[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:16] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guests today are Michelle Vitale and Dr. Andrea Siegel of Hudson County Community College in Jersey City. Ms. Vitale is Director of Cultural Affairs for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Curator, Benjamin J. Dineen III and Dennis C. Hull Gallery and the Art Concourse at North Hudson. Dr. Siegel is Coordinator of the College’s Foundation Art Collection. Welcome, Michelle and Andrea.
[00:00:50] Andrea S: Thank you so much for having us.
[00:00:52] Amy H-L: Andrea, would you start by telling us about Hudson County Community College.
[00:00:58] Andrea S: Hudson County Community College is an inner-city community college in Jersey City, New Jersey. We’re coming up on our 50th anniversary next year. The college has about 20,000 students, credit and non-credit, per year using our campuses, which are in Union City, we have two of them, and in Journal Square in Jersey City.
[00:01:23] Amy H-L: Who are the students who tend to attend HCCC? What high schools do they attend, and what draws them to the college?
[00:01:33] Andrea S: Most of our students are Hispanic. We’re a Hispanic-serving institution. Most of our students come from the working class, and they come from the local area. They are seeking that elusive thing, the American dream. They’re looking to build upon the extraordinary efforts of their parents, many of whom are immigrants, to grow and change and make it, such as it is, in America.
[00:02:03] Jon M: Michelle, what does your work at the college involve? What does it mean to be the Director of Cultural Affairs for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?
[00:02:13] Michelle V: It’s an exciting role during this time in our history. I run two galleries on campus. One is the Benjamin J. Dineen III and Dennis C. Hull Gallery, and it’s on the sixth floor of the Gabert Library. It’s a 3,000-square-foot facility, and it hosts exhibitions that usually include alumni, but also expand to international artists and other organizations. And then at the North Hudson campus, I started most recently the art concourse at North Hudson. It’s a pass-by area that connects the College to local transportation. We wanted to honor the artists who live and work in that area and expose all campuses to the arts. And so we’re excited about that, too.
And then we also do programming. We’ve had lectures. We recently had Ndaba Mandela, who’s Nelson Mandela’s grandson, speak. And we hosted him in the gallery with maybe 300 participants listening to him. I’ve also interviewed Tamika Palmer and the oldest Holocaust survivor in the United States.
[00:03:30] Jon M: You work a lot with public schools. Could you talk about that?
[00:03:34] Michelle V: Sure. Yes. We always love to partner with Jersey City Public Schools and beyond. That’s definitely part of our mission. Many times students start thinking about college as early as 8th grade, and so we’re happy to be part of that conversation. We do tours, they come in and they speak to me. We recently had a group of future leaders, which was a partnership with Mana Contemporary, and they spoke with Andrea, Laurie Riccadonna, who runs the art program, and myself about what roles they can fill as future art leaders.
[00:04:13] Jon M: You’re a former Jersey City public school teacher and an accomplished artist. How do these experiences inform your work with students?
[00:04:23] Michelle V: Well, I always say that the kindergartners were my toughest audience, but I was lucky because they got my jokes. I could be a comedian to kindergartners throughout the United States. I can make them laugh, which is kind of sad on my part. Being able to reach people. Jersey City public schools are filled with a variety of ethnicities and languages. It was great training to service our students here at the College. And I also think being an educator and being trained as an educator and planning lessons that had objectives and criteria enhanced how I go about teaching at the College. I’m an adjunct here and I teach a gallery management class.
[00:05:17] Amy H-L: Andrea, what is the College’s Foundation Art Collection?
[00:05:23] Andrea S: The Foundation Art Collection is over 1, 200 pieces of works of art, largely donated and installed in nine campus buildings and thematic groups. So we have a whole corridor of Japanese prints, a whole corridor of Filipino art, a whole corridor of art of the African diaspora, a whole corridor of Hispanic and Hispanic American art. Outside the writing center, we have a whole corridor of art about writing. Et cetera, et cetera, times nine buildings. The whole campus is an educational art museum so every student goes through a fully-curated gallery on the way to every class.
