CreARTivity
Magazine
Essex County: Art Institutions by Municipality
If New Jersey has a cultural capital, it is Essex, home to the state's largest museum and one of the country's largest performing arts centers. A town-by-town guide.
In this article
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. A few miles west, Montclair opened the first museum in New Jersey devoted solely to art, and did so in 1914, when the idea of a public art museum in a New Jersey suburb was close to radical. 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.
Montclair
3 institutionsMuseum
Montclair Art Museum
Opened in 1914 as the first museum in New Jersey devoted solely to art and open to the public, holding more than twelve thousand works of American and Native North American art, with an art school attached and a building on the National Register.
Gallery
George Segal Gallery
The contemporary exhibition space of Montclair State University, named for the New Jersey sculptor whose ghostly white plaster figures changed American art, showing professional and student work through the academic year.
Theater · Music
The Wellmont Theater
A 1922 theatre in the centre of Montclair, restored as one of North Jersey’s principal concert halls, drawing touring musicians and comedians to a room that began life as a vaudeville and movie house.
Newark
3 institutionsMuseum
The Newark Museum of Art
The largest museum in New Jersey, founded in 1909 by the librarian John Cotton Dana, with major holdings of American, contemporary and decorative art and a celebrated Tibetan collection, plus a planetarium and a sculpture garden behind.
Performing Arts
New Jersey Performing Arts Center
Opened in 1997 and among the largest performing arts centres in the United States, with the 2,800-seat Prudential Hall at its heart and three smaller stages, presenting orchestral music, jazz, dance and theatre year-round.
Concert Hall
Newark Symphony Hall
Built in 1925 and once known as the Mosque Theater, the former home of the New Jersey Symphony, the State Opera and the New Jersey Ballet, its 3,500-seat main room now named for Newark’s own Sarah Vaughan.
West Orange
1 institutionArts Center · Theater
Center for the Arts at JCC MetroWest
A community arts centre on Northfield Avenue whose Maurice Levin Theater hosts concerts, plays and film, alongside galleries and a full programme of classes for all ages.
Essex is where New Jersey’s art speaks loudest, and where it has the longest memory. Around the institutions listed here sit the New Jersey Historical Society and the WBGO Gallery on Park Place, the studio galleries of Newark’s artists, and the collections of Rutgers-Newark. Next in the series we cross into another North Jersey county and keep the map growing, 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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