CreARTivity
Magazine
Passaic County: Art Institutions by Municipality
Passaic County was built around the Great Falls, and Paterson's silk mills and immigrant workers shaped its culture. A town-by-town guide to its art institutions.
In this article
Passaic County was built around a waterfall. Alexander Hamilton looked at the seventy-seven foot drop of the Great Falls and imagined the young republic’s first planned industrial city, and Paterson became exactly that, a place of silk mills and locomotive works whose immigrant workforce turned it into one of the most creatively restless cities in America. The art here still carries that industrial grain. Museums stand in former erecting shops, galleries occupy renovated quarantine barns, and a Victorian castle on a mountainside holds the county’s memory. 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.
Clifton
1 institutionArts Center · Sculpture Park
Clifton Arts Center & Sculpture Park
Two early twentieth-century brick barns from the old United States Animal Quarantine Station, joined by a modern atrium and listed on the national and state historic registers, now holding galleries, studios, art classes and an outdoor sculpture park of more than thirty contemporary works.
Haledon
1 institutionMuseum
American Labor Museum, Botto House
A National Historic Landmark in the house where silk workers gathered during the great Paterson strike of 1913, now a museum with period rooms, changing exhibitions and a garden, telling the story of immigrant labour and the culture it built.
Hawthorne
1 institutionArts Center
Passaic County Arts Center
The county’s arts centre, housed in the historic John W. Rea House on Goffle Road, running exhibitions, classes and cultural programming under the Department of Cultural and Historic Affairs.
Paterson
3 institutionsMuseum
Paterson Museum
Founded in 1925 and housed since 1982 in the former erecting shop of the Rogers Locomotive Works, the city’s museum sits in the Great Falls Historic District and holds the industrial, mineral and art collections of the Silk City.
Museum · Historic House
Lambert Castle
An 1892 Victorian castle built by a silk magnate on the slope of Garret Mountain, home to the Passaic County Historical Society and its collections of art, artifacts and county memory, with views out to the Manhattan skyline.
Studios · Gallery
Art Factory Studios
A sprawling complex of nineteenth-century mill buildings near the Great Falls, given over to artist studios, galleries and event spaces, and a favoured location for film and television shoots.
Wayne
2 institutionsGallery
William Paterson University Galleries
Founded in 1979 in the Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts, three exhibition spaces totalling five thousand square feet, holding a collection of some 3,500 objects and mounting six solo and thematic exhibitions a year.
Performing Arts
Shea Center for Performing Arts
The university’s performance hall, presenting a season of music, theatre and dance, and long a centre of the jazz programme that has made William Paterson a name among musicians.
Passaic keeps its art close to its working past, in mill buildings and locomotive shops and the house where strikers once gathered. Beyond the doors listed here, the sculptor Gaetano Federici, who came from Italy as a boy and spent half a century carving the faces of Paterson, is remembered in the Federici Studio Collection at the Hamilton Club, and the Laurelwood Arboretum sculpture trail winds through Wayne. 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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