CreARTivity
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Ocean County: Art Institutions by Municipality
From John Frederick Peto's cottage studio in Island Heights to the theaters and galleries of the shore, a town-by-town guide to the art institutions of Ocean County.
In this article
In a Victorian cottage in Island Heights, an American painter named John Frederick Peto spent his last years making pictures of old letters, worn books and hanging horseshoes. He sold almost nothing, and after his death unscrupulous dealers scraped his signature off his canvases and forged a more famous name onto them. It took art historians until the middle of the twentieth century to give the work back to him, and Peto is now counted among the finest painters of trompe l’oeil this country produced. His studio still stands, and it is a museum. Ocean County is a place of beaches and pine barrens, but it has kept its art. 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.
Beach Haven
1 institutionTheater
Surflight Theatre
A professional summer theatre on Long Beach Island, staging musicals and comedies through the season and long a fixture of the island’s evenings, with a children’s programme running alongside.
Island Heights
2 institutionsMuseum · Historic Studio
John F. Peto Studio Museum
The house and studio the trompe l’oeil painter built for himself in 1889, preserved with his easel and his props, now a museum and gallery honouring an artist who was almost written out of American painting and then restored to it.
Artists Guild · Gallery
Ocean County Artists’ Guild
A restored late nineteenth-century Victorian on Chestnut Avenue holding monthly solo and juried exhibitions in every medium from pastel to reduction printmaking, with classes for artists as young as five. Free and open to the public.
Lakewood
1 institutionTheater · Arts Center
The Strand Center for the Arts
A grand old theatre on Clifton Avenue from the days when Lakewood was a fashionable winter resort, restored and back in use for concerts, plays, comedy and art exhibitions.
Loveladies
1 institutionArts Foundation · Gallery
Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences
An unusual institution that has taught art and marine science side by side since the 1940s, with galleries, studios, a kiln, lectures and a summer of classes on a barrier island a few hundred yards wide.
Toms River
1 institutionPerforming Arts · Gallery
Jay and Linda Grunin Center for the Arts
The performing arts complex of Ocean County College, with a main stage, a black box and a studio theatre, bringing touring music, dance and theatre to the shore, and a gallery on site. Parking is free.
Ocean completes Central Jersey, and with it the whole of New Jersey. Twenty-one counties, from the glasshouses of Salem to the silk mills of Paterson, from the Newark Museum of Art to a painter’s cottage on a bluff above the Toms River. What the map shows, laid end to end, is that this state has never waited for permission to make art. Its museums grew out of mills and speedways and quarantine barns. Its theatres were saved by volunteers who would not let the wrecking ball through. Its greatest collections were assembled by librarians, immigrants and people who simply bought what nobody else wanted. The map is finished. The making is not, and we will keep following it, 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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