The Sixteen Best Jersey City Art Shows of 2025
Last year at this time, I was unsure of myself. For the first time in a while, I’d missed shows — including some important ones. I could write about my favorites, but I couldn’t pretend to be comprehensive. It was entirely possible that the Jersey City art exhibition I would’ve liked the best was one that I didn’t get to.
That was then. Over the past twelve months, I’ve made a point of catching everything I could. If an exhibition was mounted anywhere in town, it went right on the calendar. Comprehensiveness doesn’t give me better taste and judgment, but it does confer a certain authority on the words I’m about to write. If you had something to show me, chances are, I saw it. If you had something to say, I listened.
Thus, you can be confident that this list reflects the values and my experience of a person who has spent the year engaging with visual art as it is expressed in Jersey City. That doesn’t mean that it reflects yours. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve got your own ideas about the best art shows of 2025 and your own criteria for your assessment. I’d love to know what you think and why. In that spirit of dialogue, here are my choices:
16. Sarah Mueller: Reconstructions @ Art House Productions (345 Marin Boulevard)
It was another strong year for the glass-walled gallery on the western edge of the Powerhouse Arts District. Curator Andrea McKenna continued a hot streak that began well before the new theater opened, mounting one dramatic show after another: Deb Sinha’s cityscapes and roughneck characters, Cheryl Gross’s mythologically inspired fold-out wooden folios, and an Animalia show presented for the Studio Tour that was busy with charismatic depictions of beasts. That taste for the grand visual gesture extended to “Reconstructions,” a solo show dedicated to the work of the town’s most spectral portraitist. Sarah Mueller’s canvases are a rush of eye-catching color that come on like waves. Once engulfed, it becomes apparent that she’s painting pictures of people — smeared, occasionally ghostly people, but distinct human figures nevertheless. Mueller’s work is full of blurry afterimages, distortions, and implied motion. But she’s never spooky for the sake of sensation, and she never overplays her hand. Instead, her interiors are austere and slightly unsettling, and the people who populate these scenes are marked by shadow. In particular, Mueller’s image of a young woman in a red dress crossing the street by taxi headlights shimmered with Hudson County mystery.
5. DISTORT: Ending Up @ Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.)
It’s rare that an art show changes the physical dimensions of a gallery permanently. I suppose that DISTORT and Andrea McKenna could remove the section of wall where the plaster appears to liquify and drip if they’d like to, but I doubt they ever will. It’s a visual acknowledgment that a searing thing happened in this gallery during the late spring, and a permanent tribute to the intensity and glorious color that DISTORT brought to his solo show. The melting wall helped to set the scene, but the main attractions were the large canvases and the thrilling sense of verticality generated by a muralist who has spend a lot of time at the tops of buildings. In “Ending Up,” DISTORT located the city within a crevasse of a misty forest reminiscent of the Bergen Arches. His perspective put us on the lip of the cliff, staring down at the tops of skyscrapers. The purple and pink lights of the populated zone cast a glow on the leaves and the firmament. In DISTORT’s paintings, the divisions between the built environment and the natural world were difficult to pinpoint. Here, the urban and the rural blurred into each other, leapt the language barrier, and stayed in conversation, with the tower blocks imitating the trees and the stone pathways through the woods resembling streets. Nothing to do, then, but affix a rope to the rockface and swing down into the abyss.