"Katama," by Stephen Wuensch
If you're looking for the place in Jersey City that is farthest from deep space, Hamilton Park would be that place. Everything about the neighborhood is intensely terrestrial. It's green, it's full of life, and it's the home of many people who are proximate to earthly power of one kind or another. Hamilton Park exudes a spirit of closeness, with street-level businesses and stoop-level life, the rest of the Downtown in walking distance, and New York City on the far side of the tunnel. Those who convene there do not seem like lost astronauts. There's too much at their fingertips for them to bother thinking about the void.
Not so on Cornelison Avenue. There’s a raw, defiant industrial beauty to the northern part of Bergen-Lafayette, but there isn’t much foot traffic, and there’s not much vegetation, either. A person walking the long blocks west of Grand Street after hours might feel some of the detachment and weightlessness of the space cadet. For almost a decade, the gallerists at Deep Space (77 Cornelison Ave.) have turned that perception of remoteness to their advantage, cultivating the strange, the sci-fi, and the downright extraterrestrial, and occasionally sending radio signals into the darkness in the hope that there’ll be somebody out there to listen.
Bergen-Lafayette is also the most extensively tagged part of Jersey City, and the Deep Space Gallery has often served as a liminal space mediating the street and the museum. Muralists accustomed to working by starlight have stepped into the orbital and presented observations, reactions, provocations, and urban riddles. These shows have run on outsider energy. They’ve established Deep Space as an essential Jersey City place — one with an aesthetic that has become part of our personality. In order to experience Deep Space art, visitors have had to disengage from the Downtown grid and the mothership of Manhattan and pilot themselves over to an unfamiliar sector.
That’s still true, but maybe less than it used to be. In May, Deep Space opened a satellite gallery on the northeastern corner of Hamilton Park, one block away from the Word bookstore and the Clutter home goods and gift shop. DS Special Projects (222 9th St.) shares a building with Andco North, a co-working space, Betty’s Ceramics Club, and an outpost of the Tiger Schulmann karate empire. The L-shaped display room feels more than a little like an entrance foyer to a modern office building, but the gallery greets the street with a great big cheerful window, and there’s sufficient wallspace inside to accommodate some substantial paintings.
Rather than modify the Deep Space approach for their inaugural show, the gallerists have suited up a first string team of misfits: painter Stephen Wuensch, whose muscular abstract expressionism has the smoldering madness of a muralist trapped indoors, Macauley Norman, a friendly neighborhood Spiderman spinning webs of threads over his multimedia pieces, faerie-light portraitist Rebecca N. Johnson, and Keith “TF Dutchman” Van Pelt, a sculptor in stained glass who is also one of the Deep Space founders and curators.
It is not too surprising to see these astral travelers touch down in Hamilton Park. Along with his partner Jenna Geiger, Van Pelt has lately been curating shows in the wainscoted atrium of the Majestic Theatre Condominiums on Montgomery Street. Silverman, the redevelopers of the Majestic, also count Swift & Co., the new residential and retail building that contains DS Special Projects (and Betty’s, and Andco, and that Tiger Schulmann studio) as part of their portfolio. Shamona Stokes, the partner of the Deep Space principals in Wandering Lights Projects, is also the community director at Elevator (135 Erie St.), the hospital-turned-arts-complex on the eastern side of the Park where Johnson and Wuensch have both maintained studios. That, too, is a Silverman restoration.
The developers at Silverman have earned a reputation for historical and aesthetic sensitivity uncommon among businessmen connected to Jersey City real estate. Swift & Co. is a rarity: a multi-story edifice that actually looks good. Its terraces and fenestrations, all visible to pedestrians exiting Hamilton Park to the east, invite curiosity and exploration. The ground-floor presence of DS Special Projects adds to the structure’s studied and cantilevered cool, but the Silverman collaboration with the curators from Bergen-Lafayette doesn’t end there. Instead, the developer has decorated the common spaces in Swift & Co. with Deep Space and Elevator artwork: pieces by Stokes, stained glass sconces and design features by Van Pelt, and some of the best and most emotional paintings Rebecca N. Johnson ever showed to audiences on Cornelison Avenue. A handsome apartment complex in one of the most expensive corners of the Garden State now feels very much like Deep Space — a gallery in a part of Jersey City where nobody wants to live.
