CreARTivity
Magazine
Warren County: Art Institutions by Municipality
Warren County makes its art in small rooms, from a professional theatre on a university campus to a restored village hall in Blairstown. A town-by-town guide.
In this article
Warren County sits on the Delaware, at the western edge of the state, and it makes its art in small rooms. There is no great museum here and no concert hall seating three thousand. There is instead a professional theatre company on a university campus, a restored village hall in Blairstown, a community troupe in the old county seat, and an iron master’s mansion in Oxford where the county keeps its history. These are the places where a town of a few thousand people goes to hear music and see a play. 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.
Belvidere
1 institutionTheater
Country Gate Players
A community theatre in the historic town of Belvidere, staging musicals, dramas, comedies and murder mysteries in a small house where, by local account, there is not a bad seat.
Blairstown
1 institutionMusic · Performance
Roy’s Hall
A restored hall on Main Street run by the nonprofit Blairstown Live-Arts, presenting concerts, film and performance in a room that has anchored the village’s cultural life for generations.
Hackettstown
2 institutionsTheater
Centenary Stage Company
A professional theatre company on the campus of Centenary University, the county’s only four-year college, presenting a year-round season of plays, musicals, dance and music in the Sitnik Theatre at the Lackland Center.
Arts Center
Hackettstown Center for the Arts
A nonprofit cultural venue in the Strand Theater on Main Street, serving as a regional hub for concerts, recitals, theatre, poetry readings, art and photography shows and film festivals.
Oxford
1 institutionMuseum · Historic House
Shippen Manor Museum
A restored eighteenth-century iron master’s mansion on Belvidere Avenue, the county’s history museum and the home of the Warren County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs, with period rooms and exhibitions on the county’s past.
Warren completes our journey through North Jersey, and it is a fitting place to end. We began in Bergen, where the American film industry was born, and passed through Paterson’s silk mills, the warehouses of Jersey City, the great halls of Newark, the movie palaces of Morristown and Rahway, and the craft studios of the Delaware Water Gap. What the eight counties share is not scale but stubbornness. The art here was rarely handed down from a capital; it was made by immigrants, mill workers, volunteers and teachers, in barns and churches and abandoned cinemas that somebody refused to let fall down. Next in the series we turn south, to Central Jersey, 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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