Press

(June 2026) Meeting in 2024 at the opening of Villalobos’ solo exhibition Diseñando Masculinidades / Designing Masculinity at ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, the collaboration between Villalobos and Murphy is one that merges lens-based techniques with metalworking and weaving, forging together found objects and fashion into an interdisciplinary fusion.

(May 2026) The curators have chosen to contextualize that typically retiring and quietist genre in a rambling installation meant to reproduce a variety of domestic settings.

(April 29, 2026) “In the Company of Still Life,” on view through May 31 at ArtYard in Frenchtown, explores the complex and enduring relationship between humans and objects through still-life paintings, prints, drawings, collage, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and found objects.

(April 2026) In the Company of Still Life, curated by Clara Weishahn and Alex Cohen, was designed for a gallery at ArtYard, a former brick hatchery on the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When I visited, local artists, art and antique collectors, flea market buffs, and creatives who incorporate junk/treasure in their own works were visibly smitten

(September 2025) In The Dreams of Small Animals, Ash Eliza Williams probes metaphysical boundaries in paintings that channel the sensory perceptions of flowers, frogs, bugs, and birds.

Jersey Arts visits ArtYard to speak with Founder and Executive Director, Jill Kearney, about the importance of art and connection. And to experience their galleries for themselves.

(June 17, 2025) ArtYard is thrilled to announce two new exhibitions on view this summer — Brian House: Synchronizing Uncertainty and Ash Eliza Williams: The Dreams of Small Animals.

(June 8, 2025) Frenchtown sits along the Delaware River and hugs the historic D&R Canal towpath, which stretches more than 70 miles and is popular with walkers, cyclists, and the occasional horseback rider. In the warmer months, you’ll see tubes floating lazily downstream and kayaks tracing the edges of the river. It’s an outdoor lover’s dream. But it’s also an arts and culture haven, home to unexpected delights: a world-class experimental art center, an independent bookstore that hosts renowned authors, and a speakeasy hidden under an 1851 hotel.

(May 7, 2025) Frenchtown's quirky annual festival featuring giant bird puppets, people in bird costumes and a 14-foot steel egg-welded egg is returning on Saturday, May 17.

(May 7, 2025) The Hatch, a free family-friendly festival featuring colorful costumes, upbeat musical performances, and a community procession, returns to Frenchtown for the sixth time at 2 PM on Saturday, May 17.

(Feb. 26, 2025) Eight-year-old Hunterdon County mariachi singer Marilyn Gutiérrez is set to open for Jaime Lozano and Florencia Cuenca’s “Broadway en Spanglish,” starting at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 1 at ArtYard in Frenchtown, N.J.

(Jan 23, 2025) Viewing the sketchbooks in Unfinished Verses, on view at ArtYard in Frenchtown through February 9, is a chance to indulge our voyeuristic tendencies. We are literally peeping through peepholes in the specially constructed ceiling-mounted-looking devices created for this exhibition.

(Jan 18, 2025) Cindy Stockton Moore takes a trip to ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ, to weigh in on the group exhibition, 'Barrier,' which explores various ways humans use to separate things from things, persons from persons, and other internal or external divides. Cindy says, "The exhibition as a whole destabilizes perceived divisions – sometime pictorially...and sometimes geographically."

(January 2025) Kaitlin Pomerantz and Lucia Thomé’s curation of Barrier at ArtYard is its own kind of flood. It stylizes and reinterprets the material syntax of architecture that closes off access—the materials and forms that reinforce borders and boundaries—to express its language and visualize a choreography of unimpeded movement that serves as a kind of resistance.

(Jan 15, 2025) Artist Kathleen Henderson and curator and ArtYard Founder Jill Kearney join Rail Editor-at-Large Andrew Woolbright for a conversation.

(Nov 26, 2025) In Barrier, 12 artists evoke Angela Davis’s transformative abolitionist vision that “walls turned sideways are bridges.”

