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Presented by Art Wall JC + Coolvines Powerhouse Curated by Kati Vilim Featuring the unprecedented industrial visions of Loura van der Meule — a long-lauded pioneer painter in Jersey City’s art community — this small yet powerful and poignant exhibition captures in a mere few canvases the artist’s singular canonical cynosure: Jersey City’s architectural barrens and the forlorn monuments that occupy them across slow-moving superimpositions of time, with the iconic Powerhouse at the blurred, undisclosed center (or edge), surrounded, but never overtaken, by the new sky’s-the-limit towers of our era. Loura van der Meule’s small canvases hang silently inside the modest-sized Art Wall JC boutique gallery — itself placed at the rear of Coolvines Powerhouse and Butler Café, a combined wine, spirits, candle, book, coffee and cafe retail space occupying the raised ground floor of Modera Lofts, a perfectly preserved, superblock-sized 1905 Butler Brothers warehouse (designed by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt) transformed 10 years ago into an epic elevated period living development — and reveal the peeling layers and lamentations of this local threatened architecture. From the seemingly single stroke of a brush or ink pen she gives us a visceral Jersey City menagerie of ancient buildings that perhaps hold little to no value to the city’s multi-billion-dollar real estate industry: buildings without, in the view of many, development merit; buildings that cannot, should not, fit in; buildings without architectural hope; buildings declared expendable. The artist’s monuments recede, retract, leap, transition in the fields of ticking timelapses and subtle jump cuts, from architectonic state to architectonic state. Weather-beaten, weather-torn veneers; scarred and scabbed masonry tissue; de-pointed and de-pointing brick courses; pulled-apart facades; smashed walls; unglazed windows; severed smokestacks — and then in the blink of an eye they all seem to turn back into their once-new molds, as if reborn yet born once, blind to time and neglect, but their visages now softened, seen from mystical corners only accessible in the artist’s long-carried dreamscape. Each painting in van der Meule’s Stages of Transition exhibition — it closes August 3 — is a refusal of architectural erasure, an enduring voice, a defense against development. The Powerhouse, as we see and know it in its current ruinous manifestation, lives as a quantum effigy in her painted work, just as it lives — to the rising anxiety of modern builders — in the physicality of its own magnificent image, amazingly just a few steps away. — John Gomez, Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy Stages of Transitions runs through August 3, 2026, and is generously supported by public funds from the Jersey City Arts and Culture Trust Fund. Free admission, with exhibited artwork available for purchase. Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to check out the specially curated wine and spirits collections at Coolvines Powerhouse and to grab a latte and light bite at Butler Café just a few steps away.
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