For once, the weather was glorious. No unseasonable chill, no storms, none of the other discomforts that have fettered recent Jersey City Artist and Studio Tours. There was nothing to impede walking about — from studio to gallery, from train station to café, from neighborhood to neighborhood. This was JCAST as it could only be when the fates cooperate: the skies, the schedules, the dispositions of the artists and gallerists involved. After a few stormy Octobers, we were granted a reprieve.We needed one. The run-up to the 35th annual Artist and Studio Tour was inharmonious, and prompted prominent figures in the arts community to wonder if there’d be a 36th. The decision made by the organizers to split activities into day and night sessions — sunlight for studios, nightlights for galleries — did not sit well with some longtime participants. Certain beloved local galleries opted to sit this one out, or open on their own schedule. Many of those who remembered the occlusion of JCAST during last year’s expansive Jersey City Art Week remained suspicious of the intentions of Arts 14C, the nonprofit group directed by its founder Robinson Holloway and current showrunner of the Tour.David Rios FerreiraBut this year, there was no Art Fair 14C. Art Week is gone and it’s not coming back. This autumn, there was nothing but the Studio Tour. While some of our arts organizations went their own way, it never felt like a shadow tour was operating alongside JCAST; an outsider wouldn’t have known that there was any dissension in the ranks. Those who chose not to be listed on the map and set their own hours didn’t disrupt the flow of the weekend. They simply became alternative options. It was a reminder that while artists are a loud and fractious bunch, they do not tend to be combative. Mostly, they just want you to see their art. And — same as it ever was — there was a lot of art to see. AT THE SALONScarcity has never been an issue for the Tour. The challenge for JCAST organizers is less a matter of aesthetics than it is one of physics. There’s an abundance of talent in Jersey City and only so many hours in a day. Over the years, JCAST has become more expansive and inclusive, which, while well-intentioned, has exacerbated the problem. Getting from Greenville to the Heights takes a long time on a good day. Few visitors want to spend an hour of Tour time navigating city traffic. Because of this, JCAST has evolved into a hub-centric event, with activities clustered around large concentrations of studios in buildings like 150 Bay Street. Even within these art buildings, there’s so much going on and so many competing voices that it can be hard to see anything more than a fraction of the Tour — especially with the clock running.Nupur NishithThus the typical poise characteristic of arts presentation goes out the window. We’ve done it by necessity, but it’s become a style, and maybe even a statement. The curators of some of the best exhibitions on view for the Tour thumbed their noses at whitespace and presented work salon style, one piece right next to its neighbors with barely a gutter between them. What could have been a boisterous mess was instead a commentary on the Tour itself: its demands, its excitement, its charismatic cast of thousands. Jersey City doesn’t always give us much space to operate in. Smushed we are, but we’re still singing.In “All Things Great and Small,” curator P.E. Pinkman saturates the walls of the too-narrow ART150 Gallery (150 Bay St.) with work. In a supercollider like this, pieces from forty members of the ProArts family of accomplished New Jersey artists can’t help but speak to each other. A clever painting by Linda Streicher divided into eight squares containing acrobats in motion nudges at the elegant little oils, superficially sedate but brimming with disquietude, of Deborah Pohl. Edward Fausty’s fish-eye lens photograph of an earthly landscape, molded by the camera into a sphere and cast on a black background like a planet seen from space, casts an invisible penumbra across Dorie Dahlberg’s intimate shot of a different kind of small world: a motel room in Nova Scotia. Stella Chang’s pair of “Chromatic Compositions” in acrylic, abstract but anthropomorphic, echo the curved bodies of two different regents — Lucy Rovetto’s mixed-media “Simple King,” a surreptitious character who may be restraining a subject, and Josie Barreiro’s “Brick City King,” a rat treading the pavement of Newark with proprietary swagger. Even the most graceful pieces in the show crackle with marks, color, and visual information, like Isabelle Duverger’s stellar observations in ink, or Nupur Nishith’s symbol-stuffed ode to “Ardhanarishwar,” the androgynous Hindu deity.Rene SahebAt Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison Ave.) the walls were similarly crowded: art, fast art, including many pieces on paper, arranged like a puzzle from the