CreARTivity
Magazine
Union County: Art Institutions by Municipality
From Rahway's restored 1928 movie palace to Summit's visual arts center, a town-by-town guide to why Union County has become one of New Jersey's best places to see art.
In this article
Union County has quietly become one of the most interesting places to look at art in New Jersey. Rahway, a small city west of Staten Island, built an arts district around a restored 1928 movie palace and was named by USA Today the second best small-town arts scene in the country. Summit holds a visual arts centre that grew from seven painters sharing a studio in 1931 and became the Summit Art Association in 1933, Plainfield has been teaching painters since 1926, and the college campuses at Union and Cranford keep their galleries open to the public. 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.
Cranford
1 institutionGallery
Tomasulo Art Gallery
The public gallery of Union College on the Cranford campus, presenting exhibitions of regional contemporary artists alongside student and faculty work, free and open to visitors.
Plainfield
1 institutionArt School · Gallery
duCret School of Art
One of the oldest art schools in New Jersey, on Central Avenue, teaching drawing, painting and illustration to children and adults, and home to the Dragonfly Multicultural Arts Center and its gallery.
Rahway
2 institutionsPerforming Arts
Union County Performing Arts Center
The cornerstone of the Rahway Arts District, a 1928 movie palace restored to its full grandeur, seating more than thirteen hundred, with a working Wurlitzer organ on the national registry of significant instruments and the smaller Hamilton Stage alongside.
Arts Guild · Gallery
Arts Guild New Jersey
A gallery and school on Irving Street showing emerging New Jersey artists, running a respected jazz series, and teaching multi-week classes and workshops for adults, teens and children.
Summit
1 institutionArts Center
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
Founded as the Summit Art Association in 1933, after seven painters began sharing a studio in 1931, now one of the state’s leading centres for contemporary art, with galleries on Elm Street and a large school of studio classes.
Union
1 institutionGallery
Galleries at Kean University
A network of exhibition spaces across the Union and Liberty Hall campuses, among them the Karl and Helen Burger Gallery, the Nancy Dryfoos Gallery and the Human Rights Institute Gallery, with tours available to schools and groups.
Union proves that an arts district does not need a city to grow in. Around the venues listed here sit the Gallery Space in Rahway’s Claude Reed Center, the Commissioners Gallery in Elizabeth, the Summit Playhouse and Vivid Stage, Premiere Stages at Kean, and the Westfield Community Players. Next in the series we cross into another North Jersey county and keep the map growing, one town at a time.
Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey was founded in 1933 by seven local artists. The center’s own history says seven painters began sharing a studio in 1931 and that the group formally became the Summit Art Association in 1933. The article also said Plainfield has been teaching painters since the nineteenth century; the duCret School of Art dates its founding to 1926.
Sources consulted
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Mission and history
duCret Center of Art, History
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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