CreARTivity
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Middlesex County: Art Institutions by Municipality
Most of Middlesex County's art lives in a few walkable blocks of New Brunswick's theatre row. A town-by-town guide to its stages, museums and galleries.
In this article
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. A short walk away, the Zimmerli holds sixty thousand works, among them the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art in the world, given by a couple who spent decades quietly buying what the Soviet state would not allow to be shown. 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.
New Brunswick
6 institutionsMuseum
Zimmerli Art Museum
One of the largest university museums in the country, on the Rutgers campus, holding more than sixty thousand works from the ancient world to the avant-garde, including the Dodge collection of some twenty thousand works of Soviet nonconformist art. Admission is free.
Theater
Crossroads Theatre Company
Founded in 1978 and a winner of the Tony Award, one of the country’s foremost African American theatre companies, staging work drawn from the African diaspora and now resident at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center.
Theater
George Street Playhouse
A professional company producing new work and reimagined classics, several of which have travelled to Broadway and off-Broadway, resident since 2019 in the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center and its two theatres.
Performing Arts
State Theatre New Jersey
A 1921 house on Livingston Avenue and Central Jersey’s largest nonprofit arts presenter, bringing Broadway tours, concerts, dance and family programming to a stage that anchors the city’s cultural district.
Gallery
Alfa Art Gallery
A gallery and open studio on Church Street where artists work in view of the public, showing contemporary painting, photography and mixed media, with a busy programme of receptions and cultural events.
Museum
Museum of the American Hungarian Foundation
A museum and gallery devoted to the art, folk craft and history of the Hungarian community that settled in New Brunswick in great numbers, with changing exhibitions and a substantial collection of decorative art.
Perth Amboy
1 institutionGallery · Arts Center
Perth Amboy Gallery Center for the Arts
A gallery and arts centre on Reade Street in the old port city, showing local and regional artists and running classes and community programming for a strongly Latino waterfront community.
Piscataway
1 institutionMuseum
Middlesex County Museum
Housed in the eighteenth-century Cornelius Low House above the Raritan, the county’s museum of local history and decorative arts, with changing exhibitions and a view over the river valley it was built to command.
Middlesex concentrates its art rather than scattering it, and the result is a downtown you can cross on foot in ten minutes and still not see everything. Around the institutions listed here work the Arts Institute of Middlesex County, the American Repertory Ballet, the galleries of the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Above Art Studios, the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, and the New Brunswick Jazz Project. 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 described the Dodge Collection as the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art anywhere outside Russia. The Zimmerli Art Museum describes it as the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art in the world, and the article now uses the museum’s wording.
Sources consulted
Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The Dodge Collection
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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