MONTCLAIR, New Jersey — Diversity, equity, and inclusion: The refrain has climbed its way into common parlance in the last few years, after a nationwide racial reckoning in the summer of 2020. According to Indeed, corporate hiring for roles in that sphere have increased by 123% between May and September 2020. What followed suit was the anti-DEI movement, referred to by some pundits as “the war on woke.”
Beyond the bubble of corporate communications, these three supposedly dirty words remain a pretty solid conceptual framework for accommodating a wide breadth of perspectives and identities. In this year’s iteration of the New Jersey Arts Annual, diversity and inclusion formed the backbone of a juried exhibition that poses the question, “What would it look like to form a more just and equitable society?”
Jurors Todd Caissie, Kimberly Callas, and Philemona Williamson reviewed more than 1,000 submissions, ultimately selecting 63 works created since 2022 by 61 artists, all of whom currently work or live in the Garden State. The resulting exhibition, Exploring our Connections, curated by Gail Stavitsky, continues at the Montclair Art Museum through January 5.
Under such a wide umbrella, the body of work is surprisingly international, formally inventive, and generation-spanning in perspective. New Jersey is one of the most racially diverse states in the country and home to nearly 2 million immigrants and refugees. First-generation Ecuadorian-American artist Jonathan Yubi Gomez’s oil painting “Una historia gringa” (2023) nods to this diversity. In its honoring of the labor of a construction crew inside a subway station, the work recalls a Works Projects Administration-era mural. But looking closer, you’ll notice that the work contains the symbols of a Klansman’s hood and the American flag receding behind a foreground of brown men at work. Such an anti-imperial message never would have flown past the adjudicators of federal government funding.
The works in Exploring our Connections take us far away, as if to suggest that our complicated lineages are a point on which we connect. There are resonances in the themes between Parvathi Kumar’s photograph “Family Unit” (2023), taken in Oaxaca, Mexico; Gary Saretzky’s “Three Angels with Chitarra” (2023), a photograph of a photograph taken decades ago in Abruzzo, Italy; and one of the few sculptural works, Ellen Hanauer’s cloth piece “Upcycle” (2023), inspired by her own “convergence point” of Ellis Island in New York in 1904. Interdisciplinary artist and Newark native paulA neves’s video essay/ poem/meditation “Regina” (2023), is, aesthetically, a straightforward portrayal of the surfaces of Newark, yet it invokes the movement of peoples across time, capturing the roar of Route 21 and the grime of Passaic River through the eyes of a woman who worked as a custodian in the city for 27 years.
That isn’t to say that the show doesn’t touch on issues at home.“While [New Jersey’s] diversity is one of its strengths, the reality is I, like many others across the country, have had to remain in my current housing situation because, for various reasons, it is the most affordable option,” neves writes in an email to Hyperallergic. “So, these tensions between what some call ‘progress’ or ‘revitalization’ and others call gentrification — and its impacts on community and the stability one needs to feel safe and do meaningful work — is something I live with and am curious about how others manage as well.”
neves works as an adjunct English instructor at Rutgers University for her day job. Exploring our Connections, indeed, allows visitors to glimpse into the lives of artists who are early-career, don’t make art full-time, or make work that may not be commercially viable. These include the youngest artist showing this year, 24-year-old Ian King, who collaged hospital visit souvenirs from his thyroid cancer treatment for “Mass of neck IV (mint, BETTER)” (2023). The oldest artist at 85, Marion Held, continues her Dress Project (2009–ongoing) with “Fragile Armor” (2024), a ghostly slip dress printed with an illustrated “protective skin” and accessorized with an abstract instrument of implied violence, a necklace that’s like a claw protruding from bone. As I gazed at houses from the car window on the drive after my visit, I felt that I had peeked inside the private lives of 61 people.
Since 1985, the New Jersey Arts Annual has honored the artistic skill of state residents and provided local artists — some of whom may feel they are working in the shadow of that artsy city just across the Hudson River — the chance to show in a museum. The annual show, which is partly backed by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, performs another kind of service, too. Multiple artists wrote in their wall text that the initial call for submissions was the impetus to sit down and make their work. That’s also true for the hundreds of artists who weren’t selected but who were spurred to create. I wonder what they’re making this year, in the hopes of participating in the next.
2024 New Jersey Arts Annual: Exploring our Connections continues at the Montclair Art Museum (3 South Mountain Avenue, Montclair, New Jersey) through January 5, 2025. The exhibition was juried by Philemona Williamson, Kimberly Callas, and Todd Caissie, and organized by Gail Stavitsky.
