There’ll be guided tours and gallery shows, manifestos and musical performances. There’ll be speeches, there’ll be handshakes, there’ll be pitches and sales. There’ll be a citywide art party, basically. But the heart of JCAST remains individual open studios. That interaction between the explorer and the artist, who opens her workspace to visitors, is the central dynamic and engine of drama behind the longest-running annual event on the Jersey City cultural calendar. For the thirty-fifth time, painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, and multimedia explorers will invite the public into the private spaces where creation happens. This weekend (Oct, 4-6), JCAST encourages you to grab a map and wander the six wards in pursuit of the novel, the accomplished, and the inspired.During daylight hours, mind you. This year, the Tour is doing something it hasn’t done before: in an effort to direct eyeballs toward the work of individual artists whose creative production sometimes gets lost amidst the fanfare of larger gallery shows, JCAST will feature open studios during the day (1pm – 5 pm) and gallery exhibitions at night (5pm – 9 pm). This idea, conceived by a brainstormer in a Zoom meeting about the future of JCAST and implemented by the Tour organizers, is an attempt to circumvent the crowding that made last year’s event a dispiriting experience for artists and galleries far from JCAST hubs. In 2023, during the first (and possibly last) Jersey City Art Week, the Studio Tour ran at the same time as Art Fair 14C, a MANA Contemporary open house, and an international sculpture festival, and fought a losing battle for attention against heavier hitters. This year, there’ll be no such competition, but there’s an ambient feeling that the Tour is still recovering from self-inflicted trauma and the overreach of last autumn.A Cheryl Hochberg buffalo from the Drawing Rooms showTo make matters more confusing, several respected galleries that have been enthusiastic participants in past Tours have decided not to play ball this year. They’ve hung new shows for the autumn — some of them very good — but they’ve opted against inclusion in the official citywide event. That means that they’ll be open this weekend, but they’re not on the Studio Tour map or website. Longtime JCAST visitors who are accustomed to stopping in to these galleries might not even notice that anything is different. But if you’re new to this Tour, you might miss out on several strong exhibitions in spots that are, pointedly, going their own way. The irony of this is that Jersey City has finally roused itself from its post-Art Week hangover. There’s more good art on display in the city right now than there has been since 2023. It’s a shame that the talented but fractious members of this community couldn’t resolve their differences and figure out a way to work together.For those of us who simply want to see good art and meet the people who make it, there are plenty of excellent options, including great shows like the spectral, autumnal “END World End” at Eonta Space (47 DeKalb Ave.) and the lovely, haunted “Banderoles, the Apophatic Sky, and the Memorializing Artifact” at Curious Matter (272 5th St.). Neither of these are Studio Tour exhibitions, but they’ll be open during the Studio Tour. Meanwhile, SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.), which is part of the tour, answers with the audacious “Bolivareando: Similar, Not the Same,” Buttered Roll’s cannonball dive into the pool of pan-American history and identity. Promising shows are opening all over town: Lisa Collodoro dazzles us with geometry at Casa Colombo (380 Monmouth St.), horizontalists Susan Evans Grove and Kim Bricker draw the line together in the 150 Bay Street lobby, Pajtim Osmanaj and Deep Space Gallery invite us to an offsite retrospective (395 Halladay St.), Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) hosts a quartet of textural explorers in “Interflow,” globetrotters show their photographs at Project Greenville (128 Winfield Ave.) and Art House Productions welcomes us “Home” with a group show that features new work from some of our very best, including Mark Kurdzeil, Doris Cacoilo, Tina Maneca, and Greg Brickey. Which of these shows are officially part of JCAST and which aren’t? Who cares?Gabriel Garcia Roman’s “I Am My Father’s Son” from Latin Lens at NJCUI’m going to attempt to see as much as I can this weekend, and that includes stops in as many individual studios as I can manage. As Megan Maloy demonstrates in her outstanding JCAST photo series, artist’s studios are as clear an expression of an individual artist’s vision as a painting or a sculpture is, and visiting a creator in the place of her creation can deepen our understanding of what it is she creates. I will, as always, report back with what I’ve discovered, and I expect to discover plenty. The Studio Tour has never let me down. “Narrative of Belonging” by Samar Hussaini I’d… um… also be remiss if I didn’t draw your attention to one other happening. On Friday, Oct. 4, in a show that is part of JCAST, Sue Eldridge Ward will show her convivial, colorful, and frequently electrifying paintings at an IMUR (67 Greene St.) show curated by a fellow who looks suspiciously like Tris McCall. Rumor has it he may have a few songs for you to mark the occasion. Hey, critics are allowed to party too, right?Six more