Issue 171: Mysterious JCAST flyers

Plus, the JCBOE election, a McGreevey article, and more!

Good morning!! And woo boy — lots of content for you here today. I hope you’re having a great weekend, and… let’s get into it! — Amy

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JCBOE election

Let’s start out with the most important part of the newsletter today: the Jersey City Board of Education election is coming!! In November!!! And unfortunately when I was doing my content plan for the newsletter, I forgot all about early voting (gah! lesson learned!). So I have a Q&A out to the candidates, but that won’t be available to you til the end of the month. I’m really sorry — I will be more aware of the early voting/VBM deadlines in the future. But it is coming!! On 10/27, mark your calendars, I plan to have that Q&A in this newsletter from all of the candidates.

Meanwhile, there will be at least one upcoming candidate forums where you can go and learn from the candidates themselves (there will probably be others, but this one is next week). Honestly, if you really want to be informed, going to these events are way more important than reading my Q&A, and I really encourage you to go. It’s on October 8th, 7-9pm at Franklin L. Williams School/MS 7 (222 Laidlaw Avenue). It’s sponsored by a slew of neighborhood orgs including Heights Community Coalition, Riverview Neighborhood Association, Washington Park Association of Hudson County, The Knitty Gritty JC Social Club, Journal Square Community Association, Leonard Gordon Park Conservancy, Pershing Field Neighborhood Association, JC Heights Parents, Sgt. Anthony Park Neighborhood Association, PS 28 PTA Board, and JC Policy Circle, and will also include a presentation by Brigid D’Souza, aka CivicParent. The event will be live-streamed on the Riverview Neighborhood Association’s Facebook page.

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Mysterious JCAST flyers

JCAST (the Jersey City Artists’ Studio Tour) is this weekend and some of you reached out to ask about these cryptic flyers that went up around the city:

I’ve been hearing some grumblings about the way in which JCAST was organized this year, so I reached out to my network to find out if anyone knew who was behind them. In about five minutes, I was connected to the authors (they were very easy to find!). I asked them for a statement explaining why they were doing this, and here it is:

Why Eonta Space is sitting out this JCAST:

JCAST used to be like a big pot luck dinner. Everyone was welcome and the energy around town was one of community and pride. Then for whatever reason (money) the city wanted to off-load running JCAST and it was given to 14C Art Fair. At the time it felt like a data-grab, 14C got all our contact info and didn’t really do much for JCAST but if you signed up you were routed through 14C’s website. To be honest it smelled like a rat. This year we have been bombarded with hype. The kick-off event at a local mall? So not JC cool. Catered by a national chain notorious for its anti-LGBTQA+ stance (that was soon nixed by someone downtown). But really? Tone-deaf MUCH? For an organization that is non-profit and receives city, county and state money the commercial tie-ins for JCAST seem to be rapidly taking over. It is the developer crowd on steroids. And then there are the attempts to contain and control when, where and how artists and creatives are allowed to participate. There is no LGBTQA+ bus tour this year. The Canco Park programmers were told they couldn’t participate because they weren’t ‘arty’ enough. Art galleries were told to only open in the evening so more people would visit studios during the day. That is not how JCAST works. It is an open, inclusive, welcoming opportunity for all people to wander the city, not just downtown, and see art. It’s about sales but not JUST about sales. It’s about celebrating creativity even if only three people show up at your studio. It’s about civic pride and respect. There has been a beautiful photography campaign that portrays 108 artists as well-scrubbed and presentable exemplars of the ‘reborn’ Jersey City art scene. One artist, after being told not to expect any visitors because she was ‘off the beaten track’, had the nerve to complain that her work was not actually visible in the photo taken. She asked for a photoshop tweak, a simple fix. She was informed that the photo was a gift and if she was ungrateful she should just not use it. So who is benefitting here? So Eonta Space is sitting this year on the sidelines after years of participating. Although we will be open JCAST weekend. We were used to having a JCBike tour end their ride at our gallery and they would descend on our show as a group of fifty and eat all the cheese...like locusts. We would host bands and dance and poetry readings. It’s sad that those that are running JCAST couldn’t see it’s authentic charm. In recent years there has been a constant move towards a patronage-dominated downtown art scene. Money talks because ART and ARTISTS are the value-added ingredient that turns a faceless new high- rise into an instant art destination. At Eonta Space we are dedicated to inclusion, often encouraging unknown artists to show for the first time. We did a kids show last year, 20 / 20 Vision which was a tremendous, uplifting event. Our current show features three diverse, amazing artists. There is money for the Pompidou, there is money for 14C. Why not do a more inclusive, city- wide job with JCAST. It used to totally rock!