(Aug 21, 2024) “Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey: The Alchemy of Blood” refuses to take the easy way out. The exhibition, which occupies the main first floor gallery of ArtYard in Frenchtown, does not skimp on the discomfort. These paintings and sculptures are the result of a firsthand encounter with something monstrous and ravenous.

(July 17, 2024) Writer Suleika Jaouad was 22 when she was diagnosed with leukemia and began documenting her experience, becoming the author of the Emmy award-winning column “Life, Interrupted” and later The New York Times bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted.

(May 22, 2024) Charlotte Schulz’s exquisite charcoal drawings stand out for both their form and content.

(May 23, 2024) For those looking to take in a first-rate show without the big city ticket prices and hassles, the McDonnell Theater in Frenchtown may fit the bill.

(January 18, 2024) It may be the middle of winter, but two exhibitions on view at ArtYard in Frenchtown connect us to the world of plants, living things, and the lightness of being. Kendall Buster: What Blooms is on view through January 21, and Lucia Monge: While a Leaf Breathes can be seen through January 28.

(Jan 10, 2024) At FiNNBAR, a produce- and seasonally-driven Italian and Mediterranean restaurant and bar, 70 percent of its profits will go to Studio Route 29, a Frenchtown nonprofit art center for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities, which opened thanks to a grant from Kearney.

(November 17, 2023) Each month on The Subtext, Brian speaks with a playwright about life, writing, and whatever itches we are scratching. On this month’s episode, Brian visits Brooklyn, N.Y., for a chat with playwright TyLie Shider.

(October 11, 2023) Humor and music keep viewers entertained as the play tackles difficult themes.

(October 5, 2023) Featuring haunting remnants of mysterious blazes, cutting-edge technology, and a culmination of Lance Weiler‘s ongoing exploration of memory and truth, “Where There’s Smoke” expands the boundaries of form, narrative, and artistic expression.

(October 4, 2023) Currently the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Arrechea has long been intrigued by architecture and its meanings.

(September 28, 2023) Next on You Oughta Know, visit ArtYard, a nonprofit that reveals the transformational power of art. Explore a powerful exhibit by artist Natalie de Segonzac.

(September 20, 2023) ArtYard Announces its First Live Animation Festival offering a weekend of unique cinematic experiences that fuse the real and unreal through live animation performances.

(August 2023) Hunterdon County, NJ is the land of adventure. 🤩 Add these activities to your summer list for the complete Garden State escape.

(August 2023) ArtYard, a contemporary museum gallery and performance space, has basically reshaped small Delaware River towns on the New Jersey side, by adding a world-class, yet intimate art institution to this farm region.

(July 17, 2023) A sea change is underway across the arts, propelled by people with disabilities who are defying a deficit mentality and generating new languages in dance, theater, and visual art. Fresh ways of experiencing the arts are also emerging, such as haptic vests that translate music into body vibrations and lyrical audio descriptions of visual media.

(July 14, 2023) For anyone who’s suffered the slow loss of a parent, or struggled to truly know them as evidence of who they were fades into the mists of time, there’s a lot to relate to. The photography is beautiful, and a few of the new tactile elements were highly resonant.

(June 28, 2023) ArtYard Shows Work by Artists Who Harness Creativity to Heal

(6/26/2023) This troubling, rewarding, emotionally exhausting project draws the gallery-goer into a blaze-threatened home, bit by bit, shot by shot, and flame by beckoning flame.

(5/14/2023) Paul Bowen: Drift "a beautifully installed exhibition with some magical moments." Some works suggest a narrative and seem to be in a moment of arrested movement. Flyer, hung just above eye level, confronts us with a muscley vertical element that slices the space into tilting and leaning towards us. It gives a little jolt and uplift and a slight sense of menace like the feeling one gets standing at the bow of a very large ship at dock, foreboding and majestic as it bobs with the waves

(5/11/23) ArtYard has selected TyLie Shider as the inaugural recipient of the ArtYard Playwright Fellowship. Shider will spend nine months in residency at ArtYard developing new work, working closely with ArtYard artistic and technical staff and guest theatre curator Deonté Griffin-Quick.

