Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s “Anticipation” is part of the “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” exhibition at The Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick.
I’ll be upfront: There’s a whole lot of Essex County in this article. That’s not for lack of traveling. I saw good art shows all over the state of New Jersey in 2025. My favorites, though, were more geographically concentrated than they usually are. Though I like it best when the shows on my year-end list are better dispersed, I also can’t tell a lie. This Hudson County-based arts writer believes that Essex County had a superlative year.
And if there was a single locus of excellence in Essex County, Montclair was that place. Three Montclair shows made this list, but many others could have, including Sarah Canfield’s electro-psychedelic paintings of printer cables and chip boards behind frosted glass at Brassworks; “The Story Makers,” an innovative exhibition of African American-made jewelry at Loupe; Christine Romanell’s installations at The Montclair Art Museum and Hillside Square; and “Not Just Set in Stone,” the two-fisted celebration of rough-hewn sculpture now on view at Studio Montclair’s Leach Gallery. In a sign of an art scene brimming over with options, many strong shows in Montclair were mounted in unusual places. At times it felt like the whole town deserved to be under gallery lighting.
I was pleased to find that the Jersey museums were roused and reinvigorated after the long, cold winter of pandemic-inspired shutdowns. Princeton opened a renovated on-campus institution to renewed fanfare; The Morris Museum specialized in mind trips, cultural collisions and visual mischief; and The Hunterdon Art Museum continued to demonstrate that there is more to the visual arts than painting and sculpture. Then there is that New Brunswick institution with a yearlong show that … well, just investigate the baker’s dozen below. (And if you’ve got picks for favorites of your own, I’d love to know what they are.)
Asterisks (*) denote shows that are currently running.
13: “Jake Troyli: Fine Line” at Project for Empty Space, Newark*
Here is a delight: a show that applies the quick-witted, fast-sketched energy of cartoonists like B. Kliban, R. Crumb and Al Jaffe to pieces of great scale, impressive balance and classical overtones. Jake Troyli, an artist best known for bright-colored oil paintings of human beings with uncanny, action-figure-like smoothness, brought his characters with bare chests, rounded buttocks and tall topiary Afros to massive wall murals of sizzling energy and apparent danger. The big pieces in “Fine Line” make some stinging points about real estate, urban design, segregation, surveillance and violence both suppressed and actual, and feel like big Mad Magazine fold-ins. But the most provocative piece in this very smart show is Troyli’s small frame of a black man emerging from behind the rubber mask of a white man and pausing with his long finger atop a button. His expression is resolute but inscrutable. Is he daring the audience to react, taunting us, or setting us all free?
“La Resistencia de los Nopales Híbridos: El Susurro del Desierto,” by Salvador Jiménez-Flores.
12: “Salvador Jiménez-Flores: Raíces & Resistencias” at Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton*
The political significance of Troyli’s work is hard to miss, but if you were really determined to see his murals as nothing but silly cartoons, you could do that. Salvador Jiménez-Flores, by contrast, leaves nothing to chance. Seconds after viewing his wall art at the indoor gallery at Grounds for Sculpture, you will know exactly where he stands: He portrays the President as a snake, ICE agents as a modern equivalent of The Ku Klux Klan, and The United States as a barbed-wire prison dedicated to the incarceration of the plumed-serpent spirit of Mexico. His vision of a single America — North and South, divided, arbitrarily, by oppressors whose ancestors arrived on these shores from distant lands — is painted in New World soil that, he argues, is his by birthright. He sees his fellow border-traversers as cacti — barbed, resilient, thriving in emotionally arid quarters, and messed with at the risk of authorities. The pugnacious indoor work finds its completion in a trio of sculptures on the Grounds, including a steel rendering of a pair of desert plants with segmented edges like Aztec ceremonial swords. These blades ended in a pair of dusty feet; they are coming our way. There were a few better shows in New Jersey this year, but none was gutsier than this.
11: “Eileen Ferara & Tracy Duhamel McFarlane: Uneasy Terrain” and “Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern: The Florilegium” at Watchung Arts Center
Cacti wear their defenses proudly. Other plants are more subtle. Tracy Duhamel McFarlane and Eileen Ferara allowed texture, density, perspective and mood to stake out a patch of the garden ruled, absolutely, by things rooted. In a pair of shows presented simultaneously to mark the passage of the Watchung summer, flowers and ferns ran the show, and human beings were the inferior brand of cellular life. McFarlane submerged us in a thicket where light is as filtered as it is in a marine zone, and showed us plants so full and verdant that they were practically blue. Ferara’s forests and glades were wonderfully bossy with boughs that hung heavy with fruit and foregrounds thick with red flowers. Meanwhile, downstairs in Watchung Arts Center’s small gallery, Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern brought us a bouquet of (drawn) orchids with enough carnality and prurience to put human Lotharios to shame. Are plants really cooler than we are? McFarlane, Ferara and Ficarelli-Halpern seem to believe that we have been outpaced, outclassed and out-hustled by the vegetation. Maybe they’re right.
