Almost all of Middlesex County's art is concentrated in a few walkable blocks of New Brunswick, and those blocks are extraordinary. Livingston Avenue is known locally as theatre row, and along it sit a Tony-winning company founded to stage the voices of the African diaspora, a playhouse that sends work to Broadway, and a 1921 house that is Central Jersey's largest nonprofit presenter.

The bridge over the Delaware at Trenton carries a slogan in electric letters: Trenton Makes, The World Takes. For a century that was literally true of pottery.

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.

Sussex is the far northwest corner of New Jersey, a county of ridges and farmland where the state runs out and the Delaware begins. It has fewer art institutions than its crowded neighbours, and one of them is among the most important in the country.

Union County has quietly become one of the most interesting places to look at art in New Jersey. Rahway, a small city west of Staten Island, built an arts district around a restored 1928 movie palace and was named by USA Today the second best small-town arts scene in the country.

Morris County keeps its art in unusually good rooms. Morristown, where Washington's army wintered twice, has turned a 1937 movie palace into one of the busiest theatres in the state, and a hilltop mansion into a museum whose collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata is among the finest anywhere.

If New Jersey has a cultural capital, it is Essex. Newark holds the largest museum in the state and one of the largest performing arts centres in the country, and its Broad Street concert hall was the house where the New Jersey Symphony, the State Opera and the Ballet all once lived.