JCC’S EARTH DAY ART SHOW IS A WARNING ABOUT OUR IMPERILED PLANET

By Carol Selman

Our Environment, Our Future

The Gaelen Gallery at JCC Metrowest

760 Northfield Avenue

West Orange, NJ

Closes: April 27

Donna Moran’s multimedia piece Landscape of Memory 2 is a tragedy in four acts:

Act I. The earth with her white continents swimming in blue waters starts a journey over a familiar yet unfamiliar landscape. Plants wave like shark teeth. Geometric outcroppings, reminiscent of Aztec artifacts, fill the brush. Act II. The waters rise. The continents are befouled. They darken and recede. Act III. Our blue dot Earth is black–Apocalypse. Act IV. The blue waters, now darker, have returned. The land hasn’t. Gaia, Mother Nature, Planet Earth—choose a name—has eliminated its humans problem.

In time for Earth Day, veteran artist Moran confronts the questions underlying all the works in the show Our Environment, Our Future at the Gaelen Gallery: What have we done and where are we going? Powerful and beautiful, miss this exhibit at your own and the planet’s peril.

ORIGIN STORY

The 28-piece exhibition—paintings, drawings, collage, prints and photographs– began as the larger Shomrei Adamah: Keep The Land That I Give You, the biblical commandment to honor the earth, at South Orange’s Temple Israel Sharey Tefilio (TIST). Shomrei Adamah was the joint vision of co-curators Felix Aarts, TIST Gallery director, and Lisa Suss, longtime Gaelen Gallery director and arts manager at the JCC Metrowest.

“Felix and I are a generation apart; he’s the same age as my oldest son,” Suss said, “We both know many of the same artists and travel in different art circles, giving us wide choice. And, we always see eye to eye.”

The two reached out to major area artists with current or past ties to Manufacturers Village Artists, SOMA Arts, Mana Contemporary, and Pro Arts Jersey City, where leading Oranges artists frequently exhibit.

Donna Moran arrived via Aarts. She long taught and chaired the prestigious Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute. Aarts studied with her as graduate student. “Now we relate as colleagues,” Aarts said. “We visit one another’s studios often.”

“These are all master artists enjoying gallery representation, major exhibits, and museum shows. They have national and international recognition,” Suss said. One glance around the exhibit confirms the imaginative vision and technical prowess of the ten.

Both curators agreed the TIST exhibit needed a wider audience—the TIST Gallery is open to the general public by arrangement.

“The Gaelen exhibition calendar reserves many dates for JCC initiatives,” Suss said. “My problem is always scheduling.”

Suss’s next challenge was choosing the pieces to fit the Gaelen’s smaller space. Don’t worry, she’s designed a knock-out exhibit complete unto itself.

THE ART

Susan Evans Grove

If Landscape of Memory 2 warns of apocalypse from a cosmic perspective, celebrated photographer Susan Evans Grove–now Montclair-based, formerly a mainstay of the South Orange art scene–takes us into her earth-bound studio for a closer look. Grove has long taken a skewed approach to harsh realities. Years before the Barbie film, her memorable “Battered Barbies” addressed patriarchy and domestic abuse. From a distance, her three photographs here seem homages to 17^th Century Dutch still lifes. Closer up, the darker truth emerges—rotting fruit, wilting flowers and the detritus of electronic waste. Sometimes the Dutch still life artists evoked Memento Mori imagery, Remember You Will Die, but Grove cuts deeper: Living things will die and decay. Our discarded e-waste will pollute forever.

Alexandra Schoenberg

Among the younger artists is Colombian-born and trained architect Alexandra Schoenberg who lives in East Orange with her studio in Manufacturers Village. In her two eye-grabbing pieces Sharawaggi 1 (here pictured) and Sharawaggi 2 the natural world and traditional perspective have been replaced in a non-3-D projection of a dystopian city. Schoenberg evokes a city seemingly created by AI robots for their own comfort. Using black and colored pencils and ink, her palette is distressed red and toxic blue/green. Artist Suss filled me in: “It’s phthalo green. Use it in a natural landscape at your own risk. It can ruin a painting.”