Andrew Harrison’s “(new) jersey: garden city.”
10: “Andrew Harrison: This Was Always a Place” at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit*
Maps are beautiful. As two-dimensional representations of our communities, they are also reductive. Because he knows that what the cartographer omits is at least as important as what he includes, Andrew Harrison is an ideal navigator to drive down dangerous alleys with. In a series of creative desecrations, he slices up maps of familiar places and radically re-arranges them, pouring a shredded state of New Jersey into vessels the shape of Manhattan, and Brasilia, and a Mesoamerican temple, and the Garden of Eden. His recontextualization of landmarks and place-names is full of quiet provocations and visual jokes, but there is a serious side to “This Was Always a Place,” too. Harrison wants to investigate the map itself, and lay bare the utopian project of categorizing and cataloguing our neighborhoods. Is our fiercely held Jersey identity really bound up in this arbitrary assortment of place names and intersections? One that can be turned into confetti by an enterprising conceptual artist with an X-Acto knife? This clever show also unearths Seneca Village, an African-American settlement wiped from New York to make way for Central Park. Harrison reminds us that as helpful — and as gorgeous — as they are, maps are, at best, partial history.
9: “Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance” at Montclair Art Museum
They are tall as a man, as thin as fireplace pokers, and made of Mylar, the polyethylene sheeting that is sometimes used to fabricate balloons for birthday parties. Nanette Carter calls them Afro Sentinels, and she assembled 14 of them on the big wall at the Special Exhibition Gallery of the Montclair Art Museum to let visitors know that they were in the presence of the sacred. The Sentinels didn’t have bodies, or faces, or eyes, but they watched us nonetheless. Like the members of a tribunal, each one had a distinctive personality. They carried themselves with dignity. These impressive figures presided over a roomful of Mylar designs that felt like flat sculptures: plays of color, angle and shape, each communicating beauty and precarity, each catching and pooling the light in the distinctive way that Mylar does. Her stacks of panels were abstract, but the emotions they conjured were specific: care, and worry, and passionate love for a world spinning dangerously off of its axis. The Sentinels, then, were like Afro superheroes here to set things right — or at least look on disapprovingly while it all goes wrong.
“Mindscape 6,” by Heejung Kim.
8: “Mindscapes: The Artistic Universe of Heejung Kim” at Paris Koh Fine Arts, Fort Lee
The year’s loveliest show hung in an unloved part of the state: two blocks from the automobile entrance to The George Washington Bridge. That is where you will find Paris Koh Fine Arts, a delightful little gallery on a road that ends in a Route 9 feeder ramp. Yet “Mindscapes: The Artistic Universe of Heejung Kim” was hardly as terrestrial as that description suggests it might be. Instead, Kim fitted circles on dowels and drove them into a panel to create winsome objects that resembled star charts. “Mindscape 6,” for instance, featured scores of round pieces of paper painted the azure of lapis jewelry and decorated with golden suns and pinwheels. No two of these objects were exactly the same, but Kim’s discipline gave the piece a feeling of unity, and perhaps even purity. In “Mindscape 4,” one of many mandalas in this skyward-looking show, the artist scratched silver marks on a clay board in interlocking patterns and crowned it with a Tree of Life for good mystical measure. It all came to a head in the thrilling “World of Dots,” a wide black board covered with hundreds of meticulously decorated black-and-white circles. Kim’s dowel and circle technique may sound reminiscent of the work of Kate Dodd and Valerie Huhn, two of the state’s best artists, but its delicacy, elegance and peculiar character marks her as a woman walking her own starry path.