[00:06:08] Amy H-L: That sounds fantastic. As I understand it, you don’t have a lot of resources to build your collection. So how do you do it?
[00:06:16] Andrea S: Yeah, we don’t have a lot of resources. So what we have is an enormous number of civic-minded art donors and a budget of about $45,000 a year to get everything framed, installed, and ready to roll. We will put up several hundred works of art every year to grow the collection in richness and intensity. And correlation is not causation, but, and I want to be very clear about this, because the college has worked hard to increase, our number of graduates, but in my time here, the number of graduates has doubled. The art collection is not causing this, but I don’t think we’re hurting the incredibly hard work that the college has done to retain students and help them toward a brighter future. It’s impressive and I’m proud of it.
[00:07:12] Amy H-L: How do you find works of art that are relevant to students?
[00:07:16] Andrea S: We started with Benjamin Dineen and Dennis Paul. Michelle, do you want to talk about Ben and Dan? You worked with Ben before you came here, didn’t you?
[00:07:25] Michelle V: Yes. I want to make sure I’m answering correctly. We’re talking about their philanthropy.
They are our very first donors, major donors. One of them was on the Foundation board. Benjamin Dineen and his partner, Dennis Hall, gave us over 300 works of art that were extraordinarily political and relevant to our community because they collected works of art by women and people of color. So they started us on the best possible foot forward and we’ve done our best as donations are offered to us. It’s amazing. As people hear about the project they want to give us more and more of their stuff. We keep trying to grow it.
Right now, the national average for museums, in terms of works by women, is about 13 percent of the collection. In our collection, it’s, we’re about at half. We have works where we don’t know the names of the artists. When you don’t know the name of the artist, it’s usually a woman. Yeah, we’re about, we’re about 50 percent of our works are by women. We have substantial collections. Over a hundred by Asian American artists — Vietnamese American, Korean American, Chinese American, Japanese American, and Indian American, as in not Native American, but India Indian., Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It grows by word of mouth.
[00:09:01] Jon M: You said that most students walk by because the exhibits are in hallways, but when someone gets it, you’ve changed their life. Could you talk about one of those moments or a couple of those moments?
[00:09:15] Andrea S: My goal is three percent attention. My feeling is if we have 20,000 students walking through here every year, and three out of a hundred actually see what’s on the walls, we have done a good piece of work. One student got so excited about what she saw on the walls she came to my office and said I am going to be your work-study next year. The federal work-study program pays students a stipend to do work in the college that allows them to complete their degree. The money allows them to eat and function. So Mica Garcia comes by my office and says I am your next work-study, and she was one of the best work-study students I’ve ever had. After she graduated, she got a job at the Whitney Museum part-time, and from there she went to the Museum of Modern Art part-time, and then she went to be a full-time worker at Sotheby’s Auction House. Our motto used to be “Start here, go anywhere.” It’s changed, but she’s one of those people who started here, caught fire, and is now a member of the art world at the highest levels of the New York City art world. So that’s a story. Is that a good story? Is that kind of what you’re thinking about?
[00:10:39] Jon M: Yeah, definitely. Michelle, beyond Hudson County Community College, tell us what’s the art scene in Jersey City and in Hudson County more generally.
[00:10:59] Michelle V: So Jersey City, in the 1990s and early 2000s had a building called 111, and this was down in the waterfront, which was starting to develop, but the artists were there well before that. That building housed so many artists and it qualified Jersey City as having the largest studio arts tour in America. And it’s a reason a lot of artists came here. Not only visual artists, but also musicians. We’ve had a history of established musicians living and working in Jersey City as well.
