Historic Happenings Blog

Upper Gallery Hoboken: A Retrospective by Alex Morales Uruguayan artist Alex Morales returns to the Hoboken Historical Museum with a new batch of 15 paintings of his beloved adopted home of Hoboken. The public is invited to a free opening reception on Feb. 16 from 2 - 5 pm. The exhibition will remain on view through March 29. 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 Historical Museum 1301 Hudson St. PO Box 3296 Hoboken, NJ 07030 Phone:  201.656.2240 info@hobokenmuseum.org Tuesday – Thursday  2 to 7 pm Friday  1 to 5 pm Saturday & Sunday  12 to 5 pm Admission:  $5 Free  for children and members

Upper Gallery New Views of Old Hoboken, Paper Collages by Meredeth Turshen The Museum's Upper Gallery space opens 2020 with an exhibition of works by an artist, teacher, and writer Meredeth Turshen. All are invited to a free opening reception on Jan. 5 from 2 - 5 pm. The exhibition will remain on view through Feb. 9. Turshen has lived in Hoboken and taught at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, for more than 25 years. A member of the National Association of Women Artists, she has exhibited regularly in the New York metropolitan region, with Viridian Gallery in Chelsea, and with hob’art, an arts cooperative based in Hoboken.  Describing her work, Turshen writes: "This exhibition presents a modernist’s interpretation of historic Hoboken. I was inspired by the 2008 postcard show, parts of which can be seen again in the main gallery of the Hoboken Historical Museum. From the catalog of the exhibit, I excerpted images of Hoboken landmarks and incorporated them in paper collage...

Upper Gallery Lackawanna: From Drawing to Print, New Works by Kelli Glancey Artist Kelli Glancey moved to Hoboken in 1985 to study at Parsons School of Design in NYC, where today she is a part-time assistant professor. She says that residing in Hoboken is distinctive in many ways and is so rich historically. “I am a visual person. I walk the streets daily and stare at the details of the many beautiful structures and homes, always happier when I see a place renovated rather than destroyed for new construction or high rises. This, I feel, is vital to the integrity and character of this quaint, mile-square city. I have watched it change a lot since the mid-1980s but it still feels like home.” One distinctive fixture of the Hoboken cityscape is the historic 1907 Lackawanna Terminal, the gateway to Hoboken and NYC for so many visitors and new arrivals. The terminal and its surroundings are the focus of the exhibit, “Lackawanna ~ from drawing to print, New Works by Kelli Glancey," going...

Upper Gallery Cloud Zombies Visit the Museum, Art Installation by Steven Vizena Artist Steve Vizena has been dazzling neighbors and passers-by every Halloween for over a decade with his thought-provoking 3D assemblages in his garden at the corner of 11th and Garden streets. (He also dazzles passers-by with his ever-changing garden from early spring through late fall!) His goal isn’t merely to join his neighbors in the annual frenzy of Halloween decorations; rather, he enjoys engaging people in conversations about our engagement with and disengagement from the visual world around us. The Museum has invited Vizena to create a display that captures the spirit of those art assemblages, and to bring his archived images of past Halloween creations, along with a display of some of his other visual art. His artwork is an exploration of what it means to fully engage our visual senses.   Vizena's "Cloud Zombies' installation was inspired by his sensation of dodging zombies as he nav...

Upper Gallery The Amazing Color Photographs of Hoboken by Anita Heimbruch Sneak back in time to Hoboken in the 1950s and 60s through the rich Kodachrome images taken by Anita Heimbruch, a long-time employee at Hoboken's Keuffel & Esser factory at Third and Adams Streets. Her photographs reflect the daily lives of working-class Hoboken: The festivals, the stoops, the pride they took in their backyard gardens, with crisscrossed lines of laundry drying above. More details to come. The exhibit opens Sunday, August 4, with a free reception from 2 – 5 pm in the Museum's Upper Gallery. The exhibit remains on view through September 15.  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. Tuesday – Thursday  2 to 7 pm Friday  1 to 5 pm Saturday & Sunday  12 to 5 pm Admission:  $5 Free  for children and members

Upper Gallery Hiro Takeshita Transforms Cut Paper into Art Hiro Takeshita wields an exacto knife with more finesse than many painters with brushes and oils. He creates dazzling works of art with layers of precisely cut paper in saturated hues. The resulting works of art appear to be painted, but they’re all executed in kiri-e or kirigami, the traditional Japanese art of cut paper.  Hiro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. After studying art and print-making in Tokyo, he moved to the U.S. in 1977 to further his studies, inspired by artists of the post-Impressionist period, particularly Henri Matisse, Abstract Expressionists like Richard Diebenkorn and Pop Artists, especially Andy Warhol. He moved to Hoboken in 1985.   Hiro's latest works express his appreciation for the beauty of nature. About a dozen of his paperworks will go on display at the Museum in the Upper Gallery on Sunday, June 16, through July 28. His third exhibition at the Hoboken Museum is titled, “Under the Stars.”...

