Archives

Robert Nardolillo – “The Essence of Hoboken”

April 15 - May 21, 2017

Join us for a free opening reception for our latest Upper Gallery art exhibition: “The Essence of Hoboken: Watercolors by Robert Nardolillo.” These dynamic and moody watercolor paintings by the Brooklyn-born artist who now lives in the suburbs, express the urban energy of the Mile Square City. He discovered the city’s unique beauty when his daughters moved to Hoboken after college. Meet the artist at the opening reception for his works on Saturday, Apr. 15 from 2 – 5 pm. His works will remain on view through Sunday, May 21. For a preview of his work, visit the artist’s website.

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.

Heaven, Hell or Hoboken: 11-Part Lecture Series

August 21, 2016 – December 10, 2017 • 4pm

Location: Hoboken Historical Museum, 1301 Hudson St., (201) 656-2240

In the summer of 1914, nationalist fervor drove European nations into war. Although the United States did not enter the Great War until the spring of 1917, the conflict that would later be known as World War I had an enormous impact on Hoboken, a small city with large immigrant communities and a busy port.

As early as July 1916, the war intruded on Hudson County with the explosion of a munitions depot on Black Tom Island, just off the coast of Jersey City. The explosion shattered glass for miles around, yet the incident was initially downplayed, to avoid ramping up public support for America’s entry into World War I.

When America formally entered the war on April 6, 1917, Hoboken’s waterfront became central to the war effort as the government seized the German ships docked there and commandeered the piers, which became the army’s port of embarkation for American troops. Some 2 million soldiers passed through Hoboken on their way to or from Europe.

Near the end of the war, General John Pershing rallied the troops for a swift conclusion to the war with the rallying cry, “Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken.”

Learn more about the “war to end all wars” through a series of lectures by visiting authors, scholars and professors, from August 21, 2016 through December 10, 2017. Topics ranged from the rhetoric that characterized the role of women during WWI to a critical view of the wartime leadership of Woodrow Wilson. See below for videos from the series.

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The series is supported by a Special Project Grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission, and the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. DeGise County Executive and the Board of Chosen Freeholders, along with the Tom Kennedy American Legion Post #107, Hoboken, NJ.

Additional support comes from “World War I and America,” a two-year national initiative of Library of America presented in partnership with The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the National World War I Museum and Memorial, and other organizations, with generous support from The National Endowment for the Humanities.

  • August 21, 4 pm: “The 100th Anniversary of the Black Tom Explosion,” by Chad Millman, author of The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice (Little, Brown & Co., 2006)
     
  • September 11, 4 pm: “The First Attack on the Homeland,” by Howard Blum, author of Dark Invasion, 1915: Germany’s Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America (HarperCollins, 2014)
     
  • October 16, 4 pm: “Illusions and Realities of World War I,” by Thomas Fleming, Jersey City native and author of The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (Basic Books, 2004)
     
  • November 6, 4 pm: “Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: From Hoboken to the Rhine and Back,” by Jeffrey Sammons, PhD, Professor of History at NYU and co-author of Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014)
     
  • November 27, 1 pm: “A City on the Eve of War, Hoboken in 1916-1917: Some Recent Research,” by Christina Ziegler-McPherson, PhD, author of Immigrants in Hoboken: One-Way Ticket to America, 1845-1985 (History Press, 2011)
     
  • December 11, 4 pm: “Woodrow Wilson’s Failure of Wartime Leadership,” by Richard Striner, PhD, Professor of History, Washington College, and author of Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)

2017

  • February 12, 4 pm: “The Women of Peace and Preparedness: The Use of Motherhood and Maternalism in World War I,” by Lisa Mastrangelo, PhD, Assistant Professor of English, Centenary College, and author of forthcoming paper, The Rhetoric of Maternalism: The Use of Motherhood as a Trope in World War I
     
  • March 12, 4 pm: “Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen,” by Christopher Capozzola, PhD, Associate Professor of History at MIT, and author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (Oxford University Press, 2008)
     
  • April 23, 4 pm: “A Seaport at War with Itself: Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians and African Americans in Wartime Greater New York,” by Steven H. Jaffe, author of New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham (Basic Books, 2012)
     