(5/1/23) Lance Weiler is an A.I. convert. His art students at Columbia University are still debating the creative value of ChatGPT and Midjourney. Powerful tools or a crutch?

(4/27/23) Shoes, A Love Story invites viewers to consider footwear as autobiography, activism, and socioeconomic commentary. The well-worn shoes range from embroidered silk slippers to steel-and-leather polio braces, from oversized clown feet to woven straw clogs

(3/9/23) The actor-model-author-farmer plays “dogs, cats, chickens, peacocks, and, of course, Charles Darwin,” in a comedic meditation on art and science. It plays at Frenchtown's ArtYard this weekend.

(3/8/23) This exhibition invites viewers to question their notions of beauty, artistry, and materiality. On view in Frenchtown, New Jersey.

(3/8/2023) You can learn a lot from Isabella Rossellini’s new one-woman show. But “Darwin’s Smile” — the Emmy nominee’s meditation on empathy and its intersection with acting and the study of animal behavior — is certainly not a lecture.

(3/9/23) “It’s really nice for people with disabilities to have a place where they’re celebrated for who they are instead of trying to fix them or make them fit into society in a way that they’re not."

(2/18/23) A Flemington resident's artwork will be featured at a new exhibition at ArtYard, in Frenchtown, this season, beginning Saturday. Valerie Huhn, of Flemington, and David Horowitz, of Frenchtown, have created works in "Shoes, A Love Story."

(2/8/2023) Studio Route 29 is a new art studio for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. It offers classes, programming, and open work time.

(12/15/2022) Interdisciplinary artist Sebastienne Mundheim takes on the work of Kea Tawana in workshops and upcoming performance at ArtYard.

(11/21/22) Alexandre Arrechea en la conjura del agua y el silencio

(11/4/22) A group of Ukrainian performers were set to put on a show at ArtYard in Frenchtown Friday and Saturday night. "Mothermotherland" will be followed by talkback events where the audience can ask the cast questions.

(October 2022) A founding member of the Cuban Collective, Los Carpinteros, international artist Alexandre Arrechea creates a new exhibition at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. We meet the artist during his residency there as he creates monumental work, including a watercolor made with water drawn from the nearby Delaware River. Curator Elsa Mora describes how growing up in Cuba affected Arrechea’s work.

(October 2022) Live music at ArtYard

(September 2022) ArtYard inaugurated the new exhibition by Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea. LANDSCAPE AND HIERARCHIES explores the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the domino effect that human actions may have on society and nature.

(8/31/22) A month-by-month visual guide to the museum exhibitions and art events you should check out in New York City this season.

(9/21/2022) Studio Route 29 will begin accepting applications on a first-come, first-serve basis for those with development and intellectual disabilities.

(8/1/2022) Peter Schumann's philosophy has been explored recently at ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, through an installation of masks, puppets, books, paper mâché relief work, and paintings conveying his deep commitment to the creative and political work which unites artists and communities in celebration and protest. The installation featured historic never-before displayed woodcuts, brand new giant books, and paintings in black and white plus giant paper mâché sculpture, sweeping multi-chrome paintings, masks and objects.

(7/21/2022) The Hatch, a raucous and exuberant celebration of creative incubation and community, featured the brass band Ocean Avenue Stompers, a dozen artists led by Laura Bernstein who unfurled their 100-foot-long Miracle Tapestry Project, and a parade of friendly locals dressed as birds bringing merriment through downtown Frenchtown

(7/7/2022) ArtYard is hosting a Film Festival of Joy, July 13-17, featuring a diverse selection of shorts, features, silent films, cartoons and documentaries. Filmmakers will be there to answer audience questions, and the fest wraps up with a gospel performance by the Paterson-based group Anointed Friends.

(7/1/2022) On Saturday, June 25, ArtYard in Frenchtown invited guests to its fifth annual “Hatch” event. The event is ArtYard’s “joyful celebration of creative incubation.”