floor of the space to the ceiling. Gallerists Jenna Geiger and Keith Van Pelt have shown many local creators over the past decade, and in the aptly-named “Wallpaper,” it felt like they’d all showed up and contributed something to the patchwork. That meant sketches of winsome women in disarming poses by Rebecca N. Johnson, quietly provocative line drawings by Macauley Norman, runic symbols overwriting printed matter by Cheryl R. Riley, adorable but unsettling fertility totems painted by Shamona Stokes, mysterious beasts in gray and white from Anne Novado, and at least one portrait of a grasping overlord by the muralist RU8ICON. The whole Deep Space contingent rode this subway train together, bouncing over the bumps and hugging the curves, heading into the heart of the city in the same direction, keeping balance even when the brakes squealed. That the show cohered was testament to the camaraderie that Deep Space has been able to cultivate, but it was also attributable to the looseness of the exhibition, the bustle of the presentation, and the refusal of anybody involved to take themselves too seriously. Similarly, the globetrotters of Project Greenville (128 Winfield Ave.) — a stop that wasn’t part of the official Tour, but might well have been — covered the walls of a backyard gallery with images from all over the world, including photographs, prints, and a few of Nathalie Kalbach’s architecturally sensitive paintings. The excess was a statement in itself, speaking of velocity, travel both physical and intellectual, and the speed of thought.Teamwork extended to artist studios, many of which were shared. Nohi Mehrotra, who commits electric-colored squiggles and curlicues to canvas in mesmerizing layers, opened her space to Kubra Ada, a specialist in paper marbling who coaxes images of flora out of pigment suspended in fluid. Ada’s process is meditative, hushed, full of careful stirrings and precise dippings of paper in an inky bath; Mehrotra’s work is kinetic, musical, suggestive of whispers and murmurs in a language we don’t quite understand. When Ada demonstrated marbling while surrounded by Mehrotra’s paintings, it didn’t merely bridge the gap between two very different artists. It made their work feel like twin expressions of a single creative impulse — a common desire to acknowledge turbulence and chaos, and tame the waters.THE DREAM LANDSCAPEAs abstract as their pictures can be, both Mehrotra and Ada make art that suggest a place — even if that place is a land privately apprehended and only cautiously shared with the audience. Much of the art on view at this year’s JCAST was like that: a glimpse of a place not exactly of this world, a self-directed hallucination that doubled as a refuge. In the paintings of Rene Saheb, melting shapes, waterfalls and sluices of color often achieved an organic quality, as if the artist was mapping out a fantastic forest complete with shadow-beings anchored to the soil. Fabricio Suarez, her dextrous neighbor in the 150 Bay Street studio complex, takes this further, showing us faces made of foliage and flowers, with eyeballs peeking between bird’s nests and scraggly leaves, all rendered with his customary precision. This is the human being as root system: man as a tangle of vines connected to a world that’s sometimes sedate, and sometimes aflame.Michèle FenniakDownstairs in the 150 Bay Street lobby, the tone became starker. Printmaker Kim Bricker and experimental photographer Susan Evans Grove both understand that any flat line implies a landscape, including the fissures between the imprints made by a pair of colored blocks and the striations on the hulls of old boats. Bricker’s prints and Grove’s close-up shots of watermarked metal are not intentional representations of specific places, but they take us someplace anyway: the beach, the foot of a mountain range, the outskirts of the city at night. They’re a perfect match, and their excellent joint exhibition will be viewable on the ground floor of 150 for the rest of the month. So will “Interflow” at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.), a display of beautiful paintings by a quartet of interior explorers. Like Bricker and Grove, Steve Datz makes hay with the horizon, dividing gorgeous pieces like “A Greener Place” into earth and sky, and suggesting that the boundary between the two may be more permeable than we think.Just as there is longitude in every line, there’s topography in every crumpled canvas. Pajtim Osmanaj took over a residence on Halladay Street for “Retro,” a pop-up exhibition anchored by images of mountain ranges of his own devising, composed of wrinkled, overlapping strips of paper kissed by aerosol and affixed to giant canvases. He’s even provided us with a little sportscar seemingly made of balled-up notebook sheets, and in it, we might imagine ourselves navigating his creased highlands. Michèle Fenniak provides