Passaic County was built around a waterfall. Alexander Hamilton looked at the seventy-seven foot drop of the Great Falls and imagined the young republic's first planned industrial city, and Paterson became exactly that, a place of silk mills and locomotive works whose immigrant workforce turned it into one of the most creatively restless cities in America.

Bergen County is the most populous county in New Jersey and the largest anywhere in the state by number of municipalities, seventy boroughs, townships and cities packed into the corner of land that faces Manhattan across the Hudson. That proximity has shaped its art.