Through the years and all the changes and the redevelopment, I would say that artists now are not centered in downtown. They’re all over Jersey City and a lot of different neighborhoods, so much so that we have a program called the JC art crawl and the art crawl basically asks neighborhood art organizations, associations, and artists to open their doors on a Saturday. And that goes from place to place. We also have something called Art Fair 14C, which started in Jersey City, but has expanded nationally to visit other places. That has allowed for something interesting to happen to the Jersey City and New Jersey art scene, which is people have started collecting work in New Jersey. Before, it was hard for an artist to live in New Jersey because you were competing against New York for collectors. But now with the help of Art Fair 14C and a few other establishments Mountain Contemporary, people are starting to look at New Jersey artists.
Newark [Museum of Art] is also developing. I think it has the largest American painting collection in the United States. And Newark is becoming a hot scene. So those are all great things for our students to be part of.
[00:13:19] Andrea S: The world also seems to be coming here. Michelle recently coordinated this amazing evening called the Night of Ideas. The Musee Pompidou was behind the sort of curating or the idea behind this. Musee Pompidou is going to move into one of our old classroom buildings across the street from our library and have the first North American outlet for that Parisian museum in 2026 or so. So the world is coming to us as well.
[00:13:50] Michelle V: Yeah, if you want to hear more about the Night of Ideas quickly, it’s a program that Villa Albertine leads. They pick a two-week time period globally to select sites. This year they wanted to focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Last year they were at the Brooklyn Library, I believe, and this year they picked Hudson County Community College. I worked with them and the Centre Pompidou. We had over 800 people attend that night. It was amazing.
[00:14:20] Amy H-L: So, for our listeners, who is Pompidou?
[00:14:24] Michelle V: The Centre Pompidou is based, its first museum, was based in Paris. It’s a very contemporary and progressive museum that has a great collection, super diverse. They have started having sites globally, and this is their site here in the New York area, right next door to us.
[00:14:52] Amy H-L: That’s interesting. I hadn’t realized they had sites in the U.S.
[00:14:57] Michelle V: They don’t. This is the first one in North America. They’ve chosen Jersey City. But they have sites in other places.
[00:15:07] Andrea S: Yeah, they have one in China, I think they have one in, maybe in Belgium, all over. But for those of you who haven’t been to see it, one of the wonderful things in Paris about this museum is the piping is all painted wonderfully bright colors. You can see it all. The skin of the building is clear so you can see everything, all the ductwork and all that stuff that’s going on in the museum. It’s a very modern and strange and wonderful building.
[00:15:34] Michelle V: It was also designed to meet people at the street. So there’s not a very elaborate entrance to get in, something we would think of the Met. It’s very public service-oriented and community-inspired.
[00:15:53] Jon M: I think you said that this is going to be right across the street from you.
[00:15:56] Michelle V: Right. We used to own a public service building, and it actually says “Public Service” outside, which they love. And now it’s going to be the new Pompidou site for Jersey City.
[00:16:09] Amy H-L: Aside from getting to know and understand art, I would imagine that many of the students who experience these exhibits at the college have never had art classes in their schools, because that’s one of the programs that’s been taken away from a lot of schools due to budget concerns. So I’m wondering if this encourages more students to make art as well as to see art.
[00:16:41] Michelle V: Well, Jersey City Public Schools is pretty great at having the arts cemented in their education. I was a Jersey City public school teacher for eight years. Under the supervisor, Nancy Healy, the students create PATH [train] posters and then one is selected to be on the PATH train every year. And that still goes on even though she has long left her position.
I think that what may be new to the students is the concept — and it was new to me, too — of what a gallery is. And the difference between a commercial gallery and our gallery is that we welcome all to visit. And there are a lot of educational materials. So if it is your first time or a student’s first time or a parent of a student’s first time visiting the gallery, there’s a plethora of information. Our docents are trained to be very welcoming. Some gallery etiquette, don’t touch the artwork, we talk about that regularly, and how we can greet the viewer with respect and not make anyone feel as if they don’t belong. As I said, I typically have emerging artists, I had an alumnus in this past show, with artists that have exhibited internationally and are at blue chip galleries. So we try to celebrate all people and make it accessible to our students to dream and to hope that one day they’ll be in the gallery, too. And every semester we do a student show. We’re a community college so we have winter graduation and spring graduation, and we highlight the students who are graduating. And that’s always a big, competitive experience. The students are excited to show in the gallery and it many times it’s their first time showing in the gallery. And it’s wonderfully curated by the two coordinators of studio arts and computer arts, Laurie Riccadonna and Jeremiah Teipen.. . .
