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Last month, NJPAC got some very good news.

At its February Board meeting, the New Jersey Economic Development Authority awarded NJPAC almost $200 million in Aspire Program tax credits to support the construction of the residential, retail, educational and cultural projects that make up NJPAC’s long-planned campus-wide redevelopment.

This award is unprecedented in the Arts Center’s history. It is the largest award of financial support that NJPAC has ever received, exceeding even the state support given to construct the Arts Center building itself and the $33 million we received from the NJEDA to build One Theater Square in 2012.

After years of planning, with this award turbocharging our efforts, construction on the first of those projects will commence … next week!

The award itself is wonderful, but what it means is even better: A generation after the Arts Center opened, we will make the ambitious vision of our founders a brick-and-steel reality.

Because those founders – former Governor Tom Kean, Ray Chambers, former Mayor Sharpe James and Larry Goldman – never saw NJPAC as just a theater.

Instead, they saw us as the cornerstone of an entire arts district. That’s why they intentionally secured 12 acres for the Arts Center to sit on, even though our current building only takes up about five.

And that neighborhood is what we start building on April 1, an effort that will continue in phases with move-ins expected by first quarter 2027. We will transform the campus surrounding NJPAC’s theaters into a whole new walkable and liveable Newark destination, filled not only with apartment buildings and townhouses for downtown residents to live in, but with restaurants, shops and cultural spaces that will draw visitors into the city, as well as a new park, a new arts education and community center, even a new headquarters for one of Newark’s longest-lived cultural institutions, WBGO, the nation’s premier jazz public radio station.

That NJEDA award is the final piece of the puzzle that will make this next phase of the redevelopment of the Arts Center’s campus, a $336 million proposition, possible.

We’ve been planning and working towards this moment for more than six years.

And now, in just a few days, the work begins. The first element of construction will be the re-architecting of our front yard, Chambers Plaza, into a four-season urban park, where concerts, markets and more can be held all year round.

The next time you come to see a show here, you’ll notice new fencing, construction equipment — and a palpable sense of excitement in the air.

One of the reasons getting to this point has been such a long process is that all of us at the Arts Center were committed to ensuring that NJPAC’s campus would not simply become an apartment complex. We engaged in what’s called creative placemaking — the practice of creating spaces where art and human interaction are centered.

Our goal was never to wring every dollar out of every inch of the land our theaters stand on; rather, we wanted to make the space as beautiful and as useful to our community as it could be.

Ommeed Sathe, who led social investments at Prudential Financial, first had the idea of masterplanning our campus, creating a road map to ensure that the Arts Center was surrounded by an arts-infused, human-scaled, dense and lively urban neighborhood. With Prudential’s help, we began working years ago with RePLACE Urban Studio, a holistic city planning firm, to create a blueprint for the entirety of our campus. And in 2018, we launched NJPAC’s third Capital Campaign, to raise funds for the Arts Center’s future, 25 years after opening, including dollars required to underwrite elements of the campus redevelopment.

As of last month, our Campaign is complete: It has now raised more than $244 million to set NJPAC on a path to an extraordinary future.

I’m enormously grateful to the donors and supporters who embraced our vision of what this Arts Center could become, and the many partners — architectural firms, developers, city, state and federal officials and community groups — who helped us refine that vision.

Here’s what our campus will look like in 2027 when this redevelopment is complete: On what is now Parking Lot A, along a new pedestrian-friendly extension of Mulberry Street, we’ll have ArtSide, a new mixed-use development that includes 350 residential apartments and townhomes. (20 percent of the units will be affordable.)

The ArtSide project, which will include high-rise and low-rise buildings with shops, restaurants, cultural venues and WBGO’s new home, is a joint effort between NJPAC and developers including LMXD and Sirree Morris, and Prudential Impact & Responsible Investments. Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), the celebrated architecture firm, is designing this new Newark neighborhood.

Across the street on Parking Lot C, we will build the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center, designed by the renowned architectural firm of Weiss/Manfredi.

