COURTESY OF THE ARTIST'S ESTATE AND THE GARTH GREENAN GALLERY
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s “Going Forward, Looking Back” is part of the “Dreamtime in Newark” exhibition.
The first thing you will notice when you enter the room is a ship. Two ships, really: one about the size of a shopping cart, and another, much smaller, in its wake. The vessel’s prows don’t touch water. Instead, they are on narrow wires, suspended from the ceiling of The Newark Museum of Art and catching the gallery light like a clipper catches the wind.
The model boats, fashioned by artist Hew Locke, are friendly-looking, but they are also more than a little ragged. Their brightly painted hulls are bent and weather-beaten, their decks are crammed with model cargo, their nets are frayed, and their main sails are torn. Both masts lean. They look like they have come through some heavy weather. Nevertheless, they give the impression of seaworthiness. Wherever they are headed — and “Where Lies the Land?,” the title Locke gives to this dangling question of an installation, suggests they may not know for sure — they are not sinking any time soon.
COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST
Nanette Carter’s “Illumination” is included in “Dreamtime in Newark.”
“Land?” is a rocking introduction to “Dreamtime in Newark,” a terrific, provocative, occasionally hallucinatory exhibition that will hang in the museum until June. The group show — which highlights the legacy of Newark’s Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art — takes transience and the strange placelessness of modern life as its starting point. To call the 46 artists in “Dreamtime” restless is to undersell the feelings of destabilization that radiate from the walls and platforms of the gallery. Yet there is little agitation in these reveries. Instead, these works achieve weightlessness. They float like Locke’s airborne boats, even when they have no ocean to buoy them up.
Grace and perseverance were two of the Aljira Center’s notable characteristics. The collective, which was co-founded by a pair of Guyanese-born artists in 1983 and lasted for 35 years, gave a platform to creators making work outside mainstream galleries. These included painters and sculptors who would go on to become cornerstones of contemporary African-American art in The Garden State and beyond.
“Dreamtime” curators Alliyah Allen and Tricia Laughlin Bloom and assistant curator Monisha Bernard present exciting work by many of them, including Nanette Carter, subject of a mesmerizing retrospective at The Montclair Art Museum last year; Ben Jones, honored with a pair of shows at NJCU and William Paterson University in 2024 that testified to his influence; and the perennially appreciated (and collected) Jerry Gant, one of Newark’s best-loved street artists. Place is made for the energetic crayon drawings of the folk poet Amiri Baraka (father of Ras, the current Brick City mayor).
They are all gathered here in “Dreamtime,” represented by pieces that are unmistakably theirs and that crackle with the urgency of the early stages of a public mission.
COLLECTION OF VICTOR DAVSON AND CICELY COTTINGHAM
“Dreamtime in Newark” includes Victor Davson’s “Bad Cow Comin’ (Dear Guyana).”
If celebrating these landmark artists was all there was to “Dreamtime in Newark,” it would be a show worth seeing. But “Dreamtime” turns out to be much more than the sum of attractive parts: It is a demonstration of the ways in which the aesthetic of an art space can focus and amplify the meaning of the art that is shown there. Aljira co-founders Victor Davson and Carl E. Hazlewood felt unmoored in The New World. For them, the search for place and the quest for identity were parallel undertakings. From abstractions to images of children’s faces, everything in “Dreamtime” resembles a map.
Those maps rarely correspond to anything in the atlas we know. The Caribbean is scrambled, newsprint is torn up and reconstituted, roads lead nowhere and everywhere all at once. We get a general idea of where we are, but nothing is pinpointed. In Nell Irvin Painter’s mind-bending “Black Sea Composite,” a mislabeled Haiti floats in the blue near a detached Crimea that looks suspiciously like Jamaica. (The real Haiti, through some trick of tectonics, has gotten itself glued to Houston.)
Jersey City artist Nyugen Smith presents us with “Bundlehouse: Borderlines #1,” an assembly of pieces of paper festooned with hundreds of drawings of tiny structures. Smith has stitched these scraps together into a large tapestry. From a distance, the “Bundlehouse” suggests the crowded conditions of a favela or refugee camp. But it also hints at old maps of newly explored territories, roughly filled in by imaginative cartographers acting out of a combination of curiosity and terror. If it is accepted that Here Be Monsters, how are we to think about the non-monsters who call those territories home?
Another place that is poorly understood by mapmakers and considered abject by outsiders is the jailhouse. Duron Jackson shows us “Northern State Prison” in its brutal, serrated outline, omitting any distinguishing details, and letting the lacerating architecture speak volumes. Jacobson’s penitentiary, shown from above as if seen from a Google Map, is rendered in dark, metallic brown-gray on a black background. It looks like a rusted razor blade dragged across the landscape.
Softer and funnier but just as incisive is Dahlia Elsayed’s “My Favorite Ruins So Far,” a diptych in dripping teal acrylic and oil stick. This stark landscape, dominated by a pair of radio towers and a Hollywood-like sign announcing the presence of empire, is spiked with Jersey in-jokes and little exit signs attached to no particular parkway. It is The Garden State as psychic jungle, a Land of the Lost that is, paradoxically, very familiar.
COLLECTION OF VICTOR DAVSON AND CICELY COTTINGHAM
Cicely Cottingham’s “Tomorrow Will Come on Its Green Footsteps.”
