The arts have a really unique ability to build community and to bring people together, even if it's just for one singular shared experience, or you're really building something over the course of 10, 20, 30 years or beyond.

There's a magic when we're together experiencing the arts.

I think that's really the tradition that we have inherited and that we need to continue even well into the future because that will never change.

Being exposed to the arts is going to create well-rounded, balanced individuals, and it creates opportunities for kids to learn about themselves and to be exposed to various cultures and narratives.

Art is storytelling, and storytelling is one of the most important things involved in being in a social setting.

What people get from art is what it means to be human.

And if you look at art history, you know, look at the history of the world, the things that we're the most proud of over our existence are these artistic expressions.

Well, access to the arts period I think is crucial to everyone.

The wellness practice that comes with engaging with the arts, it's next level.

I describe the Barrymore Film Center as a community hub, a place where people can come and enjoy the arts, culture, film, education, based on the fact that Fort Lee is a place where the arts in the movies started.

I like to say we are honoring the past, present, and future of filmmaking.

Fort Lee, New Jersey was the original Hollywood.

It was the birthplace of the American film industry.

It was much cheaper to make films in New Jersey.

So the studios came over here.

They came across the river.

The Barrymores were on Broadway in the early 1900s.

And then they started making their films here in Fort Lee.

And they worked with some of the most famous directors and actors and producers that we know today, Charlie Chaplin.

Max Sennett, D.W.

Griffith.

We have Alice Guy-Blache, who came from France.

She was the first female studio owner.

We have Oscar Micheaux, who was the first commercial Black filmmaker, made his films in Fort Lee.

Some of the biggest studios today started here in Fort Lee.

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of silent films shot here.

There was a serial called The Perils of Pauline, which was filmed here in Fort Lee.

And what they would do, they would go out to the palisades, the cliffs on the river, and they would have the cameraman there, and then they would you have whatever mat and she would be hanging off the cliff at the end of the show, what's gonna happen to her in the next installment.

That's where the word cliffhanger comes from, from Pauline hanging off of the cliff.

With the closure of some theaters recently, we are the last independent nonprofit art house theater in Bergen County, which is, it's important.

Yeah, I have a lot of people tell me they're so grateful that we're here because they don't have to go over the bridge.

They can find what they want in New Jersey.

We're preserving the theater experience as well as these films that people haven't seen in theaters in decades.

My name is Todd Caissie and I am the interim director of the Montclair Art Museum.

We are a cultural anchor that has a wonderful collection of both contemporary and historic art and Native American art, as well as a place that is really a cultural meeting place because we also have art classes and a full art school.

The origins date back to 1909 when a prominent collector of American art named William T. Evans was part of a town commission that was trying to plan a town common that would include education, art, and recreation resources with the idea of a public art gallery at the center of it all.

But money was needed to build what became the first public art museum in New Jersey.

And the person who rose to the challenge was Florence Rand Lang, who was a painter herself and heir to the Ingersoll Rand fortune.

And her main stipulation was that the gallery be a museum and that part of the museum be dedicated to Native American art.

I am an enrolled member of the Osage Nation and I think the emotions that I have being Montclair Art Museum's first Native American director is one of pride and responsibility.

As a museum, we need to make sure that we are in communication with Native American nations, having dialogs with them and treat the collection as a partnership with those nations and to not only be able to educate about the histories of Native American art, but also looking into the future.

My hope is that when people come to the museum, they get an opportunity for inspiration and discovery.

Education is important, but nowadays you can get the education anywhere.

It's about really coming into a space and being inspired and discovering new things.

Every turn should be a discovery.

Every wall should have something that they're either gonna be inspired by or they're gonna discover, and I think that's what makes museums great.

My name's Adam Philipson and I am the CEO and President at the Count Basie Center for the Arts.

This amazing place where you could see a top headliner but also an emerging artist or maybe a conversation that's really involving this community.

Students that are here that are learning and one of our many stages I think that's what this center is.

It's an arts campus.

The building was built in 1926.

Very much one of the original vaudeville and movie houses.

There were many of them in the state.

This is where artists would leave the city and they would go on tours through New Jersey and other states as well.

That was its beginning.

We're so much more than what's here on the campus, right?

So especially a lot of the work that I do is not physically in this building.

It is out in the community, in community organizations, in schools, throughout the state.

It's really about making the art successful for everybody, wherever that may be.

One of the programs that's near and dear to my heart is our school show program.

This kind of massive program that serves over 10,000 students and teachers a year and making professional performance accessible and that program reaches communities across the state.

The arts are a place where we find comfort, we share stories, we can express ourselves, we gain confidence, we learn to work together, we build empathy.

Without that, the world looks very different and it's important that we make those experiences accessible to anybody who's interested.