  • May 7, 4 pm: “Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken: The U.S. Army Port of Embarkation in Hoboken During World War I,” by Mark Van Ellis, PhD, Professor of History, Queensborough Community College, and author of America and World War I: A Traveler’s Guide (Interlink Books, 2014)
  • August 27, 4 pm: “The WWI Legacy of Fort Dix, New Jersey,” by Jamien Parks, veteran and historian for the United States Air Force
  • September 10, 1 pm: “Legacy of Remembrance, Part 1,” a bus tour of WWI monuments of Hudson and Bergen County. Led by New Jersey historian Erik Burro
  • September 17, 4 pm: Collections Manager Rand Hoppe shows and discusses newsreel footage of the American Expeditionary Forces in Hoboken.
  • October 1, 4 pm: “Sabotage at Black Tom,” by Jules Witcover, jouralist and author of “Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War on America” (Algonquin Books, 1989)
  • October 8, 4 pm: “The Patriot Farmerette: Women’s Land Army in New Jersey” by author Elaine Weiss (Fruits of Victory: The Women’s Land Army in the Great War, (Potomac Books, 2008) 
  • October 15, 1 pm: “Doughboy Monuments of Hudson County, Part 2”, a bus tour of WWI monuments led by New Jersey historian Erik Burro. 
  • November 5, 4 pm: “Camp Merritt, An American Portal to the Great War” by Harold Bartholf, author of “Camp Merritt,” (Images of America, 2017)
  • November 19, 4 pm: “Who Was Major General David C. Shanks?” by Museum Director Robert Foster
  • December 3, 4 pm: “Jungle of Weeds” to War,” by Melissa Ziobro, author and Professor of Public History at Monmouth University
  • December 10, 4 pm: “Music Wins the War” led by Museum Programming Coordinator Eileen Lynch, and musicologist Lois Dilivio

 

 

Jean-Paul Picard – “Hoboken Sweeps”

March 4 - April 9, 2017

The versatile artist Jean-Paul Picard specializes in web design and digital photography. He teaches courses in these technical skills in evening classes at the Hudson County Schools of Technology. But he started out as a graphic designer and photographer back in the days when you used an actual T-square to draw a rule, and mixed chemicals in a darkroom to print a photo.

With a penchant for trying new things, Picard started experimenting with using multiple images in single work to create a story line, after seeing a Richard Avedon exhibit in 2013. Avedon had created monumental, panoramic photographs of people standing in a row by combining several exposures together. Inspired by this and by his affinity for art by cubist painters like Picasso and Braque, Picard started combining a series of separate exposures he had taken at another art exhibit.

Then, he struck on the idea of using the panorama mode on a digital camera, but rather than moving the camera in a smooth line, he learned he could create more interesting effects by sweeping the camera in different ways and at different speeds. Like the cubists, this he uses this technique to show more sides of an object than a traditional single-perspective image offers.

At first, he printed these “sweeps” from his digital printer on white paper, but because of the images’ shapes, there was too much white space on the final artwork for his taste. So he experimented with printing on different types of fine-art paper, first preparing the paper with a digital ground – a field of special white paint applied to the paper to help set the inks and make the image pop.

He devised this approach on his own, inspired by a technique that dates from the earliest days of photography, when photographers applied a silver gelatin halide solution by brush to paper before developing their images. The silver gelatin images usually had rough-edged borders, unseen behind the matte or frame of the final product. But that rough edge appealed to Picard, who incorporates it into his original works of art.

Although the images originate in a digital camera, each of the works on display in the Museum’s upper gallery is a unique edition, or monoprint, containing the serendipitous elements of the artist’s hand. In addition to the Hoboken Sweeps series, Picard is working on similar series with the themes of nature, travel, portraiture, New York City and Québec, where he has family roots. More examples of his work, including his 2009 “Visage Hoboken” portraits that were displayed in his first Museum exhibit, can be seen at www.jean-paulpicard.com.

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.

Hoboken People and Places, 1976-1994: Photographs by Michael Flanagan

January 22 – July 2, 2017

When he moved to Hoboken in the mid-1970s, Michael Flanagan was already a seasoned photographer with a passion for developing his own prints through meticulous experimentation.

His camera of choice was a large format, four-by-five-inch Linhof view camera, mounted on a tripod. The equipment was bulky and cumbersome, but under his skilled hands, it yielded crisp, detailed black and white images. He even toted this same camera and tripod on his many trips abroad.