The Cooperman Center will not only be a purpose-built home for our Arts Education programs for kids, teens and teachers — and a home base for our Community Engagement and Arts & Well-Being work — it will be a facility that expands what we can teach. The Center’s programmatic activities will include offerings for everyone from senior citizens to toddlers and their caregivers. High-tech classrooms will enable us to offer virtual and hybrid classes. We’ll be able to teach technical theater skills like light and sound design, in a new theater “lab” with a walkable tension-wire grid above its performance space, offering Newark’s young people a new way to find careers in the entertainment industry.

The Cooperman Center will also be a place where community groups can meet and rehearse; a space-grant program will let them use our classrooms whenever a class is not in session.

Just as exciting: The Cooperman Center will have a full floor of professional rehearsal rooms where professional artists and production companies can create, refine and rehearse performances, bringing our students into contact with performing artists of all stripes.

And our front yard, Chambers Plaza, will undergo a makeover, outfitting it with everything from new lighting, new seating areas, a rain garden — and the addition of a new space we’ve named the Essex County Green, in recognition of a grant from Essex County that will help us create it.

When it’s finished, the Arts Center’s plaza will be transformed into an urban park that not only invites our neighbors and visitors to linger in the outdoors, but that can host outdoor events in every season.

And finally, we’ll be renovating our main building for the first time in more than 25 years, creating a new East Wing facade and entryway facing the extended Mulberry Street.

NJPAC will look, and feel, very different in three years: It will be a place with almost a thousand new neighbors; a place where students, community members and artists come and go from the Cooperman Center all day, every day; a place where visitors flow into restaurants and shops on weekdays and weekends alike.

But all of this is in service to what has always been our mission: To make the arts accessible to everyone in our community, and to use the arts to do as much good for our community as we possibly can. I can’t wait to see this iteration of the Arts Center. I can’t wait for you to see it, too.

All of this has been a long time coming, and as we expected, the road to breaking ground on this project has been winding and frequently an uphill climb. But we’re just about there now.

There’s a song that Sammy Davis Jr. used to sing called “Gonna Build a Mountain.” Its lyrics talk about the stick-to-it-iveness that all of us need to get from here to there everyday.

Take a listen — this tune tells me that a good idea and perseverance can make anything possible.

With gratitude and high hopes,

John Schreiber

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Drumming up Brazilian pride

Did you know NJPAC presents more than 280 free events every year? 

Did you know theater can be therapy?

The view from box b: Welcoming
Dr. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield

Students stood and vocalized silly phrases such as “ki-koo-koo-ki.” They clapped their hands, stomped their feet sometimes all at once. 

In short, around three dozen students from East Side High School in Newark had a blast when they opted to spend their lunch break with the free-wheeling percussionist Cyro Baptista, a Brazilian musician and composer who is the featured performer July 11 at NJPAC’s Horizon Sounds of the City. 

But that afternoon at East Side High, his stage was the band classroom thanks to a program produced by NJPAC’s Community Engagement. Baptista’s instruments were multitudinous. He played wooden drumsticks on a desk. He thwacked PVC pipes of different lengths with foam paddles. He shook a caxixi, a small bell-shaped basket filled with seeds, and played a multi-stringed “necklace” made of household caps (such as from medicine and water bottles and jugs of laundry detergent) that when tapped or shaken sounded like raindrops. He made a good case for upcycling.

“I can replicate sounds in my environment,” he told the students. “Sounds of the birds, the sound of the rain, the subway … Try to find things and do it. It’s fun and it sometimes doesn’t work.” 

Of course, the famed musician who has played in the big leagues with Paul Simon, Phish, John Zorn, Yo-Yo Ma, Laurie Anderson and many more, was there to teach students about percussion. He aptly demonstrated how anything can become rhythmic from the pattern of footsteps to voices, hands, bottle caps to a mass of discarded sardine cans strung together. 

But his workshop was about more than just percussion. It included science, with lessons on sound waves and the pitch created from pushing air through various lengths of pipes. It included encouragement to embrace creativity and self-expression.

