After visiting her horse, Katie and I returned to civilization and spent the rest of the day at the annual Jersey City Art Tour.
What a great idea! You pick-up a self-guided tour map that indicates dozens of spots across the city where artists are exhibiting and selling their work, then you stop by to check out whatever sounds interesting. We didn’t ever get a program, just a map with a bunch of numbered dots on it, so we made random stops. The cool part was that it wasn’t just studios and galleries exhibiting. Sometimes we’d show up and find the “gallery” was someone’s garage or second-floor apartment, a bowl of pretzels sitting on a table and people milling around like it was a impromptu party. Or it’d be a bar or a restaurant with the art hanging on the walls, inside and out. One of the fancier galleries was nestled under a muddy highway entrance ramp and for refreshments they had a styrofoam cup-full of snack-size Snickers and Butterfinger bars and a bottle of pinot grigio with bits of cork floating in it. Throughout the tour everyone was friendly and cool and there wasn’t any pressure to buy anything.
Among the more intriguing stuff we saw were small handmade blank books, knit cross-section replicas of internal organs, photographs of lightning and hand-tinted Polaroids of Europe, a dress made entirely from unused tampons and other feminine hygiene products, and sculptures of fish made from scrap metal with cranks you could turn to move their fins and mouths.
After the end of a long day, we had dinner at Tania’s, a mighty fine Polish restaurant where we chowed down cheap and tasty pierogi, potato pancakes, sausage, beets, cucumber salad, and Polish beers that our waiter assured us were unavailable in New York outside of Greenpoint. Then it was off to buy cat food which we dropped off for Katie’s cats, then set out again to a party organized by William, a coworker of Katie’s from her Barnes & Noble days who’s an accomplished artist and was one of the exhibitors on the Art Tour. He has a small and comfy apartment crammed with his large oil canvases, sketchbooks, random furniture, records, CDs and books, mannequin heads and loads of knicknacks. The party soundtrack included the Pixies, Mates Of State, some sort of krautrock and an awful lot of Joy Division. A nice touch was a green plastic bowl of cheap and fun party favors, including carpal-tunnel wrist braces, a rainbow-colored elastic headband, a cellophane-wrapped necktie, a laser pointer, compasses and assorted dollar-store toys. When the bowl got low, Katie and I refreshed it with items we stealthily removed from William’s kitchen counter and cupboards: a wrapped white candle, a half-empty tube of Krazy Glue the feline furball remedy, PetroMalt, and a small jar of gravy.