(6/13/2022) A recent reading of TyLie Shider’s play ‘Whittier,’ about the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, brought together artists intent on sustaining the energy of the past 2 years of protest.

(6/7/2022) “‘Ecstatic Decrepitude’ is presented on two stories,” Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann writes of his exhibition at ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, from April 30 to July 31, 2022.

(6/3/2022) These days, Frenchtown is in the midst of a major revival, with an active budding art scene anchored by ArtYard, a contemporary art and performance center that opened in May of last year. While this is bringing in a new wave of visitors, Frenchtown has enjoyed a huge underlying current of local hometown pride right from the start. From annual events like Bastille Day, to River Fest, to the Frenchtown Mermaid Parade, it’s a town brimming with love for their river, community, and visitors alike.

(5/27/2022) ArtYard was designed for immersion. The galleries in this Frenchtown arts center are big enough to dry-dock a boat in. It’s the sort of place that encourages installations, rather than exhibitions. Instead of an array of pictures on a wall, waiting there to be apprehended, the Yard brims over with art. Its curators invite visitors to plunge in. The refurbished theater is impressive to behold — it’s right on the banks of a beautiful bend in the Delaware River — and it requires visions to match its dimensions. The ArtYard whispers to creators: Use every square inch of these galleries. Take advantage of the wide walls and high ceilings. Make a fantasy world.

(5/15/2022) This Saturday, May 21, theatergoers are invited to join ArtYard in Frenchtown for a reading of Whittier, a new docudrama by TyLie Shider. Whittier is a neighborhood in Minneapolis, close to where the murder of George Floyd took place. Shider’s new play follows residents of Whittier grappling with that tragedy, as well as the stresses of life during the lockdown of 2020.

(4/9/2022) Arthur Vint & Associates bring a unique jazz-influenced cinematic sound to ArtYard Frenchtown Saturday, April 9 at 8pm. Arthur Vint and ArtYard concert curator and owner of the Frenchtown Bookshop Scott Sheldon join WBGO Journal host Douglas Doyle to talk about the multi-media event that will feature sounds from the late composer Ennio Morricone, including The Good The Bad and The Ugly starring jazz lover Clint Eastwood Fans.

(3/7/2022) With experience hosting more than 250 theater, poetry, dance, music and film events, ArtYard in Frenchtown has become a cultural epicenter since it opened five years ago along the Delaware River. But now, the curtain is up at 13 Front St.

(3/7/2022) Mandee Hammerstein interviews with ArtYard’s Communications Manager Meghan Van Dyk. Mandee and Meghan dive into the opening act for ArtYard’s much anticipated McDonnell Theater opening on March 3rd, headlining with Multi-Award-Winning Hip Hop Artist Supaman.

(3/2/2022) With exhibitions, performances, residencies, and workshops, ArtYard welcomes the chance to make sense of an otherwise senseless world

(1/20/2022) ArtYard in Frenchtown, N.J., opened its first exhibition of the new year, “Invisible,” on Jan. 15. Curated by Jill Kearney, “Invisible” explores what the author Svetlana Alexievich calls “the missing history – the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.”

(1/13/2022) ArtYard in Frenchtown has been around for five years, but 2022 is set to be its most exciting year yet. The nonprofit has expanded to become a hub for creation and collaboration.

(7/14/2021) His service is so well-known throughout the borough that he was even included in a 2018 exhibition at the ArtYard that paid tribute to Frenchtown.

(5/3/2021) The founder and executive director of a renowned contemporary arts center in New Jersey is guided by an overarching mission: to incubate creative expression and catalyze collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art to the greatest extent that she can.

(3/2/2020) ArtYard is a treasure. Founded by Jill Kearney and Stephen McDonnell in 2016, the Frenchtown center is rapidly fulfilling the original vision and becoming a world-class center for the arts.

(11/8/2019) “It’s going to be a major transformational item for our downtown," Myhre said. “I think it’s going to be a big driver of tourism and visitors, and it’s going to really revitalize a whole area of town that was previously occupied by two vacant buildings that they took down.”