One of the things that we see because we live in the arts, but that I think the community in general are beginning to see is how much the arts are required for the health and wellness of an individual and of an entire community.

I grew up in a family where everybody was making things all the time.

My dad had a workshop in his basement, so we were always building things.

I invented toys.

It was kind of a smooth transition from just making objects and painting them and then I started studying ceramics and then I started to look at the forms of pottery and thinking about ceramics as an art form.

So I transitioned from making functional ceramics to making what I would then call dysfunctional ceramics.

In the early 90s, I moved to New Jersey with my family, and I went to the Thomas Edison Museum, which is just a mile away here in Orange, and Thomas Edison has this amazing inventions factory.

And when I saw that place, I thought, Jersey is for me.

If he can do this here and the whole world came to him, I'll be just fine here.

This building, which is called Manufacturer's Village, was built at the same time as the Edison factory.

So now, here I am a mile away from the Edison Factory in my own factory building doing my own work.

So now we have about 60 artists here in this building.

We're very proud of our connection to East Orange because we kind of created an artistic community here where there wasn't another art center for visual art.

And the city has been incredibly supportive of what we're doing.

We have done a lot of community projects, like I've done mural projects around the city.

And we've brought attention to the city.

While I was able to keep doing work in the studio, my personal work, I was also doing large scale outdoor commissions for public places.

I've done about 40 of them now and they're permanent outdoor pieces.

It's a way of putting art in a public place and you have a wide audience that has, there's no admission fee and so it's nice to have work that speaks to those folks.

This was Mecca of Jersey music.

You know what happens is when you walk through the door, you change.

You kind of like are walking through the stargate that all of a sudden you're mesmerized by what's going on here.

And you see that horse on the stage, you see the stage and see who's going to be playing.

You start looking around and say, this is where it really happens.

It's just that this is Asbury Park and this is the Stone Pony and that band's got to be good because you got to be good to play here.

1974, when it first opened, I was a customer at first.

You know, our family moved from Jersey City down the shore when I was 12 years old, and Asbury Park was always here.

It was the place you went to the movies.

It was a place you had to, you know, hang on the boardwalk to go to the beach, etc.

One thing that was always here was the vibe of history.

Many, many famous artists have played the stage.

Obviously, Bruce has been here, Bon Jovi has been there, Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Cheap Trick, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Here we were in the 80s, there was talk about moving us because this land was of course very valuable.

You know, walking into the venue, it wasn't the way it looks today.

A lot of repair was needed.

It was a tough go.

New developers had just taken over.

They were trying to keep the buildings alive so that, you know, more development would come into town, because development is what Asbury Park needed to come back.

There were some very dark times back then.

So really that was happening.

There was nothing going on in town.

A lot of the stores were closing.

Only a few were still open and we were really the only thing that was really viable back then.

Over the last 20 years, the town has exploded in how it's changed.

More in the years of 2006 onward, Asbury Park seems to be a place where talent gathers and people wanna be part of not only the music, but the art that's really hitting a high here.

And I don't think we've even begun to get to where it's going yet.

Every name that's up on that stage adds to our legacy.

It creates the legacy, and when they come back, it's even better because it keeps the power of the legacy going.

And that is what's gonna keep us here for the next 20 years.

We're a 42-acre sculpture park.

We are New Jersey's largest sculpture park, and Seward Johnson, our founder, was an artist.

He wanted a place to be able to build his sculpture, his artwork, and he invited his friends in to build with him, started bringing in apprentices, and at their highest point, I believe, it was about 150-plus people that were a part of this school for sculpture.

And then they wanted to figure out a place to put their artwork, and so they started buying the land around it.

So we are located in central New Jersey, over in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Central Jersey is a real place.

In the late 80s, this whole area in New Jersey was part of the New Jersey Fairgrounds, and it had sort of been abandoned.

And Seward Johnson had this idea of wanting to create something, a sculpture park possibly, that would be accessible for folks.

And it opened up in 1992.

I think community is everything.

As organizations, one, you can't grow unless you're building community and who sees themselves there.

And a lot of the work that we do across our education team and building relationships externally is very much around building relationships, not only with K-12 schools and making sure that we have that interaction, but also with other organizations where we're inviting nursing homes in to do wellness walks with us.

We have social prescribing.

Where we partnered with multiple medical professionals that they actually prescribe people a three month membership to Grounds for Sculpture because of the sense of relaxation and peace and disconnect that happens when people come to our campus.

You can also find the quiet spots here, and sort of like take a beat, take a moment for yourself.

We like to think of our grounds as an oasis, a temporary pause in life.

In our current climate, where there is so much anxiety and there's so much stress, being out in nature, one, there's tons of studies that say that that is a relaxing space.

