The power of art
Jersey City’s Drawing Rooms’ two shows have two views of Jewish life today
To get to Drawing Rooms, you drive through the part of Jersey City that looks, at least to my from-elsewhere eyes, like industrial wasteland, like the streets that lead up to the highways in the far reaches of the outer boroughs.
It’s close to a highway, it’s full of what look like untended warehouses (does anyone tend to a warehouse?), with a parking lot that is full of signs telling you not to park there, even though you’ve been told to park there.
No one is going to gentrify this particularly unprepossessing part of Jersey City anytime soon.
And then you walk into the narrow hallway that leads to the Drawing Rooms’ main space, and suddenly you — okay, I, but probably you too — are sobbing.
You’ll be struck by the images on that longish, white-walled space, taped up posters, some in color, with red bars, others smaller, black and white, not arranged, not really, just up there, looking random, daring you to look at them.
Because they’ll all about the hostages; overwhelmingly most are of the hostages Hamas captured in Israel on October 7 and has since released, continued to hold, or murdered. A few are of Israeli hostages taken earlier and still held captive.
So you walk down the hall, and the faces stare at you.
These are the posters we have seen all over, sometimes torn down, sometimes with the faces rubbed out, sometimes covered over with tape so it takes real work to destroy them. The red-headed Bibas boys, who we know were killed by their captors, and their mother, Shiri, also dead, by the same hands. Edan Alexander of Tenafly, still held, said to be doing poorly. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, also murdered, whose parents have done so much to make all of the hostages seem like people we know and for whose return we long. Omer Neutra, an Israeli Long Islander, who died on October 7 but whose family was cruelly teased by hints that he was alive. We’ve come to recognize all the faces, even when we don’t know all their names, and they all smile at us from the wall, thankfully unaware of what would happen to them.
That’s part of what you see on those walls.
The other part is the work of the Hatikvah Sticker Collective.
That’s a group of 25 artists who were inspired by the hostage posters; they use thermal printers, the technology created for printing mailing labels. The Hatikvah Sticker Collective has encouraged anyone with access to a thermal printer to make a sticker, and to put it up somewhere in the neighborhood. “Any person with 100 dollars to purchase a printer and 1,000 labels can change their neighborhood for the better,” its press release — maybe it’s more accurate to call it the group’s manifesto — says.
“Through this new form of mass-produced Jewish street art, the collective is not just reshaping public spaces — it is forging a new kind of Jewish public citizen, one who asserts their presence, refuses erasure, and understands that art itself is an act of resistance.
“The Hatikvah Collective is more than an art movement — in a world awash with antisemitic rhetoric, it is a call to reclaim Jewish presence in public spaces. Anyone with a thermal printer and a vision can contribute. Our sticker library is open-source and growing. Print, post, and participate — because Jewish presence is not a given, it is made.”
The manifesto closes with the Hebrew words “od lo avdah tikvatanu” — “our hope is not lost yet,” from the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah — and then, in English, “So long as we create, our hope is not yet lost.”
That’s the exhibit its creator, Anne Trauben, the Drawing Rooms’ curator and gallery director, calls “Hatikvah Sticker Collective: A Global Movement Stickering for the Hostages and Jewish Civil Rights.”
Maybe because of the small space, maybe because of all the faces, and all the messages, it is shattering.
Beyond that show, there’s another one, also curated by Ms. Trauben, that she calls “Material Wonder: Jewish Joy and Mysticism in 2025.” It includes work by five artists, all Jewish, including her — the others are Pesya Altman, Rachel Klinghoffer, Denise Treizman, and Carol Salmanson. The show is bright, playful, colorful, fun to look at. It’s both partner and corrective to the stickers.
Both are aspects of Jewish life today.
The idea of the Hatikvah show came to her first, Ms. Trauben said.
She’s a small but intimidating figure — her hair and bangs are sharply cut, her lipstick is statement red, her manner is direct. And then she takes off her black jacket, revealing a black top and three necklaces — a hostage dogtag, a small pendant shaped like the map of Israel, and a tiny Jewish star. It’s an unusual, brave, and instantly likeable combination of messages.
“I already had the idea of doing a show, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she said. “There was a show about October 7 at the 81 Leonard Gallery downtown” — we wrote about that show, in a story called “Artists on antisemitism,” in the July 4, 2024, issue of this paper — “but it was already done.” It was powerful, but there was no need to repeat it.
“But I knew I wanted to do something.”
The reason for her need to respond somehow, with art, to October 7, was because both the pogrom that day and the response to it had galvanized her. Ms. Trauben is Jewish; she grew up in south Jersey deeply culturally Jewish, if not particularly religiously observant. She always has been an artist — she earned a master’s degree in ceramics at Temple University in Philadelphia — and became part of the art community in Jersey City when she moved there in 2001, just weeks before September 11. (“I’d been living downtown, on Water Street, and because I’d just gotten there I had a little survivor’s guilt,” she said.)
