Creative Grove
Imagine the cultural centers built around old world Europe. You have everything outdoors. There’s always a market place in a closed off central avenue buzzing with pedestrians. People lounge around watching musicians and performance art, or maybe talking politics.
This is a center for free expression.
This is the vision Uta Brauser has for Jersey City’s Creative Grove Artist Market, a new art exchange held every Friday from to 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Grove Street PATH Plaza. Creative Grove aims to connect artist vendors with art enthusiasts on a weekly basis in an open forum, housing up to 50 tables and tents.
“We want to bring everyone together. The main purpose is to bring the Jersey City art scene together,” said Brauser, an artist and organizer of the weekly event. “That’s the first main purpose, but we will welcome anyone with fabulous work.
Creative Grove is open to all artists in the metropolitan area, and includes vendors from New York City, Nutley and Red Bank.
“It will be a nice mixture of successful artists, designers, and homegrown starters with small distribution–local mom and pops,” said Brauser, who also runs the Fish with Braids gallery located on Jersey Avenue in Jersey City.
The marketplace strives to offer artists a place where they can not only display their crafts, but make a tidy profit. Selling their artistic goods–from paintings to handcrafted hats–offers consumers a potential alternative to cheap foreign imports and designer knock-offs. Brauser envisions a multi-level environment where the artists create one-of-a-kind work while providing people with the goods they want.
“I imagine that when some people look for something, they find it here. It would be a really good connecting point. Like a train station,” said Brauser, while pointing to the bustling crowd entering and leaving the Grove Street PATH station. She compares the market to a moving train: “unstoppable.”
The Artist Market began as the brainchild of Arts in Action, a non-profit organization run by Brauser and Laura Dejban, with the goal of starting art centers that can promote artwork and offer learning experiences. They envision adopting buildings in Jersey City to run as centers where artists can have a place to gather.
“Our mission is to first of all create a scene for us. We want to have a place that’s ours…a public place that’s ours,” said Brauser. “We’re claiming public space and turning it into whatever we will make this.”
Maggie Ens, one art seller present at the inaugural May 22 market, likened the energy of the Grove Street event to the now defunct 111 First Street Arts Community. The building served as low-rent living spaces that gathered some 120 Jersey City artists, musicians and artisans for over 15 years until redevelopment plans hit.
“A funky, old, dirty warehouse. Loft living. It had such vitality,” said Ens, who has created artwork from re-used and re-purposed garbage since the 1980’s. “The market is a way to connect with people since the diaspora.”
Ens spent much of that day not only selling her artwork, but befriending the people who came out. She sold one piece, a collage of photographs and collected fruit and food stickers that detailed her transition into eating only un-cooked and un-processed vegetarian food. Ens unexpectedly found a fast friend in one of her customers, Tsehai Hiwot.
“She’s very friendly, so we just naturally started talking to each other, like we knew each other for years or something,” said Hiwot, who spent much of the day talking with Ens. “We were talking about animal rights and about how I missed the Veggie Parade and this film I saw about animal rights. I bought one of her pieces because I really liked it.”
Hiwot, a Bayonne resident, first came to support a friend who sold New Jersey-themed graffiti painted on subway maps, t-shirts and hats at the market. But she stayed because she loves to support homegrown artists and musicians.
“I think it’s very important to support the artists because I’m also an artist too,” said Hiwot, “and I think that without art and without culture, the society is dead.”
Visit www.CreativeGrove.org for more information about the Grove Street Artist Market, or to become a vendor.