[signed]

bayard

dan peyton 

lauren farber 

and the eonta space family

This statement sent me reaching out to some other folks, including Catherine Hecht (organizer of the LGBTQ artist tour, mentioned above) and Project Greenville, as well as numerous others. Speaking to them independently and without telling them the specifics of the statement above, many of them confirmed the concerns raised in it. None of the people I spoke to directly said anything negative or mean about the JCAST folks (overall they were very kind and respectful to the event organizers); but they wanted a voice in how the event would run based on their experiences — which seems extremely fair, given that they have been involved in it for years. Everyone I talked to wanted a productive, positive solution to the situation we find ourselves in.

I want to say for the record that I’m not entirely comfortable with anonymous flyers posted around town calling out the organizer behind JCAST by name¹. Holloway is not a public figure like our elected officials are, and I just didn’t think that was necessary in this case — calling out Art Fair 14c was plenty. That said, I think the people behind the flyers have legitimate concerns that I was hearing from others as I asked around, and so I want to talk about those concerns here.

Some brief background: when JCAST was started several decades ago, it was run by ProArts, a local arts organization. It was mostly centered around the then-thriving 111 First Street area, and was a pretty small event. Over the years (and this is a quick retelling, I know), it grew, and then eventually fell under the umbrella of the Department of Cultural Affairs in City Hall for many years. Under their auspices, the event grew to take over the whole city. There were shuttle buses bringing people from the Heights to Greenville, and any little individual studio or art project/space that wanted to wound up getting a spot on the map. It was always a fact that downtown spots got the majority of the action, but there was a real effort made to include the entire city.

This ran pretty decently for a while, then I started to get a little concerned right around the time of the Ron English closing party back in 2021. An awful lot of money went to that event, and I was never comfortable with how that played out. English was, at one point, associated with JC (he had a space at 111 First Street for several years) but not actually currently a part of it in 2021 (he moved out of the area a long time ago and hasn’t lived here in many years, so I had some serious questions as to why he was the one getting attention as opposed to our many talented artists who live and work here?) — and a lot of the funding for that party came from places that seemed to not gel with the community spirit that JCAST projected. Sponsors included a corporate cannabis dispensary, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, along with some local real estate developers. I really felt we were going down a path that wasn’t good, but with the money flowing and the event being a welcome break from the pandemic, I think a lot of us went along with it rather than voicing those concerns.

Then, there was an abrupt turn away from that. In 2023 and 2024, JCAST was given to the organizers of Art Fair 14c to run. There’s some controversy in this action alone, in terms of why they were chosen or what the process was that they assumed control over the event. Personally (and again, this is my opinion), I don’t think anything untoward happened to make this play out the way it did, and that there were probably limited options as to who would run the event at this point, but it’s also fair for the artists involved — who are being asked to show their work and open their studios for free — are right to ask questions if they have them.

Now, the event is contracting. The money that poured into the event during the time of the English party is somehow gone (you can blame shifting corporate attention spans, I guess) and the list of sponsors has been whittled down considerably. The event is getting smaller, more rules are being put on it (including a rule involving the timing of when studios and art spaces can be open), and if artists and spaces don’t agree with these rules, they’re finding themselves out of the event. As the result, a lot of people who have been involved with this event for years are feeling left out and asking questions. Is there maybe a better way to do this? With some well-loved events like the LGBTQ bus tour being canceled due to budget issues, what exactly is the budget? How is it being allocated? Artists and art spaces are saying they’re in the dark about that, and in that vacuum of information, fear and speculations are flourishing.

I reached out to Robinson Holloway for a statement on Monday and she got back to me on Saturday morning. I didn’t share with her the statement above (I didn’t have it when I reached out) but since I knew she was aware of the flyers and of criticism towards her, I asked her for a more general statement about the situation overall. I’m pasting it in full below — it’s quite long, but I wanted to give her space to fully express her POV:

Apologies for the somewhat Amy Wilson-esque length of this – including probably too-extensive background to start. But I am taken aback that I am being accused of being a tyrant for an event that has been shaped by multiple community meetings, surveys, a volunteer JCAST committee, and more than 100 studio and gallery visits. 

Of course, some of the people who have labeled me a tyrant have long since unsubscribed from our mailing lists, so they may not be aware of how everything happened.

