Karen E. Gersch – “CIRCUS LIVES: Hovering Above, Balancing Below”

January 9, 2022 – February 27, 2022

To highlight its current exhibition “Washington St.” and to bring attention to the prestigious circus school that once operated there in the late 1970’s, the Hoboken Historical Museum is bringing a visual spectacle to its Upper Gallery. 

“CIRCUS LIVES: Hovering Above, Balancing Below” by celebrated circus artist Karen E. Gersch opens January 9th and runs through February 27th, 2022. On opening day Sunday, January 9 at 3:30, Gersch will present a slideshow/talk about the Circus Arts Center. She trained there as an acrobatic base or ‘understander’ before spending 30 years “running around rings and stages with a woman on her head. It was – like painting has always been for me – very centering. I miss it now.” She will be joined by many of her colleagues from those days and images of their acts will be shown.

The multi-media exhibit will feature dancing horses, performers on tight wire and trapeze, alluring backlot scenes and portraits of jugglers, balancers and – the remarkable Russian couple who founded and ran the Circus Arts Center at 412 Washington St. 

For Gersch, who holds a BFA from Pratt Institute, the tented world has remained a passion since childhood. She grew up in what was then rural Rockland County as an athletic tomboy who sketched from life. Her art portfolio garnered her a scholarship to Pratt at 16.  After graduating the school with Honors, she studied ballet in Manhattan, then met the duo who would become her Master Teachers: Nina Krasavina and Gregory Fedin. Gersch says, unapologetically, that she has always “juggled” parallel careers: that of performing and painting. 

She was already featured in shows here and abroad, especially for Warner Bros. Records and Henson Associates, before becoming a founding member of the Big Apple Circus and of Vermont’s Circus Smirkus. Most of the acts that composed the first two years of BAC were her fellow students: all of them chose to leave the show to keep working at the Circus Arts Center. 

During the decades when Gersch traveled extensively with three-ring shows throughout the country and one-ring shows in Europe, her art materials were her constant companion. By day, she practiced and performed, by night she sketched and painted – several pastels and line drawings from life on the road are included in the exhibition.

She works in a multitude of mediums (although oils are preferred), and is in private collections around the world. Highlights of her exhibition history include having had several works in “Dusty Glory: The Circus in American Art” at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Massachusetts, alongside legendary circus artists Chaim Gross, Walt Kuhn and Reginald Marsh. In 2017, ten of her paintings were chosen to be part of the Smithsonian’s FolkLife Festival: “Circus on the Move” in the Arts and Industry Museum.

Gersch still remembers vividly commuting from her loft/studio on the Bowery in Manhattan to Hoboken every day. “There was something magical about stepping out of the terminal from the Path train and taking back streets, many still cobblestone, with laundry lines hanging from open windows. It felt almost European in contrast to the bustle of NYC.”

Hurry, hurry, hurry – step right up! Come bask and delight in a panorama of daring, grace and physical artistry – that which the world of circus exemplifies.

For more of Gersch’s work, visit her website at www.artbykarenegersch.com. To learn more about the physical arts teaching programs she has created, see http://www.facebook.com/artofbalancebykeg. To view the short film “I Control the Balance” of Gersch interviewed by Creatives MX,  click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-p0l5U7vY4

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.