[00:18:58] Andrea S: I’m sorry to interrupt, but Michelle, how many people do you see? You see a lot of people come through your gallery. How many people do you see come through every year?
[00:19:04] Michelle V: Typically, because we have programs… We have an exhibition now about voting rights and civil rights in the main area as you enter the gallery. We have installed a poem by Rashad Wright, who was Jersey City’s first poet laureate. We also, as I said, have exhibits in North Hudson. So a combined viewing of 7,000. And we do partnerships. This year, an alumni group was hosted at Art Fair 14C and Art Fair 14C has like 7,000 people. And because we took over a booth, we can count those outside partnerships, so we were over 14,000. I think we’re going to be close, if not over that, this year.
[00:19:56] Jon M: So it sounds as though the Jersey City schools are supportive of arts and also that the city has a vibrant arts community. Do either of you have a sense of things that you’d like to see in Jersey City, Hudson County, or the state of New Jersey, to support arts education and the arts more generally?
[00:20:27] Michelle V: Yeah, I mean, I could take that first. I noticed in other places Newark actually is one of the first places I saw it more locally, but there are things like teaching and mentorship programs that I think could be wonderful for school districts, to get students energized and excited about art and all the opportunities it could provide them as an adult.
[00:20:55] Jon M: What would that look like? What is a teaching artist in that sense?
[00:20:57] Michelle V: A teaching artist is an artist who comes in, usually for the year, and they have a classroom and they’re not constricted to the curriculum of Jersey City of the state of New Jersey. They can do more expansive investigations and artwork. There’s grading, but it’s not the same as an arts teacher. It would be a complement to an art teacher. But I think having that energy in the school, bigger projects, maybe some community projects, could be exciting. And it could bring students’ work to the next level.
[00:21:44] Andrea S: When you talk about dreams, one of the things I’ve seen very clearly here is we’re at a curious moment in American history where we’re witnessing the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. And one thing I know, as a person who’s worked in the art world for many years, is there’s nothing a child of a collector hates more than their parent’s art. So what happens is, as we have the shift to the next generation, those folks want to find good homes for their parent’s art. They don’t want to throw it in a dumpster. And I think that community colleges and public schools are a great place for it to go. So what I’ve been doing, and I hope to make this bigger, is mentoring other colleges in growing their collections in Jersey and other places in the United States. We’ve got five colleges in New Jersey who, sometimes a donor comes to me and says, I’ve got two works of art I’ll give you, but I don’t want to give you the whole thing. Tell me some other places I can donate. And my hope is to make this transfer of wealth, it’s sort of a Robin Hood hope, make this transfer of wealth transfer to the people for whom it does the most good, to get it to the public schools, to get it to the community college, to get it to the public four-year colleges, so that folks can benefit from the enormous cultural capital that’s been collected by the last generation. That’s my hope.
[00:23:13] Amy H-L: Jersey City has a lot of immigrant communities. When you have a first generation immigrant community, how do parents feel about a child saying, I want to be an artist?
[00:23:30] Michelle V: Well, it’s funny that you asked that, Amy, because I am the first woman on my dad’s side to go to college. My grandmother came here and she was a seamstress. She sewed American flags for a living. My dad’s sisters didn’t go to college. They became secretaries and other things, administrative assistants. And when I said I wanted to be an art major, there was a lot of disappointment. Maybe the goals were a little bigger. When I started out, they were like, what about being an accountant? And when I said I wanted to be an artist, my dad was, what about architecture? It became glaringly obvious that I needed to be an artist. Once I kind of proved that I could advance and have a position at a college, I think they were glad that I chose that path. But for a while, it was a little disappointing. My parents were proud that I graduated college and then I went on and got my master’s. I also have a teaching certification. And with all those successes, they were proud, but if that’s the route you take, and there are expectations, you have to…. I think it made me want to prove myself more, to prove this was something that was important, and that I could provide for my family, and I could have a nine-to-five job, and all the things that your parents want for you when you go to college.