Last winter I sent emails to the arts community setting up multiple community meetings and outlining three main concerns for the 2024’s JCAST – that it had no clear identity or format that differentiated it from being just a weekend-long version of JC Fridays, that it had no funding support, and that it had no organizational foundation.

In 2023 we experimented by making JCAST part of a larger Jersey City Art Week. Knowing that managing multiple programs would be a huge task for our team, last spring 14C hired two (part-time) staff solely to work on the 2023 studio tour – a JCAST Director and a JCAST communications and social media manager.  The teeming rains on Saturday didn’t help, but it was also clear that we hadn’t been able to give the 2023 JCAST participants the support they needed to bring out the crowds.  It was an experiment that didn’t work – but I believe it could have worked if Jersey City Art Week had been able to draw more art lovers from the area, and expanding the audience for the future has been something we have been working on.

Since none of the previous JCAST sponsors were able to support the 34th JCAST (for different reasons – changing priorities for corporate sponsors and delay in the receipt of state funding for the JCEDC), the event ended as a significant financial hit for 14C.

We had several community meetings via Zoom over the winter, I apologized many times for our failures, but those three core questions remained – identity, funding and organization – along with a few others. 

If JCAST were to start from scratch as a new idea, would it be a festival spread out over 15 square miles? Is it easier to bring the art to the people rather than the people to the art? How does an artist choose whether their work should be seen in a finished state in a professional setting versus in-progress amid the tools of their practice? Is everyone comfortable with allowing the public free access to their space?  Is JCAST still needed now that there are so many other arts events in the calendar?

After a lot of discussion and ideas, some of which more wishful than practicable, at the end of one community meeting an idea coalesced among the attendees to split the days between the studios and the galleries. The only gallery representatives at the meeting were Deep Space and SMUSH, and both were willing, acknowledging the opportunity to highlight the working studio artists and noting that the format would give them a chance to visit multiple artist studios, which had always been a challenge for someone tied to a gallery in the past.

Did the idea make everyone happy? Of course not. But the large majority present were on board, as well as those who answered an email survey, and in subsequent months I have had multiple artists tell me that they are opening their studios this year specifically because of the split times and the focus on the working artist.  

We got a grant from the JCECD for JCAST operations and we spent it in four ways: printing costs, insurance, 14C staff labor (not my labor, I am a volunteer) and the Megan Maloy photography project, which provided 108 studio artists and galleries with professional photos in their spaces.  The 35th JCAST was done on a shoestring budget, with vital in-kind support from the City, the County, HCCC, Newport Centre, the Canopy Hotel, the HDSID and the Exchange Place Alliance.

Not everyone fits neatly into the category of artist studio or gallery/exhibition space, and there were some challenges with venues being open at various times, but we tried to work with them and figure it out. The volunteer JCAST committee was instrumental in devising ways to keep to the agreed-upon format, while making sure that the art could be seen. We came up with creative solutions for the arts venues who asked to participate in JCAST but had issues with fitting into the format, including finding an alternative venue for one show, and making HCCC into an official information station for JCAST when they were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to stay open for the requisite hours (they actually were able to stay open in the end).  

I have been aware since spring that there has been an alternative, shadow JCAST in discussion – because several of the artists and venues I visited during the spring Art Crawls and as we did our studio visits over the summer, volunteered the information that they were not part of it.  

It was also obvious that there was some kind of an alternative plan when several galleries which would normally participate chose not to register by the July deadline. The only explanation offered for nonparticipation came from two organizations in Greenville, who reached out in August to let us know that (in essence) the reason that they are not participating this year is because the communication from JCAST administrators was so horrible last year and that JCAST was unable to drive traffic to Greenville. 

Otherwise there was no communication of grievance, or requests for accommodation, from the protest JCAST group, so we spent much of the summer doing studio and gallery visits with more than 100 of the 150+ artists and galleries who did sign up for JCAST, talking about their practices and how to help increase the number of visitors during JCAST, which is always a challenge when the location is more isolated.

Then a couple of weeks ago a flyer was taped to the front door of my home, calling me a tyrant and advocating for a boycott. The communication was anonymous - though I saw who posted it - and not really specific as to a call to action. Other copies of the flyer were posted around town as well.

For a hot second I was amused and considered making t-shirts, with either the image of the flyer on it, or perhaps two designs that would let people choose between identifying as the ilk or the oppressed. But I don’t want to be flippant about it – the ones who are harmed by this are the artists. It’s difficult enough for the arts to get attention and for artists to have their work widely seen.