In 2013, Ms. Trauben “got involved with the Drawing Rooms,” she said. She met Jim Pastorino, the gallery’s executive director. He and his wife, who are Catholic, were members of Our Lady of Czestochowa in the Paulus Hook section of Jersey City. In 2000, the church hired him to run an art center there, in an unused church building called Victory Hall. In 2012, the gallery moved to an old convent. There was a school on the ground floor then, and the gallery had the two top floors. It was nine tiny rooms — the cells where the nuns slept — each outfitted with a little sink. “It was charming,” Ms. Trauben said. It was also a good place for very specific kinds of shows — each artist in a show could have her own tiny, discrete space.
That’s when Ms. Trauben became the gallery’s curator.
Ms. Trauben learned how to curate on the job, she said, but she had realized for some time that, much as she loves making art, she also loves working with other artists. Back in the convent, she started the Big Small Show. “I saw that nonprofits would have big shows around the end of the year, so we did too. We had over 100 pieces in that show. And the only way that Jim agreed to it was to have more than one work from an artist, the work couldn’t be postage-stamp size, and it couldn’t be hung so far up that you couldn’t see it.”
The building flooded in Hurricane Sandy, but it was renovated. The gallery continued. But eventually the church needed its building back, and in 2018 the gallery moved to the converted warehouse that it’s still in now. “We reinvented ourselves here,” Ms. Trauben said.
“This was industrial storage space. MANA is right here.” That’s the MANA Contemporary Arts Center. But because there are no stores, restaurants, apartment buildings, or offices nearly, “there are no walk-ins.”
On March 13, 2020, the Drawing Rooms opened a show. “The city told us that we had to get the names of everyone who came, and we had to maintain social distancing. We closed on March 16.” It stayed closed for two years, as the pandemic ran its course.
“Jim makes very big work, so he used the gallery space,” Ms. Trauben said. “More space in the building was available, and we got it, with a grant from the state of New Jersey. We made the space nicer, and we have a hidden back office. When we reopened, it was sort of daunting to figure out how to use the space.”
She’s since figured it out.
The gallery is nonprofit, but it does sell art.
The two shows at the Drawing Rooms “are our fourth identity show,” Ms. Trauben said. “The art world loves identity shows. The first one we did, called ‘From There,’ included artists who had been born in another country. The next one, called ‘Let Me Tell You a Story,’ featured the work of five African American artists. The third was ‘Tall Tales and Other Truths.’ It included artists from different cultures talking about things in their culture that people didn’t want them to tell the truth about. We had the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who made art about that, and an artist of Mexican descent, two Black artists, and an Italian American who told the story of his father’s barber shop.
“And now this is our fourth identity show.”
Ms. Trauben talked about why she felt compelled to put up these two shows.
“After October 7, I saw that I really didn’t understand the conflict,” she said. “And then October 7 happened, and I had a solo show then, and I don’t remember my world being rocked. I remember knowing something about what happened but not knowing how to process it. But I read the New York Times every day, and I listened to NPR, and every day they reported about what was going on in Israel and Gaza, and every day Israel was the bad guy.
“I felt manipulated. I felt sick to my stomach. It was making me feel terrible. So I started reading as much as I possibly could. I copied things from the Internet, trying to keep track of what was happening. I have hundreds of notes. I remember being in the gallery when the hospital was bombed” — that was a few weeks after October 7, when Israel was widely blamed for attacking a hospital in Gaza. In fact, it had been hit by a missile sent by a Palestinian terror group.
“I remember crying. Could Israel really do that? I realized that I felt really connected.
“So I was reading more and more, really trying to find more people to talk to. I had to do something. I felt a calling to do something.
“My mom has been gone for a long time, but she was a staunch Zionist. I felt like my ancestors wouldn’t have worked so hard for me to end up not caring.
“I really felt a calling.”
She went on social media, figured out who was credible and who wasn’t, kept learning, and “then I found an advocacy group.” It was the Hatikvah Collective. And then she went to the show at 81 Leonard, put all those pieces together, and realized that she knew what she could do.
“I can do a show,” she said. “So I started to put it together.”
As emotionally powerful as the Hatikvah Collective show is, it’s not political, Ms. Trauben said. It’s not advocating for anything except the value of all life, including Jewish life.
The other show is more conventional in that it’s works of art, made by artists. “I know that they draw really different audiences,” she said. “There are some who come just for the stickers, some just for the art, and some who won’t come because of the stickers, or say that they’re not interested in the art.”
But she knows that they go together, pain and joy, inseparable.
“We have always been a gallery with a heart,” she said. “We have always wanted to create community.”
That’s clear in this show. It is open most afternoons until April 5. Learn more at www.drawingrooms.org.
On Sunday, March 23, from 3 to 6, Drawing Rooms and Kibbutz Jersey City will hold a reception in the gallery, complete with Israeli food and wine. Reserve tickets here.
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