[00:25:14] Jon M: Andrea, did you have a different experience, a similar experience?
[00:25:20] Andrea S: There are a lot of answers to that question, but. I just need you to know that I was the first woman in my family, in my line, to finish college, and when I told my mother what I was going to do, she sat shiva, that’s Jewish for “went into mourning.” It wasn’t until much later, it was 1999, I finished college in 84. In 1999. The New York Times did a profile on my work, and it wasn’t until the New York Times put half a page with me in it that my family understood what I was doing, because if the Times explains it to you, it becomes real. So forever, I will be grateful to Trish Hall, who wrote that piece, for explaining me to my family. Because that allowed me to reenter the family and my mother’s response was to take the article, which had my picture in it and make 6 placemats. They were clear-coated, so I now have six placemats with my head in the middle, celebrating the moment when I was reclaimed by my family. I could say more, but I think I should just keep my mouth shut. It wouldn’t be pretty.
[00:26:34] Amy H-L: Is there anything else either one of you would like to add to the conversation?
[00:26:39] Michelle V: Let me think. Of course, more funding in general for, for artists, even emerging artists, because a lot of times, many of our, especially at the college level, when we’re talking, I did an artist talk last week and I had it with four artists and all of us spent a good 15 to 20 minutes trying to warn our students that when you leave the college still taking your artwork seriously is a lot on you and you have to be your own champion and you have to, I remember as a younger artist in New Jersey, how hard it was to find a studio.
I was painting in my parents’ basement. I would, I still can’t afford a studio and I’m this age with a decent job. That. Public housing for artists, public housing for artists, studios, especially emerging artists, then that way those dreams don’t get deferred. We think about how hard it is now real estate wise to own something in the state of New Jersey.
Think of that as a young artist. Maybe even a young artist of an ethnically diverse group and how, how much harder that would be and think about all the Picassos we may be missing. So I think culturally it would be great if the state would take a second look at artist funding, have categories of giving emerging artists even high school artists helping with scholarships would be ideal to make sure that our culture is preserved.
[00:28:23] Andrea S: I mean, our national politics, our discussions need to shift toward some things we all agree on, which is we all agree that our children deserve a decent future. So we have a lot of work we have to do to make sure that happens. Basic things making sure we have clean water and clean air. One of the problems with Jersey City is we have an enormous population of people who are, who are working minimum wage jobs.
And Jersey City is now the most, single most expensive city to live in in the United States because of the incredibly rapid gentrification that’s occurred here. So Michelle was talking earlier about 111 First Street and they, the artists came in and they do what artists do is they, they took an abandoned area and they made it attractive.
And then what happens, this is the pattern, is the developers see that this is all possible and they make it attractive. They move in and it becomes impossible then for artists to live there. So I think back to Johnson’s Great America program and I think about all the affordable housing that was built in the United States that people are still enjoying the benefits of.
And my goodness, it’s time, right, for us to be putting some of our, our tax dollars toward making the middle class a better place to be. And making that much more possible. You know, we’ve spent the last 40 years sending all our money to the 1%. So, there’s lots that has to happen so that our K 12 students can have the decent future that they deserve.
[00:30:03] Jon M: Thank you, Andrea Siegel and Michelle Vitale of Hudson County Community College.
[00:30:09] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. Check out our new video series, What Would YOU Do?, a collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Education and EdEthics. Go to our website, ethicalschools. org, and click video. The goal of this series is not to provide right answers, but to illustrate a variety of ethical viewpoints.
If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with a friend or colleague. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and articles, and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes.
Contact us at [email protected]. We’re on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and YouTube. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.