As much as any landlord could, Silverman has earned the trust of the creative community. The developers had their pick of artists and galleries with whom to align themselves, and they chose the most idiosyncratic operation in town. Shrewd brand strategy that was, but it also demonstrated good taste — and courage. Deep Space art is not for everyone. Connected as it is to the tradition of Jersey City street art, it’s emotionally provocative and implicitly subversive. The developers are comfortable with expressions of alienation and nonconformity, grief, outrage, rejection of capitalist imperatives, and, occasionally, a ferocious refusal to grow up.
By collaborating with Deep Space, Silverman has done more than usher a team of outsiders inside. They’ve also furthered a trend: the re-centering of creative life in the Historic Downtown. In 2025, Art Fair 14C dropped anchor in the Powerhouse Arts District after a four year float around other neighborhoods. The opening of studio complexes at Elevator and Project 14C serves as a counterweight to Mana Contemporary on the West Side. New-ish galleries at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.) and IMUR (67 Greene St.) have been mounting strong shows and maintaining ambitious schedules; the reopened MoRA (80 Grand St.) hasn’t been quite as consistent, but several of the group exhibitions there have been outstanding. This year’s Art Crawls have directed pedestrians to Downtown streets and Downtown businesses.
This wasn’t where we were heading. Before the pandemic, the forces working on the art scene were centrifugal. The future, we believe, belonged to wards other than the Downtown: inexpensive wards, or relatively inexpensive ones, where artists could spread out and make places of their own. Artists from other neighborhoods pressed for equal representation and angled for a version of the annual Studio Tour that could bring Downtowners to parts of town far from the PATH stops. This, we all agreed, was a fair allocation of attention in a changing city. But this year, it isn’t even clear that there will be a Studio Tour. The action is collapsing back on the Downtown neighborhoods and Downtown streets — the places in this expensive town that, we were told, were too exclusive, too conservative, and too unrepresentative to be home to the sort of artistic ferment that a thriving scene depends upon.
Deep Space was part of that move to the periphery. Its continued existence on Cornelison Avenue ratified the egalitarian principles that its artists believe in. If Geiger and Van Pelt could operate a gallery on a street in a post-industrial zone where few people ever walk by, it stood to reason that others could do the same. Their perseverance has been an inspiration to D.I.Y. artists, gallerists, and curators (and those who want a little D.I.Y. credibility) all over the region. Ironically, their outsider’s aesthetic has been so successfully integrated into our understanding of who we are as a community that it no longer belongs to the fringes. During the most recent JC Fridays festival, echoes from Deep Space were audible all over town. Johnson’s visual algebra — young women, flowers, flowing water, liquidity, mutability, and pastel color as signs of femininity and resistance to aggressive authority — felt like the template for the entire citywide art event.
Swift & Co. is not in the Powerhouse Arts district. Nevertheless, DS Special Projects is closer to the initial dream of the PAD than anything we’ve seen since the demolition of 111 First Street. It’s located right at street level, it’s eye-catching, and it’s attached to a building with arts-adjacent businesses and an owner interested in raising the profiles of the artists on display. Deep Space and Silverman have made sure that it’s enmeshed in a pedestrian zone. The participants in its initial show are so deeply embedded in Jersey City that they may as well be streetlamps. Several of those exhibitors are also associated with a nearby building where art is made and displayed.
All that’s missing is the affordable artist housing — and affordability in general. Maybe one day we’ll get it. But probably not in Hamilton Park.
"Pour All the Wine, Laugh a Lot" by Rebecca N. Johnson
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
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