CreARTivity
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Hunterdon County: Art Institutions by Municipality
In Clinton, two nineteenth-century mills face each other across the Raritan, one holding the county's industrial past and one its art. A town-by-town guide to Hunterdon County.
In this article
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. The other is grey stone, ground flour for the surrounding farms from 1837 until the 1950s, and in 1952 was bought by a group who wanted to turn it into a museum of art. They succeeded. The Hunterdon Art Museum now shows contemporary art, craft and design inside a building on the National Register, and its terrace holds sculpture by Toshiko Takaezu and Tom Otterness. Hunterdon is farmland and river towns, and its art has the same handmade quality. 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.
Clinton
2 institutionsMuseum
Hunterdon Art Museum
Founded in 1952 in a stone flour mill on the Raritan, a centre for art, craft and design showing established and emerging contemporary artists, with a print collection holding Guston, Katz and Reinhardt, and hundreds of classes each year.
Museum Village
Red Mill Museum Village
Twelve buildings on ten acres across the river from the art museum, holding forty thousand artifacts of the county’s agricultural and industrial life, with rotating exhibitions and one of the most photographed mills in America.
Flemington
1 institutionBallet · Performance
Roxey Ballet
A professional ballet company and school rooted in Hunterdon, touring the region with classical and contemporary repertoire, and known for performances made accessible to audiences with disabilities.
Hampton
1 institutionTheater
Hunterdon Hills Playhouse
A long-running professional dinner theatre in the hills off Route 173, presenting comedies and musicals to audiences who come from across three states for an afternoon.
Hunterdon has one of the best museums in this series. That is worth saying plainly: a stone mill in a town of about 2,800 people has been showing serious contemporary craft and design for more than seventy years. Around it work the galleries of Lambertville and Frenchtown along the Delaware, the county’s historical societies, and the artists who keep studios in the barns. Next in the series we cross into another Central Jersey county and keep the map growing, one town at a time.
Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article called Hunterdon the least crowded county in this series. Census Bureau figures show that Sussex and Salem counties have a lower population density than Hunterdon (278.1 and 195.4 people per square mile, against 301.4 in 2020), so the claim has been removed. Clinton is now described as a town of about 2,800 people, not a village of two thousand.
Sources consulted
U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Hunterdon County, New Jersey
U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Sussex County, New Jersey
U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts: Salem County, New Jersey
Wikipedia, Clinton, New Jersey (2020 Census population)
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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