shows I’ve seen that’ll be on view this weekend and are are worthy of your attention:“Lente Latin/Latin Lens” at the NJCU Visual Arts Gallery (100 Culver Ave.)This one is a sizzler: a collection of emotional, provocative, skillfully composed photographs by Latin American artists, mounted in time for Hispanic Heritage Month, but containing themes of family, labor, and urban development and devolution that are applicable to our experiences all year round. Curator Natali Bravo-Barbee emphasizes storytelling detail and unflinching honesty, but also encourages her artists to get experimental from time to time. This show also contains Cesar Melgar’s altogether brilliant streetscapes of Newark, which, presented on video, are virtually an exhibition in themselves. Unfortunately, the show is only open on Friday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. this weekend, but it’ll be up at the NJCU Gallery through October.“Jump!” by Manuel Acevedo, also at “Latin Lens”“Verses From the Abstract” at Bridge Art Gallery at Nimbus (329 Warren St.)If you’re going to name your show after a classic track by A Tribe Called Quest, you’d better come up with something supple, flexible, and imaginative. The Bridge Art Gallery has delivered with a group effort that brings together six of the county’s liveliest artists, including Heather Williams, who contributes a gorgeous assemblage of artfully torn paper and acrylic paint, and the audacious Anthony Boone, who stops the show (politely, of course) with radiant white circles and aqua streaks on canvas. Many of the pieces in this consistently entertaining show are collaborations, including the terrific “Time to Play,” which matches Bryant Small’s vibrant, colorful alcohol inks with busy black and white line drawings by Gabriel D’Ella.Judi Tavill @ “Hard Feelings” at Evening Star“Hard Feelings” at Evening Star Studio Gallery (11 Monitor St.)In just over a year, this art space in the garden level of a Lafayette brownstone has established itself as one of the best (and most playful) places in the Garden State to encounter experimental ceramics. The latest show to shine at Evening Star brings in some sculptors with wild imaginations, including Judi Tavill, who fires tangled strands of clay and marks them furiously with streaks of graphite, and Stacy As Pritchard, who graces us with a rosy-cheeked bust of a woman whose explosive blue hair has become a nest for a flock of friendly ravens. But the revelation of the show is Milcah Bassel, who vexes us with the ceramic pieces of a game with no rules, and dares us to fathom her vessels meant to contain emptiness itself.“War/Peace” at Gallery 14C (150 Bay St.)Can you handle a dress made by a Palestinian artist with a design on its belly that simultaneously evokes regional folk art and a bomber’s digital targeting system? If so, you’re ready for “War/Peace,” a brave, smart, sorrowful group show that makes no apologies for the current state of humanity — and our tendency to settle our disputes with violence rather than cooperation. Curator and 14C Arts director Robinson Holloway goes light on carnage, but manages to foreground transnational instability anyway. Her show points a steady accusatory finger at the masters of war and those who enable them, likening them to gamblers at a cockfight, collecting money while goaded beasts battle it out. Is this accurate? Turn on the news; see for yourself.“The Cockfight” by Sandra Cavanagh“Creative Vision: Arts Faculty Exhibition” at the Fine Arts Gallery at St. Peter’s University (47 Glenwood Ave.)Few artists in Jersey City have a visual signature as instantly identifiable as Beatrice M. Mady. Her paintings are divided into discrete panels containing quiltlike patterns, suns, mountains, silhouettes of humans and animals, and a shape that simultaneously suggests a sprouting bean and a swan with its head tucked beneath its wing. She’s joined at the St. Peter’s gallery that she curates by two of her colleagues in the art department: the lyrical and light-sensitive photographer Frank Gimpaya, and the technophile Trish Gianakis, who situates versions of her three dimensional art in a virtual reality landscape of her own fashioning. She’ll let you navigate an avatar of hers, and for JCAST, she promises to bring a VR headset to the gallery.“One Peaceable Kingdom” at Drawing Rooms (926 Newark Ave.)Animal art does not, in general, tend to be good art. Artists who create pictures of animals often sentimentalize or anthropomorphize their subjects when they aren’t reducing them to adorable caricatures or simple symbols. Not so for Cheryl Hochberg, whose pictures of beasts have a heft and seriousness to them that captures minds that aren’t human in the slightest, but deserve our respect anyway. Hochberg joins a group of painting and sculpting naturalists that includes Beth DiCara of Evening Star Studio, shaper of clay replicas of fauna, and Pat Brentano, leader of the curious and unwary into dense and misty thickets. Note that this show is not on the Studio Tour map. When the scene veterans who run the respected Drawing Rooms decide to skip JCAST — especially with a show of this quality on their walls — you know there’s something wrong. But that’s a subject for another article. For now, there’s art to experience. I’ll see you around town.The post Six Picks for a More Modest JCAST appeared first on Jersey City Times.