7: “Toshiko Takaezu: Dialogues in Clay” at Princeton University Art Museum*
Most of the action in the new PUAM takes place on the spacious second story. But there is a first floor special exhibition gallery, too, and through early July, it will host the ovoid ceramic pods sculpted by Toshiko Takaezu, a longtime Princeton professor with a confounding and slightly unnerving style. Takaezu’s ceramics lack apparent utility: Though they are masterfully glazed, they have no apertures. Instead, these odd shapes seem to quiver with possibility. Some of the smaller ones resemble alien eggs on the verge of hatching. The bigger, urn-like ones feel funereal and hint of sarcophagi. PUAM chief curator Juliana Ochs Dweck has raided the museum’s enormous collection to pair Takaezu’s closed forms with abstract expressionist paintings and other experimental artworks. These are the “Dialogues in Clay” that PUAM is boasting about, and they are facilitated by designers who know exactly what artworks to put next to each other to get those pieces talking together in a language that knows no nationality.
“A Bit Distracted,” by Katie Truk.
6: “Katie Truk: Macro vs. Micro” at Academy Square, Montclair
New Jersey artists are well known for making aesthetic gold out of unusual materials, especially those that would otherwise end up in the rubbish heap. Yet even in that context, Katie Truk’s radical transformations of pantyhose are still startling. Truk makes the most out of the familiar properties of women’s leggings: stretchiness, tactility, sheen, fine stitching, bright colors and occasional translucency. The artist attaches strips of hose to little clamps that pull their corners in different directions, creating sharp curves, arcs and parabolas out of workaday nylon. Then she mounts her swatches in wire boxes at different depths. These metal and mesh pieces sometimes evoke nets in a tempestuous sea, or kites in a turbulent sky. Sometimes they resemble neurons in a tempestuous, turbulent mind — the mind of a woman, perhaps, pulling on hose in a hurry as she hustles to a Downtown desk. That the material that Truk is making art with has had contact with the human body adds warmth and poignancy to a show that would work just fine as a simple exhibition of experimental textiles. Anybody who ever extracted a pair of L’eggs from one of those egg-shaped containers will get the message. She will know what the tension in this show is about. No matter how dramatically she has pulled, she is not going to run.
5: “Tom Nussbaum: But Wait, There’s More!,” Montclair Art Museum*
At Paris Koh Fine Arts, Heejung Kim allowed countless circular dots to cohere into a single starry impression. Nanette Carter cut Mylar strips into jagged shapes and, like a jigsaw-puzzler, assembled them into her Afro Sentinels. These pieces weren’t paintings, and they weren’t sculptures. They felt more like mosaics: many similar-shaped objects positioned vertically on a wall in a manner that amplified their common characteristics. Tom Nussbaum got up to something similar in “But Wait, There’s More!,” a lively, cheerful, family-friendly career retrospective in which it often felt like everything was shaking hands with everything else, all at once, in a great display of conviviality and neighborliness. Take “East Orange Boogie Woogie,” an array of hundreds of steel rectangles, some smaller than a business card, painted in primary colors and connected by tiny metal pieces. Lines sprayed out, in all directions, leading our eyes on radial pathways, taking us on visual rides to pleasant little terminal points, spinning us around and leading us from one corner of the artwork to another. Of course Nussbaum, irrepressible as he is, could never be content with two dimensions. He also gave us houses made of toothpicks, busts of impassive and peaceable animals, cheese graters fitted with robotic faces and lit from within, and great ships made of curved rods, delicate wheels, flags and tiny balls like kids’ toys. In the middle of one of these, a painted steel doll blows a horn, red-cheeked, open-eyed and expectant, calling us forth and guiding us toward unfettered acts of imagination.
COURTESY OF MICHELLE SAMOUR
“Life Inside the Mountain III,” by Michelle Samour.
4: “Pulp: The Fluid and the Concrete” at Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton
Year after year, we can count on The Hunterdon Art Museum to draw our attention to craft-adjacent forms of art that sometimes get lost behind painting and sculpture. They have shown us that basket-making, quilt-weaving, needlepoint, computer-enhanced ceramics and other practices reward ambition, vision and creativity just as well as canvases do. In 2025, it was the paper-makers’ turn, and many of them had a point to prove. Pulp, it turns out, is a water-dependent medium, and even when it is dried and pressed into a tome, it was still subject to tidal forces and the caprice of the waves. (Well, brain waves.) Many of the book-like objects in “The Fluid and the Concrete,” a 26-artist show that doubled as a convention for experimental paper-makers, seemed to have been unearthed from some sepulchral seaside cavern. These paper products could be bound, but they could not be tamed. Then there were the pieces too wild to be a sheet or a page of anything — pulp as featherweight as a dragonfly wing and diaphanous as a jellyfish, or bunched up and chaotic as sea foam. A few of these even resembled sea creatures, like Marc Rosenquist’s “Event,” a great corkscrew of flax filaments, and Michelle Samour’s room-spanning “Life Inside the Mountain III,” an undersea menagerie of colorful ring shapes that achieved the character of coral.