His lunchtime workshop was also a showcase for Brazilian culture; many of East Side’s students hail from the largest country in South America. An accordionist and drummer joined him for demonstrations of different types of folk music with rhythms ranging from polka style to reggae beats. 

“NJPAC’s Community Engagement creates experiences beyond the walls of our downtown campus and we stage performers who reflect our communities,” says Eyesha Marable, Assistant Vice President, Community Engagement. “Bringing the fun and energy of Cyro Baptista to East Side High School was a wonderful opportunity to educate students about the beautiful and wildly diverse Brazilian culture and instill pride among its students.”    

Baptista gave the students another important takeaway from his workshop: “There are many things we do by ourselves … music is something we can do together.”  

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The view from box b: building a new neighborhood

Did you know NJPAC presents more than 280 free events every year? 

Did you know theater can be therapy?

The view from box b: Welcoming
Dr. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield

While the Arts Center already offers hundreds of free community performances in Greater Newark every year, NJPAC’s newest community engagement initiative, the ArtsXChange, is designed to begin the process of bringing NJPAC arts programming into all the neighborhoods of Newark.

The project kicked off this spring in the South Ward’s Clinton Hill area. There, the Arts Center is partnering with Clinton Hill Community Action to offer performances, workshops and celebrations in local parks, schools and community centers, with a focus on the talents of local artists.

(And we know that Newark has plenty of talent: Sarah Vaughan, Frankie Valli, George Clinton, Queen Latifah, Wayne Shorter and Michael B. Jordan all hail from Brick City!)

Born out of the feedback NJPAC received while planning the new Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center on our campus, the ArtsXChange program is our answer to the many Newarkers who told us that a community center downtown would be welcome — but that they also wanted Arts Center programming right in their own neighborhoods.

Before launching ArtsXChange, NJPAC’s Community Engagement team went on a listening tour, meeting with organizations in all the neighborhoods of Newark, to hear about what kind of arts programming would be most welcome in each corner of the city. Through these conversations, the Arts Center crafted a plan that would expand NJPAC’s calendar of free events by producing arts programming in equal partnership with community members and organizations. The South Ward program is the first of what is hoped will eventually be a city-wide network of such partnerships. 

ArtsXChange is unique because it is designed and informed by community residents and local artists who work with an NJPAC production team to mount events. These community events advance the Arts Center’s vision of featuring all of Newark’s talent, diversity, and creativity, in ways that make their performances and events most accessible to local audiences.

“ArtsXChange makes space and provides a platform for artists at every level,” says Assistant Vice President of Community Engagement Eyesha Marable. “We want to make room for their gifts and support them. Not just one time but everlastingly.”

The ArtsXChange with Clinton Hill Community Action in the South Ward launched in April with a kick-off performance featuring the Shabazz Dance Troupe, spoken word poet Mia X, a choir from the Belmont Runyon Elementary School (which hosted the performance), the hip hop collective The Other Side of Newark, and Mayor Baraka. After that spectacular start, at least two events have been held in the neighborhood each month. 

Among the events: In May, ArtsXChange produced a playwright’s workshop; as a result, one of the written pieces that came out of the workshop will be performed this August.

 “We are committed to creating consistent and predictable programming in the community that uplifts local up-and-coming and professional artists,” says Marable. 

Everyone is warmly welcomed to upcoming ArtsXchange events, including a festival of one-act plays in Mildred Helms Park on August 10 and a performance of local writer Pia Wilson’s play Eternal City, presented by the Yendor Theater Company, on August 24. Get all the details on upcoming ArtsXChange events here. 

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The view from box b: building a new neighborhood

Drumming up Brazilian pride

Did you know theater can be therapy?

The view from box b: Welcoming
Dr. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield

A man in a black hoodie and black jeans stood center stage under a spotlight, most of his face hidden by a white paper mache mask.

“I had to shut down to survive,” he said, staring straight at the audience through holes in the mask. “The thing I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to open up again. How do you become human again?”

Although the story he told — of hiding all emotion while serving a years-long prison term, only allowing himself to feel when his infant daughter visited — was dramatic, the man was not an actor.