I am still not sure what the desired end result is for this group – they haven’t offered (to me at least) any specific changes that they want made in JCAST, though the split times seems to be the problem, as well as the return to the roots of JCAST and returning it to a visual arts festival rather than an all-arts festival.

This year’s format is an experiment, one more change in an event that has seen a lot of changes over 35 years, and one that seems to be working for some, but we won’t really know until after JCAST weekend is over. We are planning to have a community Zoom on November 11 to discuss what was good, what was bad, and what should happen in the future.

If the aim of the “take back your JCAST” group is to have 14C not be the organizer next year, we can absolutely make that happen.  Although a strong JCAST works with the core of our mission to increase opportunities for artists and expand public access to art, we would be very happy to step aside and take our place as one of many former organizers of JCAST, along with the DCNA, Jersey Journal, Pro Arts and the City’s Office of Cultural Affairs. 

As I have been called out by name on the flyer and in social media discussions, it’s clear that much of the problem seems to be focused on me, and my alleged desire to control the arts in Jersey City. I do want things to happen in the arts, but would actually prefer not to take the lead, and hope to be able in the near future to serve as an arts board member rather than as an arts administrator.

I believe in the core importance of the arts in a healthy and thriving society and I advocate for greater presence and funding for it whenever I can. That includes supporting the progress of the Pompidou, which has become a source of anger and concern in the community, particularly in vocal parts of the arts community. The letter to the editor of the Jersey Journal that I wrote earlier this year prompted an enormous amount of positive feedback for me – I got dozens of emails and still hear from people about it.  There are actually a lot of people who want the Pompidou to come to Jersey City, but they are hesitant to wade into the passionate discussions about it.

I don’t know if there is a solution to this schism or protest, but as soon as JCAST is over I know that my team and I will return our focus to our Project 14C artist residency program, to the 6th Edition of Art Fair 14C, to the exhibition at Gallery 14C and our plans for Miami Art Week. 

Ok so: I wanted everyone to have an opportunity to state their piece and say what they needed to say to help clear the air. It’s not possible for me to get absolutely everyone to weigh in, but hopefully I’ve been able to get some of the main players to say what they needed to in order to get the main issues out there and aired. I really would love it if now we can put all this behind us and just pivot to thinking about what the future might hold, and what kind of art scene — or art scenes, plural — we could build.

Here’s what I’d like to conclude with: JCAST doesn’t own the “open studio” model. There is nothing keeping artists and art spaces in JC from organizing their own event(s), maybe in the spring or summer, and making them much more in the image that they’d like to see. Something like an LGBTQ artist studio bus tour (just using them as an example) would be relatively inexpensive to fund — all it really takes is the outreach to the community to get them to show up, but the bus itself would only be a couple hundred dollars and the participating artists/curator would most likely participate for very little or free. Could a big crowdsourced fundraiser close the gaps on the budget for that? Plenty of cities have multiple open studio/artist-led events; there’s no reason why we can’t. Maybe JCAST has changed. Maybe it’s not what it once was. But that doesn’t mean we can’t build the art scene/s we want to see, if only we decide to do it.

(Just for some humor, I thought I’d end with a tweet I put out yesterday that reflects my personal feeling as an artist watching all this:

I’m tired, you guys. Please, let’s just find a way to move forward and put all this behind us in a way that builds a much better situation than we have right now.)

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Sunday is the last day of JCAST. For more information on the event, including a map and schedule, go to the website linked above. Catherine Hecht has a self-guided version of her LGBTQ+ tour, along with a description of the artists included, on her website.

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Jim McGreevey in JC Times

This week, there was an article about mayoral candidate Jim McGreevey in the Jersey City Times, in which McGreevey said a lot of things (I’ll get to those in a minute) in a pretty short article, but the thing that bugged me personally the most was:

“I’m the only candidate opposed to Pompidou,” says McGreevey, citing a recent Jersey Journal article in which the other four candidates, James Solomon, Bill O’Dea, Mussab Ali and Joyce Watterman, expressed qualified support for it.

“At the end of the day, you either have to be for Pompidou or against it…what I find to be disingenuous is that Councilman Solomon tries to have it both ways. Maybe yes but not yet, maybe no.”

“To undertake what would ultimately be a billion dollars of liability for Jersey City for a cultural addition is, from my vantage point, absurd.”

