CreARTivity
Magazine
Somerset County: Art Institutions by Municipality
Horse country and corporate campus, Somerset keeps its art in the gaps between, from a 1927 vaudeville house in Bound Brook to galleries and gardens across the county.
In this article
Somerset is horse country and corporate campus, rolling farmland pressed up against office parks, and its art has taken root in the gaps between. In Bound Brook stands the only surviving vaudeville house in the county, opened in 1927 and twice nearly drowned by the Raritan. Out in Bedminster, a regional art centre has been teaching studio practice since 1970. In Branchburg, a workshop makes paper and prints with military veterans. 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.
Bedminster
1 institutionArts Center · Art School
The Center for Contemporary Art
Founded in 1970 on Burnt Mills Road, a regional art centre with a busy studio school, an ambitious exhibition programme of contemporary work, and outreach that reaches well beyond the county line.
Bound Brook
1 institutionTheater
Brook Arts Center
Opened in 1927 as a thirteen-hundred-seat vaudeville house, the last surviving vaudeville theatre in Somerset County and one of only eight in the state, added to the National Register in 2014 and still presenting plays, concerts, dance and silent film.
Branchburg
2 institutionsPerforming Arts · Gallery
RVCC Theatre and Art Gallery
The arts programme of Raritan Valley Community College on Lamington Road, with a theatre presenting music, comedy and touring work, a resident community orchestra, and a gallery whose exhibitions are free and open to all.
Printmaking · Papermaking
Frontline Arts
A printmaking and papermaking workshop best known for its work with military veterans, who pulp their own uniforms into sheets of paper and print on them, turning cloth that carried a war into a surface that can hold a story.
Hillsborough
1 institutionTheater
Somerset Valley Players
A community theatre on Amwell Road working out of a converted barn, staging a full season of plays and musicals with volunteer casts drawn from the surrounding townships.
Watchung
1 institutionArts Center · Gallery
Watchung Arts Center
A community arts centre on the village circle with a gallery of rotating exhibitions, a concert and jazz series, and classes for children and adults across the visual and performing arts.
Somerset does its art in barns and old theatres, which suits a county that has never wanted to look like a city. Beyond the doors listed here are the Villagers Theatre in Somerset, the Hamilton Street Gallery in Bound Brook, the Gallery on Main in Somerville, the Central Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and the sculpture and gardens of Duke Farms. Next in the series we cross into another Central 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 Brook Arts Center is one of just eight surviving vaudeville houses in New Jersey. We could not confirm that count from the venue’s own history, so the claim has been removed. The opening in 1927, the original seating of about 1,300 and the National Register listing of 5 May 2014 are unchanged.
Sources consulted
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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