Saturday-Sunday, June 29-30 – Hudson County Hoboken Museum On  June 29 at 10 am , we have just added a  new historic walking tour  to our calendar:  " A River Walk Across the Ages : Ships, Trains and Beverages Too! ," led by Terry Pranses, a former Museum trustee and frequent Hoboken tour guide on various subjects. This tour costs $25  and is limited to 20 participants.  Finally, on  Sunday, June 30, at 10 am and 1 pm , we are pleased to offer two  Historic Walking Tours of Stevens Campus , hosted by the university's archivists, Leah Loscutoff and Ted Houghtaling. The tour costs $15.  For more information, please  click here .

Upper Gallery Photographer Greg Miller offers unusual views of Hoboken from above Greg Miller’s career in publishing, spanning 46 years, started summers during his college years when he reported for Westwood News. For the first eight years after graduating from college, he averaged 3,500 photos a year for the newspaper, processing negatives in his personal darkroom. Working for the Bergen Record as a reporter he carried his cameras along on assignments, capturing a variety of subject matter over the years. For the past 31 years, he has worked in print production for Thomson Reuters as his print division morphed from Prentice-Hall, Macmillan, and the Research Institute of America. His expertise is short-run print on demand publishing. In 2015, his office moved from Lower Broadway, Manhattan, to River Street, Hoboken. As a photographer, his subjects were more suburban than urban cityscape. “I remember a portfolio course I took at the New School in the ‘70s. I was the lone guy from the Bu...

Upper Gallery Tom Zuk Honors the Working People of Hoboken in "Work/Seven Portraits" Photographer Tom Zuk earned his living mainly from a mix of corporate, editorial and travel assignments –– often giving CEOs and senior executives the full celebrity photo shoot treatment. For passion projects, however, Zuk applies the skills he’s honed over decades of street and studio photography to subjects he feels are more deserving of the attention, like the people who really make Hoboken tick. His latest series, “Work/Seven Portraits,” which opens Sunday, March 17, honors the work of people whose jobs are often classified by economists as “service” or “labor”: a nanny, a crossing guard, a waiter, a dog walker, a package deliverer.   “As a photographer, for me to apply the same high level of attention –– technical, artistic –– to the people who posed for this series as I would apply to photo shoots with CEOs is my way of giving the former their due,” Zuk says. He explains: “It’s hardly ...

Upper Gallery Issa Sow extends the life cycle of manmade creations in "Hoboken, from Old to New ” Issa Sow is a Hoboken artist in the truest sense of the word. Before moving to Hoboken from France about 7 years ago, he had never created art. He had always been an avid collector of traditional and contemporary art from his native Senegal and other countries. But he had never tried making art on his own until, he says, he was "reborn" here in Hoboken. He has learned from experience that moving to a new culture is an opportunity to change your perspective and undergo a transformation. Sow is an autodidact -- a self-taught artist who discovered his talent for creating artwork in acrylic paint, drawings and mixed media. Inspired by real life, each piece has a different personality and its own fingerprint. His artwork is constantly evolving, as he experiments with new concepts. He signs his art “Issa=2,” which represents the binary aspect of all things in life. Issa Sow’s late...

World War I Centennial, 1917-2017: Heaven, Hell or Hoboken “World War I Centennial, 1917-2017: Heaven, Hell or Hoboken” explores how Hoboken and its residents were transformed by the United States entry into World War I on April 6, 1917. The city was declared the main point of embarkation for the U.S. Expeditionary Force bound for Europe. Almost overnight Hoboken became a military town, as hundreds of officers and thousands of enlisted men took residence here to facilitate the logistics of the Embarkation Service. With an additional 14,000 civilian employees, they would oversee the transit of an estimated two million American servicemen to Europe—and then the soldiers’ return—from 1917 through 1919. Soldiers arriving in Hoboken from boot camps soon began to use the phrase “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken,” referencing John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander general of the Army forces destined for Europe. Pershing had predicted they would be in “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken”—return into America...

Through December 23 – Hudson County Hoboken Artist Pays Tribute to World War I — and Fellow Veterans — in a Series of Artworks on “Combat Paper” Hoboken Museum hosts new art exhibit, “Jim Fallon: Heaven, Hell or Hoboken, Monoprints on Combat Paper,” through Dec. 23       The Hoboken Historical Museum was pleased to commemorate the centennial of Armistice Day, the end of World War I, with the opening reception for a WWI-inspired art exhibit by veteran Jim Fallon: “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken: Monoprints on Combat Paper.”  The show will remain on view in the Upper Gallery through December 23.      The exhibit comprises 15 works of art, most on the theme of the centennial of America’s participation in World War I, 1917 - 1918.  The name of Fallon’s show is inspired by General Pershing’s famous rallying cry to the troops, “Heaven, Hell or Hoboken,” near the close of the war, as Hoboken served as the main port of embarkation and return. ...