Other landscapes hide trouble behind gorgeous exteriors. Cicely Cottingham’s “Tomorrow Will Come on Its Green Footsteps” is as lush as Monet’s “Water Lilies,” but there is a sense that something is lurking under the verdant surface of a forest lake. The painter’s streaks, drips, and wrist-twisting scrapes of acrylic give the entire piece a disquieting shimmer. As if to remind us that night always follows day, she frames the idyll on both sides by panels in turtle-shell brown and mossy green.
Hugo X. Bastidas’ forest wears its problems a little plainer. We are deep in a thicket, and foliage covers his canvas from corner to corner. In the foreground are thin tree trunks and fallen branches dripping with vines; in the lower left corner, the painter depicts a race car’s-worth of tires, all bunched up, stacked, introducing a discordant rubbery note into an otherwise organic symphony. As dramatic as this act of pollution is, the forest doesn’t care. It grows unimpeded over all obstacles.
Bastidas is on the side of the trees. Cheekily, he calls this oil-painted depiction of natural defiance “Apparent Recovery.”
Aljira’s attraction to rural imagery and mangrove-swamp colors may have something to do with the co-founders’ nation of origin. The deeply forested Guyana is one of the few places on earth as interesting as New Jersey: it is a node on trade routes, a way station en route to The Caribbean, a meeting place for indigenous South Americans, Africans and South Asians brought to the country by the British colonials to work the cane fields after the abolition of slavery.
Donald Locke’s “Blairmont.”
Donald Locke’s aching “Blairmont,” a sculpture from his “Plantation Series,” plants nine ceramic cylinders in a grid and slips a stalk of dried Guyanese grass in an aperture in each column. The piece is an elegy and an accusation, and it peers out of its vitrine at a crystal baseball bat that hovers in midair with the ease of Hew Locke’s boats. This, too, is a work with Caribbean signification — it is a tribute to Sammy Sosa, the charismatic Dominican slugger who helped reinvigorate baseball after the 1994 work stoppage, but who has been barred from baseball’s Hall of Fame and expunged from the game because of his involvement in the steroid scandal. Freddy Rodriguez’s suspended bat is transparent; like Sosa, it is both there and not there, impressive, shining in the spotlight, erased from the record but casting a long shadow.
This is exactly what “Dreamtime in Newark” does so well. A map means something different to a transient in a diaspora than it does to a person who has settled down and claimed a piece of territory. Sosa represents The Dominican Republic, but he came to fame while playing a game in The United States. He belongs to both countries; he belongs to neither.
“The African Dream,” a stunner of a photograph by Adama Delphine Fawundu, captures a young woman in traditional dress on a sofa in a smart living room in Bamako, Mali. Her serving bowls and carrying trays have been stashed in a large wicker container. To her left, a bust of Mao Zedong squats, proprietarily, in a corner. Over her head, a portrait of a man glowers. He could be an ancestor, or a Malian founding father. The subject of the portrait has attained material comfort and is the queen of her domain. But she is being watched.
El Anatsui’s “Lace People,” a knockout wall sculpture made of carved wood, isn’t so different. An artist and fabricator internationally recognized for his enormous tapestries made of flattened bottle caps, Anatsui takes aim at the Ghanan and Nigerian upper class and their conspicuous consumption of European consumer goods. He scores his slabs with circular markings that imply a lace pattern but also look suspiciously like bullet holes, cuts black fissures in the surface of the wood, and affixes the planks side by side to give the impression of a forbidding fence. A few get to wear expensive threads. The rest are walled off and kicked out of the club.
ANNA ARCA
Hew Locke’s “Where Lies the Land?” 4.
But even the fortunate ones, “Dreamtime in Newark” argues, are adrift on one of Locke’s boats, contending with tides of history that seem to intensify with each year, and forever asking, like Locke, “Where Lies the Land?” Cultural disorientation is endemic to the modern world. Then there are the millions who have been dispossessed outright, and who have packed up what they can of their heritage and carried it with them to the best of their ability.
The late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, curator of the thunderously good “Indigenous Identities” show of Native American modern art at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick in 2025, represents the Salish and Kootenai Nation that once occupied thousands of square miles of land in Montana, Idaho and The Pacific Northwest. In “Going Forward, Looking Back” (see at top of post), her impressive contribution to “Dreamtime in Newark,” a painted horse gallops across a backdrop of newsprint. Many of the headlines are salient to her experience as a Native American coping, as best as she can, with forced assimilation.
The horse, in mid-gallop, strains to outpace the news about property available on Indian lands and the time before Columbus Day. But there are white handprints on its hindquarters, and we can’t see its eyes.
Jayson Keeling’s “The Marked Man.”
As “Dreamtime” and “Indigenous Identities” both suggest, enduring indignity creates its own funny sort of balance. “The Marked Man,” a six-minute video presentation by Jayson Keeling, brings us back to Brick City to make a hero out of a queer person of color. As the subject of the piece stands before the plate glass window of the Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, he is doused, over and over, by buckets of paint.
We don’t see who is doing the throwing, but we see the protagonist’s resignation and self-possession. Cars streak by on the Downtown Newark street, but nobody stops or even slows down to see what is happening. By the end of the clip, he is saturated with glitter pigment, shining bright as the Tin Man, eyes closed and beard speckled with metallic particles.
He looks like he has been through it. He is also, undeniably, beautiful.
The Newark Museum of Art will present “Dreamtime in Newark: Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art” through June 20. Visit newarkmuseumart.org.
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