From 1976 to 1994, Flanagan lived near the corner of Bloomfield and 10th Streets, and many of his photographs document the changing storefronts of this uptown location. He was determined to capture a feature of Hoboken life that was swiftly fading during the course of that decade: Mom-and-Pop shops, and the blue-collar residents that populated the city.

Only a few of the corner businesses recorded in Flanagan’s photos survive today: Lisa’s Deli, Truglio’s Meat Market, and, on the northeast corner of his block, the Bloomfield Launderette. Through his photographs we can see what has long been lost: Pierro’s Butcher Shop before it closed, and its owner, Al Pierro, during its last days. Today, it’s a kids’ yoga studio.

On the southeast corner, we see the interior and exterior of Kusseluk’s Shoe Store, which maintained an ancient display of footwear during the years Mike lived in the neighborhood. That it remained open at all during the 1980s was paradoxical, as potential customers would have to beg Sam Kusseluk to sell them a pair of shoes-—and rarely succeeded. Today, the building hosts Anthony David’s restaurant and an adjacent tattoo parlor.

Opposite Kusseluk’s was Nellie’s Store, where a customer might find just about anything available at the city’s one big supermarket, but in smaller quantities. Like so many who owned and ran the corner stores in Hoboken in the 1980s, Nellie lived in the building, and seemed to be in the shop night and day, offering warm greetings along with candy bars, cans of soup, and cartons of milk.

Flanagan photographed other longtime residents: barkeeps, plumbers, mailmen, retired longshoremen, and many seniors, often snapped while sitting in folding chairs on the sunny side of the sidewalk, as if the public pathway were a corner of their own backyard. Some were known as the “mayors” of their block-—the characters, the ones who told the best stories, the ones you sought out when you wanted to learn the news behind the news. One barkeep he photographed, “mayor” Tom Vezzetti, actually became Mayor of Hoboken in 1985.

Like most photographers, Mike did not set out to create a comprehensive visual record of the city. There are, for example, no photographs of the music scene at Maxwell’s, which was at its height during the late 1970s and 1980s, and there is but one image that attests to the spate of arson that terrified Hoboken’s tenement dwellers during the same period. It is a haunting memorial for the eleven tenants, including seven children, who died in the 1981 fire in the Eldorado on 12th Street.

But in their close observation of textures and absences and the uses of public space, Flanagan’s photographs allow current residents and visitors to reflect upon significant changes, over time, in the life and landscape of Hoboken. The exhibition also includes festival and political posters, t-shirts and video footage from the period, including the critically acclaimed “Delivered Vacant,” Nora Jacobson’s sensitive documentary showing the personal consequences of gentrification.

The most striking changes are visible in his images of the waterfront and of city parks. Hoboken’s young family population had declined by the 1980s, and some of the city’s old school buildings were sold for condominium development. The parks in that period were crumbling and seem nearly abandoned-—barely recognizable compared with the green, equipment-filled spaces that teem with activity today.

The Museum is indebted to the Estate of Michael Flanagan, for sponsoring this exhibition, with additional financial support from: Lizzy Flanagan; Michael Flanagan and Christine Allen; Abigail, Luke and Liam Flanagan; Liz Flanagan and Nancy Wilkinson; Hoboken Improvement Company; Justin Silverman; and Robert Foster; and thanks also to Steven and Lily Zane for their generous donation of Michael Flanagan’s photographs, negatives and slides to the permanent collection of the Hoboken Historical Museum.

Elliot Appel – “Mile Square Colors”

November 6 - December 30, 2016

Elliot Appel has always been interested in capturing the myriad interesting architectural details embedded in the urban landscape. On weekends, and in the margins of his workweek in Midtown Manhattan, he prowls the city’s more colorful neighborhoods, camera in hand, looking for eye-catching subjects. He’s drawn to antiquated doorways and signs, interesting street performers, or an arresting reflection in a window.

“I try to capture the details of everyday life that people may not notice, or take for granted, as they rush from place to place,” Appel says. “I’ve always been a city person. It intensified when all these old structures were being torn down and replaced by new buildings without detail.”

Born and raised in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, he began drawing as a child and kept on sketching through high school and college. Largely self-taught as an artist, he honed his painting technique and subject matter on trips to Europe in his early twenties, visiting museums in Paris, Geneva, Florence, Milan, Venice, Rome and Athens.

