From the Renaissance bottega to a glassblowing studio in Newark, the workshop has always been the room where art is not merely admired but made, and it may be the oldest school we have. Ask a museum what art is and you will be shown a wall.

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.

In the town of Clinton, two nineteenth-century mills face one another across the Raritan. One is red and holds the county's industrial past.

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.

Monmouth County makes music. William Basie was born in Red Bank in 1904, learned the organ from Fats Waller, and went on to lead one of the greatest bands in the history of jazz; the town's 1926 theatre now carries his name.

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.