us with no such conveyance, but perhaps we didn’t need it: her intricate drawings in graphite, now on view at the “Shifting Horizons” show at the Dineen Hull Gallery at Hudson County Community College (71 Sip Ave.) were the wildest and most transportive trip in the Tour. These long, sweeping, scroll-like windows into Fenniak’s fantasia are meticulously drawn in startling detail, and feature brilliantly realized departures from expectation, like a road that twists through the badlands with the weightlessness of a unspooled ribbon.Adriane ColburnFenniak’s demanding work simultaneously evokes Chinese landscape panels, antique maps, stills from animated sci-fi films, and a Carcassonne match gone entirely mad. These drawings represent nowhere on Earth, but it is recognizably earth, or an earth-like place, that she’s inviting us to inhabit with her. In the breathtaking “Reconnaissance,” the imaginary territory she’s mapping is dotted with so much engrossing visual incident — houses, castles, creatures — that it attains narrative weight on its own terms. Her alien landscape conjures real emotions: dread, curiosity, invigoration, the satisfaction of discovery. The same can be said of the images painted by Kirkland Bray, an artist whose crowded seascapes and weird gatherings always seem to achieve the quality of a held breath. Something may soon happen, but we don’t know when, and we don’t know why these patient witnesses have gathered. Pedestrians in a thin line flank a desert road. Do they await a ghost motorcade? Or are they, like the forlorn beach dwellers in his hallmate Frank Ippolito’s surreal post-flood scene, one complete with great rubber duckies the size of an ark, digging out after some unknown psychic break?THE DEPTH OF HISTORYWe think we know what they’re struggling with. Our last few years have been tough ones, and we’ve been living through another brutal election season. We try to fathom the immensity of the challenges that are facing our city, our country, and our planet, but it’s impossible: the best we can do is remain sensitive to them. It’s little wonder that interior landscapes are more appealing to people than the real ones we’ve got to share with our neighbors. Only if we draw our worlds ourselves can we exercise a modicum of control over them.During Tours past, JCAST creators came at social problems with overt and unambiguous polemical art. In 2024, that was not the favored approach. Instead, artists committed to the long view, grounding their acts of visual commentary in the historical record. “Bolivareando: Different, Not the Same,” Buttered Roll’s witty, cutting, pained solo turn at SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.), was the rare art show that dipped into sophisticated historiography, insisting as it did on the distance between our understanding of a historical figure (in this case, “El Liberator” Simon Bolivar) and the human being himself. Tina Maneca explored the archaeology of urban memory at “Ward Mount: A Mother of Many Daughters” at the Museum of Jersey City History (298 Academy St.), installing and appointing a complex child’s bedroom (hers?) complete with books in Portuguese, a bedsheet made of dimebags, and stuffed animals with chemical symbols stitched into their fur. Even “War Peace,” a smart, sharp-edged topical exhibition at the 14C Gallery (150 Bay St.) that took the intractability of global belligerence as its starting point, felt surprisingly nuanced. The show, curated by 14C director and Tour organizer Robinson Holloway, avoided graphic displays of violence and chose instead to foreground the dehumanizing consequences of the endless cockfight that our world has become. Charlie Spademan’s sculpture of a scale in which a white balloon slightly outweighs an anvil — a piece called “False Equivalency” — epitomizes the show’s desperation, its wry irony, and its undercurrent of hope.Nohi MehrotraUnrepentant scene-stealer Thomas John Carlson contributed to “War Peace,” too. His canvas there did what he’s been doing recently: it applied the emotional residue of his experience as a hospital patient to the sociopolitical reality of life in 2024.  At his own Jersey City Art School (313 3rd Ave.) and its associated gallery, Carlson hung four paintings that incorporated images of heavy duty medical technology and life support devices into reimagined versions of nationalist masterworks from four countries, including America. In the hands of a less talented artist, this would have felt like a postmodern prank: all cynicism and no heart. Carlson wears his emotions too plainly for that. His “Death of Romanticism” series played as an elegy for patriotism itself, and a harsh reminder of the estrangement we jaded modern subjects feel from the lofty nation-building imagery of the nineteenth century.Others reached back further. David Rios Ferreira, an artist with a subtle but unmistakable sense