During his travels, he would often pause to sketch scenes in the public squares, capturing the unique character of each space from interesting angles. After he sold one of his acrylic paintings based on a photo of a cathedral, he began working in a more photorealistic style that has come to define his art, with urban life as his most frequent subject.

After moving to Bayonne, he began to explore neighborhoods across Hudson County filled with the same late 19th and early 20th century architectural detail that captivated two of his favorite American painters, Edward Hopper and John Sloan. Many of Appel’s scenes recall Hopper’s crisp, light-flooded canvases of modern, realistic street scenes. He interprets these scenes in vibrant colors, with unusual perspectives, as well as an eye for detail, resulting in a singular view of life in the big city. In general, his paintings take about two to three weeks to complete, depending on the amount of detail involved.

“Practice makes perfect,” he adds. “I like to work without a lot of sketching; I block it out on the canvas and launch into filling in the details, working in acrylics because they allow you to paint quickly.” He usually paints at night, with a daylight simulator lamp, with the full sunlight spectrum, and on weekends, when he’s not out searching for new subject matter. He says he’s looking forward to retiring and having more time to paint.

The artist will exhibit about 15 Hoboken-themed paintings, ranging in size from 16” x 20” to 24” x 36”, in a show titled, “Mile Square Colors: Paintings by Elliot Appel.” The show opens at the Hoboken Historical Museum on Sunday, November 6, with a free reception from 1 – 4 pm, and remains on view through Dec. 30. See more of his work at elliotpaints.com. His work is frequently on view at galleries in New York and New Jersey, as well as street fairs and online shows.

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.

Donna O’Grady – “Hoboken Scenes”

September 18 – October 18, 2016

While most of us are busy documenting our travels and daily lives with cameras that fit in our pockets, Donna O’Grady carts along a full pochade box, a traditional painter’s supply case with attachable tripod easel, to capture scenes from her travels and her favorite places in her adopted hometown of Hoboken.

She takes her pochade case everywhere: To many of Hoboken’s sidewalk cafes, on business trips around the world as a financial software product manager, on frequent artist workshops in Italy, and even on a boat, where she lived for two years sailing around the Caribbean. She paints to preserve her memories of these places, or sometimes to barter for the catch of the day, painting portraits of fishing boats and their crews in exchange for a hearty meal of fresh scallops.

Like the Impressionists, she paints in oils on location, en plein air, and uses an Old Masters’ technique called underpainting, roughing out the major elements of a composition in dark and light monochromes before applying colors and details. This helps infuse a painting with light and depth, giving them a deeper dimension and a realistic atmosphere. (See examples on her blog, www.donnaogrady.com/blog)

O’Grady has been painting all her life – she can’t remember when she didn’t paint, from her early years in Jersey City and high school years in North Haledon, to her early adult years in Ringwood, NJ. Along the way, she has taken classes at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts, both in Manhattan. She likes studying with different teachers to learn different techniques and styles, and has taken to listening to podcasts by artists, too.

Her parents, who had worked so hard to be able to move the family out to the suburbs, couldn’t believe it when she chose to move to Hoboken about 14 years ago, but she says she felt an irresistible pull to the Mile Square City.

“I love Hoboken’s architecture, day or night, there’s so much detail,” she raves. “I love the factories, cafés, the train terminal, the waterfront—there’s so much life on the streets of the city.” Her artist’s eye is drawn to interesting details wherever she goes. She quickly sets up her easel and captures the local architecture, landscape and portraits of the people she meets. She even enjoys chatting with strangers while she works.

Hoboken’s architecture has inserted itself even more directly into her paintings lately, as she has begun painting on salvaged antique ceiling tiles made of pressed tin, once ubiquitous in older Hoboken homes and businesses. “My neighbor had bought some at a street fair and she gave me the idea to paint in the flat center area — a perfect painting surface with a built-in frame,” O’Grady says. “Now, I find them at craft fairs and order vintage tiles online – the older the better, with cracked and peeling paint.”

She’s chosen about 12 new works mostly on these tiles for her latest exhibit, “Hoboken Scenes: Paintings on Pressed Tin,” on view from September 18 – October 18 in the Hoboken Historical Museum’s Upper Gallery. O’Grady is an active member of the local hob’art artists gallery, and exhibits her work in shows in Jersey City and Ocean Grove, NJ.

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.

