CreARTivity
Magazine
Monmouth County: Art Institutions by Municipality
The county that gave the world Count Basie and the Asbury Park sound. A town-by-town guide to the theaters, galleries and music venues of Monmouth County.
In this article
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. Fifteen miles down the shore, Asbury Park’s boardwalk gave the world a different sound entirely, and its Paramount Theatre and Convention Hall still stand facing the Atlantic. But the county is not only stages. It has a museum on a college campus, an arts centre in a former schoolhouse, and galleries strung along the Navesink. 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.
Asbury Park
1 institutionTheater · Concert Hall
Paramount Theatre and Convention Hall
A pair of joined halls on the boardwalk, built in the 1920s and facing directly onto the ocean, still the largest stages on this stretch of the shore and the centre of a music scene that has outlived several attempts to close it down.
Lincroft
1 institutionMuseum
Monmouth Museum
A museum of art, science and cultural history on the Brookdale Community College campus, with changing exhibitions in its main galleries and hands-on wings built for children.
Middletown
1 institutionArts Center · Gallery
Middletown Arts Center
A municipal arts centre on Church Street with a gallery of rotating exhibitions, a theatre, and a broad teaching programme in visual art, dance and music for children and adults.
Ocean Grove
1 institutionArts Center
Jersey Shore Arts Center
A restored nineteenth-century school building on South Main Street in the Victorian camp-meeting town, now a warren of studios, galleries and a theatre serving artists across the shore.
Red Bank
3 institutionsPerforming Arts
Count Basie Center for the Arts
Opened in 1926 as the Carlton Theater and renamed in 1984 for the bandleader born a few streets away, a landmarked theatre on the National Register that has grown into a campus with a concert room, cinemas and an arts academy.
Theater
Two River Theater
A professional company on Bridge Avenue producing classics, musicals and a steady stream of new plays, with a purpose-built house and a reputation that reaches well beyond the shore.
Gallery · Studio
Art Alliance of Monmouth County
A gallery and studio on Monmouth Street showing work across every medium, from sculpture to digital art, and existing chiefly to give the county’s working artists a room of their own.
West Long Branch
1 institutionArts Center · Gallery
Monmouth University Center for the Arts
The university’s cultural programme on Cedar Avenue, with exhibitions, cinema and live performance at the Pollak Theatre, and home to the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music.
Monmouth has more small stages than any county its size has a right to. Around the venues listed here run the Axelrod Performing Arts Center in Deal Park, the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center in Red Bank, the Belmar Arts Center, Parlor Gallery and the ShowRoom Cinema in Asbury Park, the Spring Lake Theatre, and the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove, where six thousand people still gather under a wooden roof to hear an organ. Next in the series we cross into another Central 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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