of social justice, constructed a model boat out of slices of transparent acetate and haunted it with specters from the past and, possibly, the future: dark-skinned passengers, privateers in colonial dress, oversized cartoon weaponry, craft within craft. Was it a slave ship, a buccaneer’s schooner, a yacht, or some combination of all of that? As the shipwright sets his vessel sailing through time, he hints at the transhistorical nature of exploitation. Sculptor in metal Jerome China makes his outraged howl a little more audible. His backyard is full of steel assemblages, some the size of a human being, some hanging on the fence like cuckoo clocks frozen in mid-crow, all bearing marks of trauma including rust, scars, and broken chains. Railroad spikes laid head to head in the central chamber of a steel container speak, unmistakably, of bodies in the middle passage. Yet the overriding tone of China’s sculpture garden is one of liberation, pride, and relief. His sun gods and rusted warriors have fought for freedom, and some of them have attained it. They’ve got the scars to prove it.Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern concentrates on more recent horrors: spike proteins, ecological degradation, and the loss of reproductive rights. Her “Robe of Resilience” — a fuchsia gown on a black mannequin — greets visitors to the HCCC Gabert Library (71 Sip Ave.) with reminders of the garment-rending struggles of modern women. She’s sewn her symbols into a train long enough to stretch halfway down the aisle of a church, and lets it flow over a trio of pedestals so its protest can be properly apprehended. A dress can advertise our feelings. But it can also be taken off: exchanged for something else if we can all agree to sheathe our ideological weaponry and slip into something more comfortable.STERLING SOUNDAs some longtime contributors chose not to be part of this year’s JCAST, a multilevel thrill of a facility participated for the first time. The Sterling @ Wilkinson (15 Wilkinson Ave.) is closer to the Bayonne border than it is to the Exchange Place PATH station, and its inclusion in JCAST gave the Tour some of that geographic diversity that its organizers are always chasing. But the Wilkinson building wasn’t just there to balance the map. It’s home to an impressive group of artists, including a few, like the community-minded experimentalist Jin Jung and the celebrated sculptor Nancy Cohen, who have been part of public culture in Hudson County for years. It’s hard not to wonder why this studio complex wasn’t part of JCAST in the past. We’ll just call it an unfortunate omission and enjoy them now that we’ve got them. Fabricio SuarezThis year, the open studios at The Sterling @ Wilkinson contained expressions of some of the most striking visions in town. Painter Jonah Walstrom tucked scores of tiny human figures reminiscent of alternative comics and the illustrations in the Popol Vuh into large, energetic abstract oil paintings. In a tribute to old media, the whimsical sculptor and photographer Roger Sayre fused together hundreds of cassette tapes in a half-cylinder and popped the results on the wall. Rebecca Welz guided us through a forest of steel sculptures as thin and delicate-looking as tapered candles.My favorite pieces on the entire Tour, though, came from an artist I didn’t know at all. Adriane Colburn twists long strips of steam-weakened wood into hoops and lattices, colors them brightly, and suspends them from cables or mounts them as if they were paintings. These were the skeletons of architectural structures, or the bones of great birds, or the lightest aircraft ever invented. Her studio felt like a place of levitation: arcs of ash overhead, coils curving like question marks or ending suddenly, unanswered but ready to vibrate, like the tines on a wooden marimba. My trip through Colburn’s studio was JCAST at its best, and a reminder to me of why this annual exercise is indispensable. Here was sudden and full immersion in the creative world of a meaning-maker with a perspective and process that’s hers alone. Here were things I’d never imagined before, in arrangements I’d never visualized. I left the studio with my field of vision a little wider, my mind a little sharper, and my smile a little brighter.15 Wilkinson is clearly a rewarding building in which to make art. It’s also a fun place to hang out, period — it’s well-lit, with wide and welcoming halls, old-school stairwells and corridors to nowhere. It’s got none of the prefab feel of 150 Bay Street or the imposing vibe of MANA Contemporary; instead, it’s a lot like Manufacturers Village, the East Orange factory-to-studio complex that’s become home to many of the Garden State’s most imaginative artists. Wisely, JCAST ran shuttles from Downtown to Wilkinson Ave. all weekend. On the 36th Tour, this facility ought to be a hub. And yes, there will be a 36th Tour.  