Bill Curran – “Extraordinary Hoboken”

April 9 - May 29, 2016

When most of us pass a flowerpot in full bloom on a stoop or a cat sunning lazily in a window, we might make a mental note of these moments of unexpected beauty, but they are soon forgotten, buried under a pile of errands and obligations. It takes a special eye to see these fleeting moments of pure color and light as inspiration for great art.

Artist Bill Curran has that kind of eye. He finds subjects for his lushly colorful paintings in his everyday walks through Hoboken, or views from his own window. The less “artfully” arranged the better. Taking a cue from his favorite painter, Fairfield Porter, Curran prefers to happen upon a scene worth painting, rather than intentionally arranging objects.

To explain his penchant for painting flowers, Hoboken stoops, cats, windows, boats and more, he cites a phrase that Porter used to describe the French painter Edouard Vuillard: “It seems to be ordinary, what [he’s] doing, but the extraordinary is everywhere.” When Curran sees something he likes, he will paint it quickly, en plein air, to capture the fleeting moment of pure color and light, sometimes making a sketch on site and finishing the canvas quickly back at his studio. “The feeling of adding lush paint to a rough canvas is incomparable,” he adds.

On Saturday, April 9, with an opening reception from 2 – 5 pm, the Museum is pleased to present Curran’s third Upper Gallery exhibit, “Extraordinary Hoboken,” comprising 64 small-format oil paintings of a stunning variety of subjects, painted between 1999 and 2016. Regular visitors to the Museum will know Curran as the unfailingly nice Museum Associate who greets guests and keeps operations humming at the Museum and the Fire Department Museum. On view through May 29, the paintings are as delightful as the artist!

Before coming to work for the Hoboken Museum, Curran was an illustrator and art director for 16 years at Lord & Taylor in New York. He also teaches private art lessons and classes at the Bayonne Jewish Community Center. His work has been widely exhibited at venues in New York and New Jersey, including Hoboken City Hall, Hoboken Library and even in the Empire State Building, which used to captivate him from his vantage point at Lord & Taylor, and continues to draw his eye from the Hoboken waterfront.

Curran honed his technique through years of study at The Art Institute in Fort Lauderdale, as well as New York’s School of Visual Arts, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League. But perhaps the most profound influence was an invitation to join Fairfield Porter’s niece, Anina Porter Fuller, and 12 other artists for a painting retreat at the family’s 100-year-old estate on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, in 2013.

Originally born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised on Long Island, Curran has lived in Hoboken for thirty-two years. View more of his work online at billcurran.net.

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.

Alex Morales – “Watercolor Paintings”

January 10 - February 14, 2016

The Uruguayan artist Alex Morales has been making art in a wide range of media from an early age, studying and refining his skills at the Museum of Fine Arts in the state of San Jose de Mayo in his home country. He earned a living in Uruguay and Buenos Aires as a successful illustrator, graphic artist, set designer and muralist before moving to the United States about nine years ago. He settled in the New York/New Jersey area, and about three years ago met a woman named Pilar in Hoboken. They fell in love, and have since married, and along the way, he fell in love with Hoboken.

“I like Hoboken because of the people and the small-town feel,” he says. “It is a very open community, a small town that offers a blend of youth and joy with elegance and maturity. The community is very vibrant and friendly.” As an artist, he is drawn to Hoboken’s architecture, and its piers and marina, as well as the mesmerizing views of the New York City skyline across the river. He can sense that the people who live here are proud of their city, and he was inspired to give them a chance to see it through his artistic interpretation.

For his six-week exhibition in the Hoboken Museum’s Upper Gallery, Morales has assembled about 15 recent paintings executed in water-based media, some in traditional watercolor and some elaborated in ink and lemon juice. They are realist works, with elements of abstraction and meticulously detailed work with a fountain pen.

Morales earned a reputation in Uruguay as a sought-after decorator for dance clubs and pubs, and today he continues to earn commissions creating art for commercial spaces, such as the large-scale mosaic mural, “Life,” that he created recently for the Orama Restaurant in Edgewater, NJ. The massive, 1,150-square-foot mural and other artistic elements adorning the restaurant took the artist the better part of 2013 and half of 2014 to realize. This year, he plans to offer private art classes, specifically drawing and painting.

Throughout his career, he has continued to produce fine art, exhibiting his work in solo and group shows in galleries and public spaces. “My next exhibition will be of small sculptures representing the most characteristic places of Hoboken,” Morales says. “These will be replicas in yeso (plaster) of the buildings and homes showing the architecture of this town.” The first of these pieces will be on view during his exhibit at the Hoboken Historical Museum, through Sunday, February 14. Learn more at the artist’s website: http://www.ajmorales.com

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.