For the record, here are statements from James Solomon, Mussab Ali, and Bill O’Dea. They have all repeatedly expressed their lack of support of this project. If you wanted to quibble over it, I’d say Solomon’s statement is the strongest “anti” statement and O’Dea’s opens the door for some negotiation (only if the yearly operational costs are accounted for somehow, but at that point it becomes a whole other plan so I do not see any contradiction in saying he’s against the plan).

The only person in this race who has shown support for the project is Joyce Watterman in her vote as a member of the city council. All the other candidates have made it clear they’re against it, and it’s disingenuous at best to pretend otherwise. And right now, organizers who oppose it need the block of people who oppose this to work together — not try and score cheap political points (that are untrue, anyway) against each other for an election over a year away. Letting people know that four out of five of the people running for mayor oppose this plan has been a valuable talking point for those organizing against it. If the goal here is to stop the Pompidou from costing the JC taxpayer a ton of money, McGreevey is working at cross-purposes to that. If it’s to score some points to voters who maybe haven’t been following the story closely… well, I guess he can try and scoop up those folks. But he’s not helping those who are trying to stop this project.

Ok, that point aside, here are the other thing he says that is a huge issue: in that article, McGreevey goes on to promise that if he’s mayor, he’ll build a thousand units of affordable housing instead of the Pompidou. This is a pretty common trope of pitting artists against the working class, without acknowledging that the vast majority of artists are working class, but let’s leave that alone. There seem to be some serious problems with this plan that he’s proposing.

On Friday, resident Katie Brennan — who is a literal expert on housing policy, having worked in the field for years and having earned a Masters degree in the subject from Rutgers — weighed in with an op ed that shows that McGreevey’s alternative plan isn’t as easy as he makes it out to be. She makes the point that the plan he lays out wouldn’t result in the thousand units he’s promising — and in fact, would wind up with a whole lot less. Her op ed really breaks everything down and is worth reading. Just a brief part of the opening (she goes on to break down the rest of his plan bit by bit):

If Jersey City did successfully “undo” it, that tax money would come in annually and then would be appropriated in the budget to fund affordable housing. This $150 million is not cash that we can use to fund 1,000 units of affordable housing.

There’s also been other things that have come up since the op ed. The mayor claimed in a tweet that McGreevey never built any affordable housing in his tenure as mayor of Woodbridge. Then there’s this article, which makes clear that his policies as governor actually hampered the cause of affordable housing throughout the state:

While McGreevey may be known best nationally for outing himself as the nation’s first openly gay governor, he’s equally well known here in New Jersey for Byzantine political moves that have left the state in a deep fiscal crisis.

Under the supervision of his housing commissioner Susan Bass Levin, McGreevey systematically attempted to gut the state’s affordable housing laws.

You’re going to find very few people in JC more opposed to the plan for the Pompidou, in its current state, than me. That said, the idea that we can just wave a magic wand and turn that money into affordable housing is ridiculous. This is not a 1:1 equation; it’s not just a matter of saying no to one project and yes to another. The people of Jersey City aren’t hard-hearted jerks who want to pour money into an unprofitable museum purely to screw over working class people who are getting priced out; I’d bet if you put up for a vote “a museum or affordable housing,” affordable housing would win by a landslide. But unfortunately, things aren’t that simple.

Building affordable housing is unfortunately really complicated. I wish it wasn’t, but it is. There is a way to do it, but it’s not what McGreevey is suggesting here. And I really wish, if he’s truly against the Pompidou coming to JC and not just for using it as a rallying symbol, that he’ll be more willing to work with those who are also trying to push back against it.

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ICYMI

Twilight Vintage reopens after a ceiling collapse. They’re also having a huge denim sale today, so check them out — 2845 JFK Boulevard (aka the old Payless place). Also, don’t miss JC Oddities: Living Dead Market, Sunday, Oct 13th, 12-5pm, at the Harsimus Cemetery ($8 to enter, supports the cemetery! and the goats!).

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Feral cat of the week

It’s spooky black cat season (when is it not?) and this little friend is a reminder to all drivers to check under their cars before pulling out. Far too many of our ferals like to take refuge under cars — like this one, who was pretty securely hidden — and I’d image it’s all too easy to forget that they’re around.

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1. To be very clear, I reached out to Holloway on Monday and made her aware that I was writing this piece about the flyers before I proceeded to look into this at all. If at any time she said that the flyers made her feel unsafe (I mean, I’m sure they annoyed her, but if she stated that she was afraid for her safety or anything like that), I wouldn’t have gone ahead and written this. She did not express that to me in any way, and in fact said it was fine to proceed with writing about it, so here we are.