(3/29/2019) The Creative Commons is remarkable, not just because the work is so good, but because what it represents is so new.

(8/15/2018) The Frenchtown community is doing all that they can to help get a couple who lost everything in a fire get back on their feet.

(6/23/2017) The exhibition "Ordinary Obsessions" will feature drawings, sculptures, installations and video works. Both artists looked at everyday objects for inspiration in creating thought-provoking work.

(March 17, 2017) For the past three months, members of the Frenchtown, New Jersey community have been sharing their wishes anonymously with the neighborhood gallery ArtYard. An art installation made from the collected wishes will be on display in the exhibit "Through the Unfrequented Sky." Those who view the piece, which resembles a cloud, are asked to look for repeated wishes.

ArtYard Live Animation Festival offers unique cinematic experiences

ArtYard is excited to celebrate the launch of two summer exhibitions, Natalie de Segonzac: Evidence and Where There’s Smoke, a project by Lance Weiler, as well as a new installation by Sebastienne Mundheim.

We are excited to announce TyLie Shider as the inaugural recipient of the ArtYard Playwright Fellowship, a new initiative to support mid-career playwrights and theater artists.

This year’s lineup, which kicked off this weekend with a rousing performance by Pardon My French!, includes a powerhouse of talented artists whose music styles range from soul to Western swing and classical to indigenous roots.

ArtYard is excited to announce four unique exhibitions that open this winter — Paul Bowen: Drift, featuring sculptures of wood and found materials; As Is, a selection of unauthored objects from the world of art without intent; Shoes, A Love Story, an assembly of shoes that hint at mysterious and beguiling narratives; and Michael Mangino: Paint, a solo exhibition of recent works by a Studio Route 29 artist.

A theater troupe formed by Ukrainian actors in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of the country will present a new performance exploring motherland at ArtYard’s McDonnell Theater in November.

ArtYard is delighted to support the launch of Studio Route 29, a progressive art studio for artists with developmental and intellectual disabilities, which opens this fall at our former gallery at 62A Trenton Ave.

ArtYard will host a press preview from 4 to 6 PM on Saturday, Sept. 17 for Landscape and Hierarchies, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Alexandre Arrechea, before its opening to visitors.

ArtYard is thrilled to present Landscape and Hierarchies, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Alexandre Arrechea opening with a reception at 6 PM on Saturday, Sept. 17 in Frenchtown, NJ.

All are invited to join in the procession alongside the Ocean Avenue Stompers and Miracle Tapestries Project

ArtYard is pleased to present Ecstatic Decrepitude, an exhibition featuring works by Bread and Puppet Founder Peter Schumann.

ArtYard is pleased to announce its partnership with the Baryshnikov Arts Center for a residency program to support the development of new work that launches in March with Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland.

Three years after breaking ground on our new building at 13 Front Street and 10 months after welcoming the first visitors to our galleries, we are thrilled to announce the opening month of programming at the McDonnell Theater.

ArtYard is pleased to present Invisible, an exhibition curated by Jill Kearney featuring the work of twelve artists whose practices examine omitted histories, imperceptible forces, and unspoken narratives which render that which is apparent, misleading, or incomplete.

Curated by Robin Hill and Ulla Warchol / BiolunarL, Going to the Meadow is a living exhibition, staged in four parts, and borrows a musical term to examine the essence of collaboration at this moment in time.

It gives us great pleasure to announce a new addition to the ArtYard campus. This May we closed on the beautiful and iconic building at 12 Bridge Street, once known as the Apgar House

ArtYard, a nonprofit contemporary art center, is set to open its newly completed 21,000-square-foot home with two floors of exhibition space and a 162-seat state-of-the-art theater at a ceremony on May 1. This interdisciplinary art center is located in Frenchtown, NJ, a beguiling small town perched at the Delaware River’s edge within a little more than an hour’s drive of Philadelphia and New York that features bike paths, hiking trails, historic hotels, farm-to-table restaurants, and an emerging art scene.