State of the Arts has been taking you on location with the most creative people in New Jersey and beyond since 1981. The New York and Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award-winning series features documentary shorts about an extraordinary range of artists and visits New Jersey’s best performance spaces. State of the Arts is on the frontlines of the creative and cultural worlds of New Jersey.
State of the Arts is a cornerstone program of NJ PBS, with episodes co-produced by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Stockton University, in cooperation with PCK Media. The series also airs on WNET and ALL ARTS.
On this week's episode... New Jersey Heritage Fellowships are an honor given to artists who are keeping their cultural traditions alive and thriving. On this special episode of State of the Arts, we meet three winners, each using music and dance from around the world to bring their heritage to New Jersey: Deborah Mitchell, founder of the New Jersey Tap Dance Ensemble; Pepe Santana, an Andean musician and instrument maker; and Rachna Sarang, a master and choreographer of Kathak, a classical Indian dance form.
The New Jersey State Council on the Arts is hosting quarterly Teaching Artist Community of Practice meetings. These virtual sessions serve as a platform for teaching artists to share their experiences, discuss new opportunities, and connect with each other and the State Arts Council.
Register for the next meeting.
The State Arts Council awarded $2 million to 198 New Jersey artists through the Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship program in the categories of Film/Video, Digital/Electronic, Interdisciplinary, Painting, Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, and Prose. The Council also welcomed two new Board Members, Vedra Chandler and Robin Gurin.
Read the full press release.
These monthly events, presented by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, are peer-to-peer learning opportunities covering a wide range of arts accessibility topics.
The cam whirred. It clicked. It paused—longer than usual. Finally, it extruded a photo, and the crowd fell silent.
The next morning, the cam whirred softly and spat out a single, glossy photo. The physical staircase was there—the chipped rail, the grey flagstone. But layered over it, like a ghost of color, was a shimmering . The feeling of Friday afternoon. The electric buzz of liberation before a long weekend.
And woven through all of it, like a melody, was a new color none of them had ever seen. A color the camera named, in its final, silent caption on the back of the photo: “Résilience. The spirit of a place that has learned to hold joy and sorrow in the same frame.”
The school grieved for a week. The Esprit Cam, respectfully, took a photo each day. Monday was a foggy —the numbness of shock. Tuesday was a muted sage green —the slow, quiet work of healing, of students hugging and sharing stories. Wednesday was a bright, piercing white —the sound of Julien’s favorite song being played on a portable speaker in the courtyard, everyone dancing badly in his honor. esprit cam
The image was . Not empty, but a deep, velvety, absolute black. In the center was a single, tiny point of cold white light—a star, or a tear.
Dubois, assuming it was a student art project, nearly threw it away. But the art teacher, Madame Elara, gasped. “It’s an Esprit Cam ,” she whispered. “My grandmother spoke of them. Lost technology. It photographs the mood, the atmosphere, the invisible spirit of a place.”
On the final Friday, one month later, the Esprit Cam produced its last photograph. Then, with a soft sigh of escaping air, the brass tarnished, the lens cracked, and it went still. It had given all its spirit. The cam whirred
The photo showed the staircase again. But now, the golden-orange haze of Friday was still there. Layered over it was the bruised purple of past tests, the red-yellow of chaos, the quiet blue of Ibrahim the custodian, and the deep black of Julien’s absence—but the white star was no longer receding. It was fixed, warm, and pulsing gently.
Thursday was a quiet, crystalline —the soft sadness of a custodian named Ibrahim who had worked there for thirty years and whose wife was ill. No one knew his name until that photo. The next day, students left him a box of chocolates and a card signed, “We see you.”
They hung that photo in the main hallway, where the camera had once sat. And for years afterward, students would pause, look at it, and see not just a staircase, but the invisible architecture of their shared heart. Finally, it extruded a photo, and the crowd fell silent
On Thursday, Monsieur Dubois tried to take the camera down. “It’s too much,” he said. “It knows our secrets.”
They mounted it in the main hallway, aimed at the old stone staircase where generations of students had loitered, laughed, and cried.
The first time the “Esprit Cam” arrived at École Secondaire de la Rivière, no one knew what it was. It arrived in a polished mahogany box, delivered by a courier in a dove-grey uniform who simply said, “For the soul of the school,” and vanished.
