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Bergen County: Art Institutions by Municipality
New Jersey's most populous county faces Manhattan across the Hudson, and that closeness shaped its art from the first film studios on. A town-by-town guide to Bergen County.
In this article
Bergen County is the most populous county in New Jersey and the largest anywhere in the state by number of municipalities, seventy boroughs, townships and cities packed into the corner of land that faces Manhattan across the Hudson. That proximity has shaped its art. Long before Hollywood existed, Fort Lee was the birthplace of American cinema, with eleven film studios operating by 1918, and the county has never quite stopped being a place where art is made rather than merely imported from across the river. Today its galleries, museums, theatres and art schools sit along leafy main streets and college campuses from the Palisades to the Ramapo foothills. What follows is a guide to those spaces, gathered town by town.
A quick note: opening hours, locations, websites and programming can change over time. Please confirm the details with each venue before you plan your visit.
Closter
1 institutionMuseum
Belskie Museum of Art & Science
Founded by the Closter Lions Club to house the work of Abram Belskie, the sculptor and medical illustrator who lived in the borough, and now showing rotating exhibitions of regional artists alongside his collection.
Demarest
1 institutionArt School · Gallery
The Art School at Old Church
A nonprofit art school and fine-art gallery offering classes for children and adults since 1974, with the Michail Zakin Gallery presenting exhibitions and a ceramics program of national standing.
Englewood
1 institutionPerforming Arts
Bergen Performing Arts Center
North Jersey’s leading nonprofit performing-arts centre, in a 1926 house that began life as the Englewood Plaza movie theatre, with a 1,367-seat mainstage, a cabaret and black box, and a performing arts school reaching thousands of students a year.
Fort Lee
1 institutionMuseum · Cinema
Barrymore Film Center
Opened in 2022 and named for the acting dynasty who lived in the borough, a film museum and repertory cinema honouring Fort Lee as the birthplace of American film, with a 253-seat theatre, rotating exhibitions and a full festival calendar.
Hackensack
1 institutionPerforming Arts · Gallery
Hackensack Performing Arts Center
A theatre and cultural venue in the county seat, whose art gallery doubles as the lobby and hosts rotating exhibitions timed to the themes of the performances on its stage.
Mahwah
1 institutionPerforming & Visual Arts
Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts
Completed in 1999 on the wooded Ramapo College campus, a complex of modern theatres and art galleries with spaces given over to fine art, photography, computer art, theatre, dance and music.
New Milford
1 institutionArt School · Gallery
Art Center of Northern New Jersey
A fine-arts school and gallery in a former Lutheran church, teaching drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture since 1956, and home to the Marcella Geltman Gallery and a rare stone-carving studio.
Oradell
2 institutionsMuseum
Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum
Set in the carriage house of an 1897 shingle-style mansion, one of only a handful of museums in the country devoted entirely to wildlife art, founded in 1957 and internationally recognised, with a sculpture garden alongside.
Theater
Bergen County Players
Founded in 1932 and now past its ninetieth season, a volunteer community theatre with more than three hundred members and a reputation that has drawn future Broadway and television names to its small stage.
Paramus
1 institutionGallery
Gallery Bergen at Bergen Community College
The college’s public exhibition space, showing contemporary regional and national artists alongside student work, with the Ciccone Theatre presenting music and drama on the same campus.
Ridgewood
1 institutionArt School · Gallery
Ridgewood Art Institute
A traditional atelier on East Glen Avenue teaching drawing and painting in the classical manner, with juried exhibitions and a gallery open to the public.
Teaneck
1 institutionGallery · Performance
Puffin Cultural Forum
The gallery and performance space of the Puffin Foundation, presenting exhibitions, concerts, theatre, film and lectures where art meets social change, and offering workshops and gallery tours to local schools.
Seventy municipalities make Bergen a county you cannot see in a day, but its art rewards the attempt. A wildlife museum in a carriage house, a stone-carving studio in an old church, a film museum standing where the American movie industry began: this is a place that has always made its own culture rather than borrowing Manhattan’s. Beyond the doors listed here, Englewood’s Dean Street galleries and the borough art associations keep the county’s calendar full year-round. Next in the series we cross into another North Jersey county and keep the map growing, one town at a time.
Author
About the author
CreARTivity Educational Team
The Educational Team writes CreARTivity's reference work: histories of artistic disciplines, guides to cultural traditions, and the county-by-county surveys of arts institutions across New Jersey. Its brief is to be useful to someone meeting a subject for the first time and still worth reading to someone who already knows it. Edited by Marie Juliane David.
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