SAVE THE POWERHOUSE WALKING TOUR, SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2026, 12-2PM

A JERSEY CITY TREASURE and POWERHOUSE CHAMPION

Congratulations to Anne Novado — artist, curator, entrepreneur, community builder, historic preservationist — on the 10th anniversary of her groundbreaking art space Novado Gallery located in the “industrial-chic” Modera Lofts building in the heart and center of the Powerhouse Arts District. She is a Jersey City treasure, a living legend, and we are so grateful for the hard work and dedication she has shown as a business owner, a lover of art and artists, and a believer in the resurgence of the historic Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Powerhouse.

Anne had the foresight, faith, and fortitude to open her gallery all those years ago to help uplift an art community still reeling from the loss of the long-time artist enclave 111 First Street. Bringing her experience as a painter and community organizer to the neighborhood, Anne decided to take a chance with creating a shared, welcoming, inclusive space for all artists using every medium and media. Partnering with Mill Creek Development at the newly adapted and restored Modera Lofts, she set out to create a business that has, incredibly, stood the test of time, finding support from residents, artists, and visitors alike. Novado Gallery has grown into a beloved community asset and has made the Modera Lofts residential building all the more distinct, lively,and special.

The Powerhouse is particularly a building Anne and gallery partner and co-director Eleazar Sanchez have thrown their support behind, with every Save the Powerhouse tour concluding — at their invitation and insistence — at the gallery in order for tour participants to view Powerhouse paintings by local artist, preservationist, and podcaster Nathalie Kalbach. The tours, we realize, would not be as meaningful, impactful, and popular without their participation, presence, and touch!

The Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy salutes Anne and Novado Gallery and will be there saluting this pioneering cultural institution for many anniversaries to come!

CLOSING AUGUST 3: STAGES OF TRANSITION

A very special exhibition by pioneer Jersey City artist Loura van der Meule at Art Wall JC. See it before it closes!

Curated by Kati Vilim and 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 at Art Wall JC 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 — situated in the rear of Coolvines Powerhouse and adjacent to Butler Café, a combined wine, spirits, candle, book, coffee and cafe retail space occupying the raised ground floor of Modera Lofts, a super-block-sized warehouse 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 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.

JOIN THE POWERHOUSE MOVEMENT