guessing that the Pompidou just has tons of Basquiats sloshing around in their collection where, sooner or later, a few of them might pop up if the location opens in JC is a sloppy mistake from someone who doesn’t really know how to talk about the art in this museum in a serious way beyond just what it might contribute to our local economy. And, to be completely fair, there’s no reason why the mayor of the city that a museum is going to open needs to have a specialized degree in art history, but it is a problem when he’s essentially the only city representative who consistently talks up this project. Every single article I could find about the Pompidou coming to JC had long, extended quotes from Fulop — in many cases, photos of him as well — and few or no other officials or spokespeople chiming in, filling in the gaps of his telling, and speaking on the behalf of the museum with any kind of deep knowledge and understanding about it. The mayor has become the public face of this project — the only face, in most cases — and that’s kind of an issue when it also winds up he lacks the expertise to talk about what would make this project unique and worth funding, as opposed to a donor simply giving their money to an established museum in a place like NYC. He’s walked into a pretty serious problem: as he leans more and more heavily into this project in his run for governor, it’s only going to come under more and more attack by people wanting to use it to stop that run, and with no one else with the necessary expertise being tapped to speak for it in a more nuanced way, I’m not sure how this is going to proceed at all except as an albatross around his neck. If he really wants this project to succeed, he needs to hand it off to someone who really knows how to resolve its very glaring issues.
Fulop wrote the tweet while RTing an op ed in the Jersey Journal where the author likened the project to the Guggenheim Bilbao (in Spain, not a fair comparison to US standards of art funding and support) and the Newark Museum (which is a totally different type of museum than the JC Pompidou would be). Again, these differences are only really for the obsessed and an average reader can be forgiven for thinking this is nitpicky, but to people who actually really care about art and have the funds to do something about it, this is going to raise some serious concerns as to whether or not anyone in JC actually understands what this project is really about. An article like this may make the argument that this is an important project to your lay person (“museums contribute to the local economy” might be something they hadn’t considered before), but at the same time lacks the specifics about this project needed to articulate it to people who can actually help (“this particular museum deserves your support because it brings this different/unique set of artworks to our area and that is important because of this reason”). It’s fine as an op ed in a local paper, but it doesn’t get us any further in terms of actually addressing the larger issues the project has.
In order for this project to succeed, it will need a lot of very wealthy art patrons to dig into their pockets and donate to it in order to close the gap in its budget. And as part of that, it will need an advocate to steer this whole thing, who can clearly and very specifically articulate the importance of this collection and the art that’s contained in it. Take a look at the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art — the JC Pompidou will need to put together a similar list of ultra-wealthy people who really know art and get them to contribute to this. It’s very likely that most of these people will not live in JC, so on top of all of this, the person in charge of the project will need to know where to find them and how to get to them1. This is a huge undertaking, and — based on media reports — it doesn’t seem like anyone is at the helm other than the mayor
This isn’t the kind of position where you can just pick some longterm employee of the city or county and put them in charge of it, ala “Well, you’ve done a great job at running the city’s senior lunch program; now we’re putting you in charge of raising $50million for the JC Pompidou.” You need a specialized project manager and fundraiser for museums, and you will need to pay them well as that is a skillset that is in high demand. No one is going to read the mayor’s tweets incorrectly guessing which artists might or might not come to Jersey City should this museum take off and pledge $10million to the project. If such a unicorn does exist in the wild, chances are three more of them aren’t going to come trotting along behind them as well, or that that person will continue to fork over that money for an extended period of time — this is a project that will be very expensive and will take a lot of convincing of a lot of people who have a lot of money to keep contributing over a series of years. (Also, we should have hired them a very long time ago as no matter what, raising the amount of money we’d need to get this off the ground and make it financially stable will take time.)
I don’t know. Again, if we go into this project and do it really well and the JC Pompidou becomes a shining beacon within the state arts scene, that’s great. If the project never takes off and the money is redirected to important things like addressing our infrastructure needs, that’s great too. What won’t work is if we keep pushing forward like everything in this project is just fine and going great and the wheels fall off of it a couple of months before it is set to open and our city looks like a bunch of idiots who can’t even get a basic project off the ground. This is a project that has gotten international attention; I really feel like we are at the end of the window where, if we need to pump the brakes and stop this, now is the time to do it and a few weeks from now may be too late for us to save face. Or, we can reorganize and redirect where this is headed, and get it on a track that makes sense.
Feral of the week
That’s right — we’re back and have a new segment to boot, a feral cat of the week! Meet this week’s feral, who got caught laying out and being all haughty on my across-the-street neighbor’s wall. I called her Matilde (it was a total guess as to her gender) and said hello to her; she mostly ignored my senile, old dog. She seems cool.
ICYMI
Things got pretty weird in Hoboken this week, and this article from Hudson County View is a must-read.
The JC Anti-Violence Coalition will be having their annual Unity Walk on Saturday, June 8th at 11am. The walk start at Warner Ave and MLK Drive and proceed to Lincoln Park on that day. I can’t find any up-to-date info online about the walk, but this is a pretty popular event and I’d guess info will be available online soon.
OPRA is being gutted. It’s a huge mess. And it’s being fast-tracked so aggressively, I’m not even sure there’s anything any of us can do. It’s really bad.
Let’s not even get into the whole controversey that has been raging in the arts community for the last decade or so, namely the issue of whether or not people like Leon Black are even welcome to donate their money to a project like this. There have been many sustained protests and interventions at other museums on this exact issue over this time, and it’s a huge question in my mind if Jersey City — as a city — wants to truly wade into this one. But I get the sneaking suspicion this topic hasn’t even been raised f or discussion.