Alison Green

Dream Weaver (Gold) is architecture of a different sort. While Schoenberg evokes a mechanistic world devoid of life, Alison Green presents striking egg shaped, painted birch panels of avian creation. “When we walked into her studio, her paintings flew from the walls,” Aarts said.

From her artist statement, Green explains. “This series, ‘String Theory’ takes its cue from the [male] weaver bird, who builds a nest hoping to attract a mate by demonstrating his architectural skills.” Against a yellow/gold background, her exquisitely rendered weaver birds create a huge spherical nest of lush vegetation—a new earth? Enchantment.

Tricia Zimic

Tricia Zimic also paints on wood, here in traditional oil, a nod at late Medieval/early Renaissance western art. Specifically, Zimic is thinking about Heironymous Bosch’s enigmatic triptych of the same title circa late 1400s, early 1500s. Zimic long lived and worked in South Orange—she was a force behind the South Mountain Reservation’s Wildflower Sculpture Garden and Preserve. Now a transplant to rural Bucks County, she is deeply concerned about species habitats and extinction. Her mysterious three-paneled painting presents multiple interpretations. In Zimic’s main, central panel, predatory birds and mammals stalk a silent city under an ominous sky. I mentioned artist Barbara Minch’s symbolic use of predatory birds in her current Fiercely Feminine show. “Tricia has studied with Barbara,” Suss said.

Prominent in Zimic’s artist bio is her studying illustration with the legendary Maurice Sendak. Sendak transported his readers to Where the Wild Things Are. In Zimic’s city, humans aren’t being transported anyplace. There are no humans. The city is now where the wild things are.

Zimic’s imagery in the side panels intrigues. At left is an Eden before the Fall: A mythical figure garbed in greenery oversees a Peaceable Kingdom of grazing animals. Peacocks take to the sky. At right, a woman–maybe Zimic, maybe the last human, maybe Zimic is the last human–sits by turbulent waters, clutching her dog and watching black birds flocking upward. This Garden of Earthly Delights mesmerizes.

Yvette Lucas. Broken Joshua

Like Zimic, Lucas spends much time in the natural world, bringing back elegiac tree portraits which have long-inspired odes of praise, including from me. As with all the seven artists featured in this column, Lucas brings a strong narrative impulse to her vision. Broken Joshua and her two other works here tell the majesty, beauty and the fragility of nature. Joshua Tree’s broken branch has fallen from its own weight. Lucas sees a warning to humans: Beware hubris, beware overreaching. In Screaming Tree and Split Tree climate-change driven storms have wrought the damage.

Donna Bassin

There are more artists and more stories in Our Environment, Our Future, for you to discover on your own. I close with Donna Bassin’s poetic multimedia works. Photographer Bassin, also a Montclair-based clinical psychologist, presents the choice before us. Monochromatic arid landscapes haunt in undulating desolation. Using sashiko thread, Bassin affixes a semi-transparent panel depicting life–trees, plants–over a portion of the main image: Here is what was and could it be again. Bassin wields many mediums but her Environmental Melancholia series is made of gossamer and dreams.

MORE INFORMATION

If You Go: Entry to the JCC is through the glass doors adjacent to the elevator on the second level of the JCC Parking Deck. Wheelchairs available. See website for hours. Artist biographies and short statements are displayed next to each artist’s works. All works are for sale with prices ranging from $250 to $3,000.

OTHER MUST-SEE ART SHOWS

Also Running Now: Two outstanding one woman shows create an interesting conversation with the JCC Show:

Fiercely Feminine: Barbara Minch at Kean College continues through June, 2025.

West Orange abstract artist Sarah Canfield’s The Circuit Unseen is at The Brassworks Gallery . The show has been strongly reviewed.

Upcoming in April: Colorful Abstraction: The Light Within at The Gallery at Temple Israel Sharey Tefilio, South Orange has an opening reception (public invited) on Sunday, April 6, 2PM-4PM. See website for other viewing options and a visual preview. Among the featured artists are South Orange’s Ben Niles and West Orange’s Judy Gould. April 6th – June 15th, 2025

East Orange’s Manufacturers Village Artists is headquarters for the second Garden State Arts Weekend, Friday April 25-Sunday April 27. The MVA’s Open Studios are Saturday April 26 and Sunday April 27, Noon to 5 p.m. with local food vendors and a community art show.