He was one of eight formerly incarcerated men who took part in Ritual4Return, a homecoming rite of passage program for those returning to the community after imprisonment. The program was offered at NJPAC in the fall, as part of the Arts Center’s Health Promotion Productions — a series of programs that use the arts to directly address mental and physical health issues.

Just one program of the first season of NJPAC’s new Arts & Well-Being initiative, the 14-week Ritual4Return program concluded in December with a deeply moving finale — a public performance in the Center for Arts Education’s black box theater.

“We’re not here to sit back, relax and enjoy the show. We’re here to bear witness,” Kevin Bott, Artistic Director of Ritual4Return, explained to an audience of community members and families of the performers.

“A ritual is something we do to bring meaning and purpose into our lives. A rite of passage is a particular kind of ritual, and it’s one of the oldest tools we have,” he said. The purpose of this devised theater ritual was to welcome the formerly incarcerated cast members back into the community and, through sharing and storytelling, excise the shame many of them experienced while imprisoned.

Bott, a Camden-born Rutgers University graduate, spent his life in the theater, starting with directing productions at community theaters as a teenager. The Ritual4Return program, which Bott created while studying theater as a graduate student at New York University, uses improvisation, mindfulness exercises, chanting, mask-making and storytelling to help participants overcome feelings of shame and isolation caused by incarceration.

The end result of those weeks of work is a ritual in which they tell the stories of how they were imprisoned and what they faced during their sentence. Drums, a variety of masks, stomping feet and call-and-response exchanges with the audience heightened the theatricality of the event, which Bott devised by incorporating elements of the rituals of multiple religions and cultures.

At the end of the show, the men remove their masks and are embraced by their families. (The man who could only feel when his baby daughter visited? He wrapped his daughter, now a young woman taller than him, in a bear hug as he took off his mask.)

“These men spent 213 years in the wilderness,” said Bott (referring to the cumulative time the men in the program had been incarcerated). “We need to say to them: We see you, we see the transition you’ve made. Welcome home.”

NJPAC will host another session of Ritual4Return, open to formerly incarcerated women, in spring 2024. •

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The view from box b: building a new neighborhood

Did you know NJPAC presents more than 280 free events every year? 

Drumming up Brazilian pride

The view from box b: Welcoming
Dr. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield

Dear Friends:

Serving as the nation’s most diverse presenter of live performances will always be NJPAC’s bread and butter as a performing arts center. But our social impact work — Arts Education, Community Engagement performances and events, social justice programming and, now, our robust and creative series of initiatives in arts and health research and programming — constitutes an outsized percentage of what we do each season.

This work, which harnesses the arts to make positive change in our community, has expanded greatly over the seasons. You can now find NJPAC initiatives geared toward enhancing literacy, teaching kids social and emotional skills, advancing community wellness and other goals in schools, hospitals, community centers, parks and libraries. We anticipate this work will continue to grow, particularly when the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center opens on our campus in a few years, providing a home base for all these efforts.

We perpetually workshop how to serve as the most effective anchor cultural institution we can be.

Over the seasons, it has become clear to me that to maximize the effectiveness of these programs, we needed a senior leader at the Arts Center who can integrate these efforts and bring all our social impact work to the next level.

We’ve been looking for this person for a few years now. The search was national; I’ve met with individuals from across the country who are doing genuinely important work in this space. But we never found someone who’s been effective in making change in a place like Newark.

Then I realized: We didn’t need somebody who’d had experience working in a place like Newark. There really isn’t any other place like Newark – a city this large and complex with our unique combination of challenges, extraordinary strengths and boundless potential.

We needed someone who already knew Newark, with all its beauty and opportunities, and ideally someone who already understood the nature of our work as a community anchor.

Today, I’m delighted to say: We found her.

I’m excited and grateful that one of our city’s most effective educational leaders has decided to make the next act of her career as NJPAC’s Senior Vice President of Social Impact.

Dr. Sherri-Ann P. Butterfield, currently Executive Vice Chancellor and Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University–Newark–(RU-N), will assume this new role on September 2.