3: “Tatyana Kazakova: In Spite of Our Fears” at Grover House, Caldwell
Heartbroken, furious, weed-tough and grainy-textured, grand, pained, emotionally forthright, and occasionally even celebratory: Painter Tatyana Kazakova’s generous three-floor retrospective at Caldwell’s Grover House was all of these things. But mostly it was a face-to-face encounter with grief, and if the artist couldn’t wrestle it to a standstill, she forced a stalemate that felt heroic. Her initial canvases were all about busting loose — figures constrained by too-tight frames, feeling the limits of their powers but throwing their shoulders and elbows anyway. The energetic paintings on the second floor featured human figures bent at their joints yet somehow still upright, and Kazakova consistently located the beauty in their struggle, and maybe even their ferocity. The real gut-punch, though, was the series of acrylic paintings of hollowed blue bodies on the top floor of the exhibition, each of which thematized the emptiness of death and loss in a manner that was frank, brave and consistently courageous. Life, the artist reminded us through her explosive pictures of seed pods and brambles, goes on no matter how sad we are, and fills the empty spaces around us. Something, it seems, is always being born. “In Spite of Our Fears” wasn’t always easy to see, but life isn’t always easy to endure. Kazakova was the reporter who gave it to us straight, without platitudes or false optimism, but with an assurance that at the speed of 24 hours a day, tomorrow is coming. We survivors had better gather our resolve and brace ourselves for it.
“Sonoran Desert No. 1” by James Prosek.
2: “James Prosek: At Work” at Morris Museum, Morris Township
It was a terrific year at the Smithsonian-affiliated museum at the top of the hill on Normandy Heights Road. Morris Museum made room for one penetrating exhibition after another. Jo-El Lopez’s techno-mystical “Digital Divine,” Troy Jones’ magnetizing images of modern subjects in timeless African masks, Alan Feltus’ mind-warp paintings of ambiguous interior scenes, and Kyle Meyer and Donna Bassin’s shredded, altered, stitched and woven photographs were all worthy of this list of superlatives. But the Morris Museum show that I couldn’t shake was “At Work,” James Prosek’s hard-eyed examination of the effects of scientific classification and animal taxonomy on the environment. Prosek’s portraits of fauna looked like he was studying his subjects as he painted them. Sometimes that meant scrupulously rendered images of fish dragged out of the water and pinned on neutral-colored backdrops; sometimes it meant size-comparison charts of cold-eyed beasts on huge, dramatic canvases. But most often, it was silhouettes of scores of animals, knocked-out black on a white field and numbered for cross-reference and cataloguing, with no two touching or interacting. And this, the show suggested, is how we see the natural world: We cram to understand its particulars and draw lines between its denizens, and ignore the continuum of life that pre-existed human knowledge by eons. This was not necessarily an animal lover’s show: The beasts in it didn’t look particularly friendly, and Prosek resisted the temptation to anthropomorphize or sentimentalize his subjects. Instead, he let the rude charisma of his subjects speak for itself, and dared us to accept the natural world as it is, fangs and all.
1. “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now, & Always” at Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick*
Wendy Red Star showed up for it. So did Emmi Whitehorse. Tomahawk Greyeyes, Raven Half Moon, Edgar Heap of Birds, and more than 90 other indigenous artists of renown brought work to the Rutgers campus for a massive, weighty, timely survey of Native American art in a time as confusing as the 21st century. Only the legendary artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith — who, alas, did not live to see this tremendous, terrifying exhibition mounted — could have convened such an array of skill. But “Indigenous Identities” is no mere talent show. Instead, over the course of 103 shattering pieces, it interrogates the indigenous psyche, asking how those descended from the first inhabitants of this continent understand themselves after centuries of representations by newcomers. What survived the onslaught of film and literature about “Indians”? Once stereotypes and stock characters are dispelled like the illusions they are, what is left behind? “Indigenous Identities” approaches these unanswerable questions through sophisticated canvases, films, photographs and sculptures that search a blasted American landscape and retrieve and reassemble elements of Indigenous culture like clues strewn at a crime scene. It is a mass murder mystery, artfully composed and full of suspense and jaw-dropping moments. But it is not a whodunit. We already know the guilty party.
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