Frank Sinatra Centennial

August 2, 2015 – July 3, 2016

Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Voice, and the Fans

Honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hoboken’s most famous native son, the exhibition, “Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Voice, and the Fans,” will open on Sunday, Aug. 2, with a free opening reception from 2 – 5 p.m. The exhibit will feature interactive displays and videos, period-appropriate listening stations, and cherished fan photographs and artifacts to illustrate the singer/actor’s formative years in Hoboken, highlights from his remarkable 60-year career, and memories from legions of fans. The exhibit will be accompanied by packed schedule of singers, films and authors, and a big birthday bash on Dec. 12, 2015.

Sinatra was, as writer Bruce Bliven put it, “a kid from Hoboken who got the breaks.” He emerged from a blue-collar, working class, urban setting, where most guys, he once told an audience, became fighters or worked in factories. His own father, Martin, a recent immigrant from Sicily, started out as a boxer, fighting under the assumed name of Marty O’Brien to gain access to Irish-controlled gyms that wouldn’t admit Italians.

Though he was born in a cold-water flat in a neighborhood of newly arrived immigrants in Southwest Hoboken, his life wasn’t as rough as some biographers have portrayed. He was a rare only child, whose mother, Dolly, used her political savvy and facility with languages to improve her family’s station, securing Marty a position with the city’s fire department. By the time he was 12, the Sinatras had moved to better housing and he earned the derisive nickname of “Slacksy O’Brien” for the dress pants he sported. In the 1920s and 30s, Hoboken was bursting with young singers who performed on street corners, in pool halls and clubs, and in private homes–wherever they could get an audience.

His big break came in 1935, when a Hoboken trio calling themselves the Three Flashes invited him to join them for a shot at the American Idol program of its day, the radio program, “Major Bowes and His Original Amateur Hour.” The Hoboken Four were a hit, and went on a tour sponsored by the radio program for the next several months. Then Sinatra went solo, performing at the Rustic Cabin in Englewood, NJ, which was broadcast on WNEW’s radio program, Dance Parade, leading to an invitation to join the nationally popular Harry James band. In 1939, he joined the Tommy Dorsey band and soon earned the name “Swoonatra,” for causing teenage girls to faint at his concerts.

He would go on to sell more records than any previous singer, and also to pursue a successful Hollywood film career, including an Oscar-winning performance in “From Here to Eternity.” He and his pals in the “Rat Pack” defined the image of American cool in the 1950s and 60s, and he continued to tour and record successful records into his later years. When he died in 1998, fans swarmed Hoboken to mourn the man whose music and movies had meant so much to them.

Judy Schmitt – “Capturing Hoboken”

May 10 - July 5, 2015

The accomplished artist Judy Schmitt may be based in Cape Cod, but since her daughter and son-in-law moved to Hoboken 15 years ago, this city has been a second home for her. Inspired by the artistic tradition of Provincetown, Mass., and many of the experienced artists who live there, Schmitt strives to capture the soul of her subjects in her paintings. She will exhibit 14 of them in the Museum’s Upper Gallery from May 10 to July 5.

Schmitt grew up in the blue collar town of Waterbury, CT, so she appreciates the hidden beauty of the many factory buildings tucked into Hoboken’s cityscape. She is enamored of the beauty and sounds of Hoboken, which she soaks in on walks through the city, or while visiting its parks with her grandchildren. She loves the way the light bounces off the brownstones, and imagines the voices of the families who grew up in them. Her goal is to portray each building’s individual character and charm, using a rich palette of Veneitan red and burnt sienna.

She starts the paintings in plein air, on the street, taking color notes for the trees, the different red-browns of the bricks and grays of the sidewalks, and finishes the canvases in her studio.   

“A major influence was Edward Hopper, who lived and painted in my town,” she says, “and I learned about capturing the light, from my mentor, Steve Kennedy, a wonderful plein air artist.”

Living near the sea in New England, Schmitt is especially sensitive to Hoboken’s waterfront and its rich shipping history. She was so struck by the image of an old pier with the “Hoboken” tugboat, that she felt compelled to use a large canvas to convey the scene in all its rich detail, with the New York skyline in the background. 

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.