ILK CITYWhat makes me so confident that this is true? After thirty-five years, it’s too late to stop now. JCAST is a habit that we’d find very hard to kick. It’s too important to our identities as members of this community: our curiosity, our openness, our hunger for the novel and our acceptance of the weird, our taste for exploration, and our pride. It’s telling that many of those regulars who registered a protest against JCAST opened for JCAST anyway, even if they didn’t call what they were doing JCAST. They refused to follow the rules set by the new regime, but they certainly wanted to open the doors and show art. As long as that hunger exists, we’re going to keep satisfying it, one way or another. And well we should. It’s not accurate to say that Jersey City without JCAST would be like New Orleans without Mardi Gras, but it isn’t entirely hyperbole. More than any other annual event, this is the one that defines us. We had a Studio Tour before other cities copied us, and I think it’s likely that we’ll keep having a human-scale Studio Tour of one kind or another after organizers in those other cities have turned their rosters and eyeballs over to algorithms and artificial intelligence. In a way, the belligerent public reaction from some former Tour participants is a healthy sign: it shows that people really care about this event, and don’t want it radically reinterpreted. Rebecca N. JohnsonSome of the complaints were worth registering. The Art Week left Tour participants all over town feeling like their thunder had been stolen; they were bound to kick back, and some of them did. The division of the Tour into day and night sessions did leave certain small galleries with no choice but to defy the order from JCAST central command and open on their own schedule. Hidden spots like the beloved Alley Cat Gallery (76 Coles St. Alley) would have sabotaged their foot traffic if they’d opened at sundown. That would have meant fewer viewers for Beth Achenbach’s stark and expertly composed photographs and Miguel Cardenas’s spirited, neon-colored assemblies of boxes in rectangular grids, each with a different portrait or message on it, inviting the kind of deep engagement that art does at its best.But to be fair, the split schedule was suggested by an unaffiliated attendee in a Zoom meeting called to address the imbalances of 2023. It was meant to make it easier for gallerists to tour studios and vice versa, and in many cases, it had the intended effect. It was okayed by the organizers of the Tour because they were trying to avoid the sort of bottlenecks that spoiled the party last year. This time around, they didn’t overextend themselves. Nothing competed with the big show. The photo series that Robinson Holloway and 14C commissioned from Megan Maloy let everybody know who the players were. Legibility wasn’t an issue, and JCAST never had to share the spotlight. That all happened by design. The 14C style rankles some longtime tour participants. It can seem professionalizing, and JCAST, with its deep roots in the arts community at 111 First Street, didn’t begin like that. The anonymous dissident who put up posters encouraging people to cancel “the tyranny of Robinson Holloway and her ilk” wasn’t operating in a vacuum. But somebody needs to run the Studio Tour. It’s a citywide event — one that requires planning, vision, and money to pull off. The municipal government has already made it clear that they’re not interested in taking the lead anymore. Rumored efforts to turn JCAST over to the Jersey City Arts Council didn’t go anywhere. 14C intends to bring back the Art Fair next year, and that’ll probably occupy their attention. If some other deep-pocked organization or individual wants to take JCAST off of Holloway’s hands, it’s unlikely that the transfer would meet much friction. Until then, I think it’d do us all well to acknowledge the ways that 14C and its director have learned from their 2023 setback. 2024 wouldn’t have gone as nicely as it did if they hadn’t. I don’t think we’re running any risk of a repeat of the Art Week: Holloway and company seem sold on the idea that the Studio Tour, the Art Crawls, and the Fair need to be treated as discrete events, even if many of the same artists are participating in all three. Robinson Holloway isn’t doing the Tour for the prestige (she’s got the 14C Fair for that), and it’s certainly not a lucrative proposition. The most likely outcome is that she’ll be back at the steering wheel in 2025. My recommendation to everybody involved is more communication, more navigation, more compromise, and above all, cooler heads. Thirty-five seasons of anything is worth acknowledging. Thirty-five seasons of something like this is worth a celebration. So let’s do one: same place, same time, next year.  The post Studio Tour ’24: Despite the Controversies JCAST Pulls off a Winning Show appeared first on Jersey City Times.