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Hudson County: Art Institutions by Municipality
New Jersey's smallest and most crowded county faces Manhattan across the water and has spent two centuries receiving the world. A town-by-town guide to Hudson County's art.
In this article
Hudson is the smallest county in New Jersey and the most crowded, a strip of waterfront facing Manhattan that has spent two centuries receiving the world. Jersey City is among the most ethnically diverse cities in America, and its art scene has grown to match: each year the Jersey City Art and Studio Tour opens the doors of over 120 venues in a single weekend. Warehouses have become galleries, a 1929 movie palace has been brought back to life, and a Polish community hall now fills with music. 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.
Hoboken
1 institutionMuseum
Hoboken Historical Museum
A museum and gallery on Hudson Street in the Mile Square City, telling the story of a working waterfront town that gave the world Frank Sinatra, with changing exhibitions, an upper gallery for artists and a full calendar of talks and concerts.
Jersey City
5 institutionsContemporary Art
Mana Contemporary
Opened in 2011 in a vast former tobacco warehouse near Journal Square, an experiential arts centre where visitors move among working studios, galleries and rehearsal spaces devoted to painting, sculpture, dance, photography and film.
Arts Center · Gallery
Art House Productions
Founded in the weeks after September 2001 as a gathering of poets seeking to reconnect a shaken city, now a performing and visual arts centre with its own theatre and gallery, and the organiser of the quarterly JC Fridays.
Theater · Cinema
Loew’s Jersey Theatre
A 1929 Baroque Revival movie palace on Journal Square, saved from demolition by volunteers and now on the National Register, seating more than three thousand for film, concerts and live performance.
Music · Theater
White Eagle Hall
Built in 1910 as a Polish community hall and restored in 2016, an eight-hundred-capacity music and theatre venue that has become one of the region’s most respected rooms for live performance.
Museum
MORA Museum of International Art
A downtown museum on Grand Street showing international contemporary art, with a programme that reflects the extraordinary range of nationalities living within a few blocks of its door.
Union City
1 institutionPerforming Arts
Park Performing Arts Center
A 1931 theatre built by a church parish and independent since 1983, presenting work that reflects North Hudson’s Hispanic communities, home to the longest-running passion play in the country, with gallery spaces and a small museum of embroidery.
Hudson holds more art per square mile than any county in New Jersey, and the buildings listed here are only its landmarks. Around them run the smaller rooms that give the county its texture: the Jersey City Theater Center and Merseles Studios, Pro Arts, Drawing Rooms and SMUSH, the galleries of New Jersey City University, and the Bridge Art Gallery down in Bayonne. Next in the series we cross into another North Jersey county and keep the map growing, one town at a time.
Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said the Jersey City Art and Studio Tour opens some one hundred and fifty art spaces in a weekend. The tour states that it features over 120 venues. The street address of White Eagle Hall was also updated to 335-337 Newark Avenue, as given by the hall.
Sources consulted
Jersey City Art and Studio Tour, About
White Eagle Hall, About
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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