By Tris McCall
It feels unfinished. The lighting isn’t optimal. There are elevators in the back of the room and exposed ducts below the ceiling. It looks very much like what it is: a repurposed corporate foyer on the ground floor of a renovated building. But 130 Bay Street is a new place to see visual art in the Powerhouse Arts District, and that’s always a cause for celebration — even if its owners haven’t yet seen fit to give their gallery a name.
How frequently it’ll be open to the general public is another question altogether. Developers Kushner and KABR Group have put thirty million dollars into the renovation of the Arts & Powerhouse Building, and while they’re clearly proud of the gallery they’ve made, they’ve got many floors of raw and Jersey-spectacular post-industrial space to fill with commercial tenants before their job is done. It’s probably most accurate to call Thursday night’s unveiling of the street level space a sneak peek of things to come.
Foyers might feel like chilly places to see an exhibition, especially when there are pretty spaces like the Novado Gallery and the Nimbus Arts Center a few short steps away. Yet it’s worth remembering that the community at 150 Bay Street has made great use of their lobby for years.
On Thursday, Kushner and KABR Group unveiled a substantial exhibition of oil paintings by the San Salvador-born airscape artist Daniella Portillo. The show was co-presented by the Long Meadow Art Residency, an arts retreat in the Berkshires founded in 2021. Portillo, a participant in the Long Meadow program, currently lives in the Hilltop neighborhood of Jersey City and maintains her studio in the basement of Mana Contemporary (888 Newark Avenue).
“The Sky in Layers,” the Daniella Portillo exhibition, is the first fruits of the Kushner/KABR commitment to the neighborhood. They’ve pledged a quarter of a million dollars to showcase Jersey City artists. Portillo’s paintings of fiery sunlight on billowing clouds will hang in the unnamed gallery through the spring, but there are no plans to open the doors regularly. The next step for Kushner, KABR, and the Long Meadow curators involves establishing regular viewing hours. Portillo’s paintings deserve to be seen — as does the space itself.
The Arts & Powerhouse building has already attracted a number of tenants, including the boxing-themed gymnasium Rumble, the Spear physical therapy center, and Daily Provisions, a Jersey outpost of the excellent Manhattan sandwich shop and bakery chain founded by Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. You will find your correspondent at 130 Bay Street and Daily Provisions the moment it opens (it’s got vegetarian options.) I hope I’ll be able to see an art show in the building that very day. Fingers crossed.
130 Bay is directly across Warren Street from the lot where the demolished Arts Center at 111 First Street once stood. What was once the creative center of Jersey City and the home of our most fertile and fissile artists community is now a heap of bricks. As the Powerhouse Arts District continues to develop, and as property prices continue to rise, it’s worth pausing to remember the creative people who got this show rolling — even if most of them have been priced out of Hudson County entirely.
The original version of this story appeared in the Jersey City Times: Kushner and KABR Group Open Gallery in Powerhouse Arts District
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