Arts & Culture Plan – James Solomon for Mayor

FACT SHEET: James Solomon’s Plan to Protect and Promote the Arts in Jersey City

Jersey City is home to a vibrant arts community, with numerous galleries, performance groups, and artists. It is the City that brought musicians like Akon and Kool & the Gang to the world, and attracts artists of every kind from across the state to come display, play, and perform their work. And in 2020, after significant advocacy from the arts community, the City voted overwhelmingly to create the first municipal Arts and Culture Trust Fund in the state.

However, Jersey City artists have also faced many challenges in recent years. The affordability crisis threatens to force many longtime artists out of our community, and has made it increasingly difficult to compete with developers to acquire and operate studio, rehearsal, and performance spaces. And the current Administration has been single-mindedly focused on making marquee announcements like the Pompidou without a practical plan for execution, at the expense of using the Mayor’s convening and advocacy power to support the homegrown arts community and the programs that are already here.

As Mayor, Councilman James Solomon’s priority will be to uplift the arts community that has already thrived in Jersey City, and to support its further growth to make Jersey City the cultural capital of the state. He will do this by tackling the affordability crisis head on, and re-committing City government to the artists and institutions that make their home here.

Promote more homegrown arts education for Jersey City’s children. One of the greatest aspects of the arts is its role in educating and inspiring young people with passion for a craft. Unfortunately, many families simply do not have affordable options for after-school or summer enrichment programs for their children, including for the arts. As Mayor, James will forge partnerships between the schools and local universities, local arts organizations, city agencies, and other stakeholders to create a comprehensive range of arts educational opportunities for our children, as part of his overall platform for improving education. Expanding these offerings will not only fill a much-needed gap for children and families, but will also create many more employment opportunities for local artists by creating more opportunities for them to teach their craft.
Cancel the Pompidou and repurpose the planned funding for Jersey City-based arts. James fully supports thinking big to promote Jersey City as an arts destination, but the current administration failed to deliver a credible plan to fund the Pompidou. Based on its own calculations, the Pompidou has a nearly $250 million budget hole over the next decade. With the State funding pulled, it is now clear that there is not a viable plan to deliver the vision that was originally sold to the community. As Mayor, James will move the City forward beyond this chapter, and work with all stakeholders to come up with a new plan that would better support the arts in Jersey City.
1. Unlock funding from foundations, universities, and companies to enable more Jersey City arts organizations to achieve and maintain scale. Even the largest Jersey City arts organizations typically get very little institutional support from the kinds of funders that typically have a big role in sustaining the arts in cities of a similar size, including when compared to cities like Newark and Princeton. As Mayor, James will work to bring together major institutions that have a stake in the continued vitality and growth of Jersey City with the arts community, and facilitate the kinds of longstanding relationships and partnerships that are necessary for non-profit arts organizations to remain viable.
Reform the process for organizational awards from the Arts Trust Fund. The Trust Fund is an extremely valuable resource for artists and art organizations in the Community, and James will review the grant process to ensure that it is operating fairly and free of political influence, and structured to best promote homegrown arts and culture. As part of this, James will re-evaluate eligibility criteria for the awards, including removing eligibility for organizations outside of Jersey City, and re-evaluating the level of current limits on organization funding and the composition of the panel that determines the awardees, to ensure the decision-making is in the hands of experts from the community. James will also explore opportunities for greater transparency into application evaluation criteria and processes, streamline the application to make it much less burdensome for applicants, and expedite payment processes.
Hold developers accountable for delivering promised arts-related community benefits. In the past, developers have made big promises to support the arts in exchange for approvals for luxury towers, including the construction of state-of-the-art performance spaces, or the provision of artist housing. Developers have often shirked these responsibilities, delivering less than what was promised or unusable spaces not fully built out in order to pad their own bottom line, with no monitoring or accountability from the City. As Mayor, James will strictly hold all developers to their promises, refusing to issue certifications of occupancy until all promises are fulfilled, and will ensure that artists with the relevant expertise are brought in from the outset to make sure that delivered spaces are fit-for-purpose.
Create a central page for the arts on the City’s website. Many cities maintain a page on their website comprehensively highlighting opportunities for local artists and arts-related events in the community, while Jersey City only has some bare-bones information on the website for the Office of Cultural Affairs. James will create and maintain such a central webpage for the arts in Jersey City, which will provide information on the comprehensive range of arts programs and opportunities that local artists, children, and residents can participate in, and also feature a more comprehensive arts events calendar sourced from the community.
Get artists materials and promote sustainability by establishing a creative re-use partnership with the City for discarded items. James will establish a program similar to New York’s “Materials for the Arts,” partnering between the Sanitation Division and the community to divert materials that are usable by artists from landfill disposal, and instead providing those materials for free to local artists, schools, and arts non-profits.