A Queens native like your reporter (we grew up about a dozen bus stops from each other), Sherri-Ann has made her professional home in Newark for almost 25 years. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan, she came to Newark to teach sociology — with a focus on race, immigration and education in urban contexts — in 2001.

She’s another Newark superstar whose attachment to the city is part of the legacy of the late Dr. Clement Price.

“I was told I should consider teaching at Rutgers–Newark because of its diversity. And at that time, that usually meant there would be a few other people of color at the institution. Then I got here and I realized: Oh, they meant diversity-diversity — diversity of race, religion, culture, ethnicity, everything.”

“And then I met Clem and he said: You have to come here. He and Marcia Wilson Brown (along with former Dean and then Chancellor Steve Diner) tag-teamed me, really. And then Clem took me everywhere around the city, and I was off to the races,” Sherri-Ann remembers.

“It was an awesome moment in Rutgers–Newark history when Sherri-Ann got here,” Marcia told me. “She had such a sense of purpose. She came on board at the same time as a few other younger faculty members and they just drove us to another level.”

Sherri-Ann quickly added administrative work on top of her teaching load, becoming Acting Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at RU-N, then Associate Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. She continued to climb through the ranks at the university, becoming Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty for the School of Arts & Sciences — a role in which she co-created the Social Justice Learning Community (SJLC), the academic precursor to the Honors Living-Learning Community (HLLC) that has earned RU-N national attention for its unique focus on advancing student learning and incorporating activism into the curriculum.

In 2017, Dr. Nancy Cantor — whom Sherri-Ann had helped recruit to lead Rutgers–Newark a decade ago — appointed her Executive Vice Chancellor, a key position in the university’s senior leadership team. In that role she oversaw a plethora of the university’s programs, many of them designed to weave the school more seamlessly into the life of the city, from the HLLC to Express Newark and the Institute of Jazz Studies to the Rutgers–Newark Dana Cotton Library.

“Sherri-Ann is a remarkable scholar, and also a passionate advocate for utilizing the university’s resources to cultivate the talent of our city’s next generation, and build on the assets of their diverse lived experiences,” says Nancy.

“Her work with first-generation college students, with the artists who make Newark so vibrant, with the Institute of Jazz Studies, and so many other Rutgers initiatives has been exceptional. She has friends and collaborators in every corner of the city, and I know she’ll be able to use that network and that experience to amplify NJPAC’s social impact work exponentially,” Nancy adds.

And she still teaches, too.

“I am always about the babies,” Sherri-Ann says. “It’s so important that we know what they’re dealing with, confronting, and if they’re consuming the programming that we’re putting out there for them.”

Happily for us at the Arts Center, all this work has connected Sherri-Ann with stakeholders across Newark: In the public schools, at City Hall and with other cultural anchors like The Newark Museum of Art.

“The arts have been a through-line of my life,” she says.

Since her elementary school days, she sang in choirs and choruses, and studied both tap and Western African dancing. Her father, “a real jazz guy,” made sure she could identify famous players by ear. Her godmother took her to Broadway shows regularly, cementing a life-long love of musical theater, particularly Dreamgirls and the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Another Broadway show she loved? “Look, don’t judge me, I was very young when I saw it … but, Cats.”

All of this makes Sherri-Ann the ideal person to help NJPAC expand its work using the arts to benefit the communities of Greater Newark.

“For me, this role at NJPAC is the embodiment of everything I’ve worked on, it fulfills all my passions,” she says.

“It honors my commitment to Newark. It’s still about education, but also about how we use the arts to provide social mobility to the young and the not-so-young and everyone in between. That’s fire, and I’m excited about being part of the next generation of that.”

I hope you will join me in welcoming Sherri-Ann to the Arts Center. I can’t wait to find out what we’ll be able to accomplish with this dynamic, experienced and passionate advocate for our city and for the arts on our team. I know it’s going to be exciting — and I promise I’ll tell you all about it, every step of the way.

All good wishes,

John Schreiber

view more articles

The view from box b: building a new neighborhood

Did you know NJPAC presents more than 280 free events every year? 

Did you know theater can be therapy?

Drumming up Brazilian pride