The Moving Architects, Where She Once Stood / Parlor (1796-1840) with Nicole Arakaki and Mariah Anton-Arters / Photo by Julie Lemberger
Lately, every day seems to bring new reports of change and uncertainty. This past week, the ongoing trials facing PBS hit home in New Jersey, as WNET announced it would end its relationship with NJ PBS by July 1, 2026. Immediately, emails and texts began to arrive in our in-boxes: what does this mean for State of the Arts? The short answer is that it’s too early to tell—for instance, another entity may step up to run NJ PBS. We will let you know! In the meantime, we are fully into production with the new season.
Producer Bob Szuter and DP Nate Reininga interview Stanley Clarke / Photo by Jack Stawowczyk for State of the Arts
Our first episode, premiering October 22, features three amazing stories. We meet legendary jazz bassist Stanley Clarke as he connects with a new generation of musicians in a performance at Wiggins Waterfront Park in Camden. We visit Montclair’s Crane House for a site-specific dance by the Moving Architects, and travel to Luna Stage in West Orange for a play set in 1933, right as Hitler was fast turning Germany into a ruthless dictatorship. Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library by playwright Jenny Lyn Bader is based on the real life adventure of political theorist Hannah Arendt’s narrow escape from an S.S. jail in Berlin, where the newly married young scholar was being held on charges of “illegal research.”
Ella Dershowitz and Brett Temple in Luna Stage’s Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library / Photo by Valerie Terranova
In the coming months, State of the Arts will feature Oh God…Beautiful Machine, a monumental symphonic jazz work by composer Vince di Mura with text by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. We’ll visit the highly anticipated new Princeton University Art Museum, which has roughly doubled its size, and meet the artists of the A-Team, who first came together 25 years ago at the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen. When the Newark Museum of Art opens Aminah Robinson, Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir, we’ll premiere a story shot in the artist’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio. In her studio, Aminah made work that traced her threads of belonging out into the world, in the process telling a universal story of what it means to call somewhere home.
Artist Aminah Robinson’s kitchen on Sunbury Road in Columbus, Ohio
In a way, artists are always making surprising connections. They play in ways that show us new ways of seeing in a constantly changing world. The team here at State of the Arts invites you to follow their journeys with us as we begin another unknowable year.