Being connected to the arts, walking through museums, whether indoors or outdoors, also does that.

Taking time to just stroll and meander.

There is joy in that.

There's a benefit in that slowing down.

I think that sense of not always having to label what you're doing, but just taking the time to just simply.

Simply be and be present where you are and not be on your phone.

And also like being with friends and family, sharing this space and honestly the slowness of it.

There's a benefit that in a time where everything is digital and everything feels rushed.

The esthetic for me, I think that I am making art the same way nature does.

Nature makes things one cell or one molecule or one particle at a time.

And those particles are identical.

It's their rhythm that gives them different appearances.

So using a single object to me is like using a single cell, that's the way I think about it.

And that's why I feel like I can make anything out of everything and everything out of anything.

Because the approach is just multiplication.

The first interest in art, I would say that, you know, the moment you open your eyes, because everything around you is created.

Everything is a work of art by somebody.

In college, I didn't do a sandwich.

I was mostly a painter.

And after college, I was most an illustrator.

But I started taking a jewelry making class at Newark Museum.

And that class brought me to the awareness that jewelry was just small sculpture.

So I started looking for small things to make jewelry out of on the street.

I go through many different iterations of labels like David Bowie.

So at that time, I thought of myself as a high-tech primitive artist.

So I was finding industrial materials, like I'd go to construction sites and take the scraps, PVC pipes, aluminum, et cetera, and make things out of those.

Years ago, I was invited to exhibit at Grounds for Sculpture.

To have the first meeting, and, you know, I'm drinking water.

And I got the bottle, the bottle gets empty, and I'm squeezing the bottle.

And I realized that I can shape the bottle into different things.

But that night, I had a dream.

I dreamed that I'd made a chandelier out of water bottles, and there's a picture of Buddha in every chandelier.

So for that show, I made that chandelier.

With light on them is amazing, the sparkle and shine is like, for me it's like God walked into the room when I see that.

A few years ago, I won a commission for the Kansas City International Airport, and when I heard about it, Kansas City, I think of jazz right away, and I think Charlie Parker.

When I heard by airport, I thought of flight.

So right away I said, man, this would be great for birds made out of saxophones.

So it was that simple.

It was almost like an equation, you know, Kansas City plus airport plus Charlie Parker equal saxophone birds.

A lot of artists do the same thing their whole career, but I couldn't do that.

It'd be very boring for me.

And I read a Picasso at some point, did every approach, you know, all mixed up.

At one point it was a period, this period, that period, but as you get older, just throw it all together.

And that's kind of where I'm at, where I've been for many years now, because I am inspired by newness, just different things, just open to inspiration.

That's what it's about.

The regional theater movement is so important because Broadway obviously is where musical theater and theater in general is born, but most people don't have access to that, right?

So regional theaters are those hubs around the country where arts can be explored and experienced, new art can be born, art can reinvented.

I'm really thrilled to bring other artists here and provide them with the launching pad to achieve what they want to.

Paper Mill is one of the more iconic regional theaters in the country.

We've been around since 1938, and we specialize in the production of musical theater, but we produce at a very high level, and I would say a Broadway caliber.

And we often produce shows that transfer from Paper Mill to Broadway.

This property used to be a functioning Paper Mill.

And it was bought in 1934 by a gentleman named Frank Carrington.

And he had a patron by the name of Antoinette Scudder.

And they invested money in converting the paper mill into a theater company.

And very early on, it got established as a destination regional theater.

Paper Mill has a real rich history of attracting some of the top talent of the day, from Carol Channing and Liza Minnelli, Anne Hathaway, who started here, and Laura Benanti and Rob McClure.

You know, through our very rich education programs, a lot of musical theater entertainers have started here and then gone on to Broadway or film and television.

I think the real key for Paper Mill and for the regional theater movement across the United States is the outreach and education departments that bring students and young people into the theater, but also take all the great things that are happening at Paper Mill or that regional theater out into the community.

I've seen how the arts can change young people's lives.

It can be a source of community.

Many people who don't find themselves in sports or academia can find a friendship and a group through the arts.

It also teaches empathy, something that we don't learn in other parts of schooling.

We have arts education programs and outreach programs that reach over 40,000 students across the state of New Jersey every year.

And touching those lives is amazing.

Paper Mill has a national reputation and now is growing with its international reputation.

And I hope that will continue in all the best ways out of passion for the arts, because I say this all the time, at the heart of musical theater is joy.

And we really need that in our lives.

We know that when cultural arts are part of a community, the community thrives, it increases tax revenue, it increases tourism, it increase business at local restaurants and shops.

So the more we can get the community involved, it's important for people to be able to come together and experience things together collectively.

In this world of instant gratification and social media, where people have shorter attention spans, I think art is another form of engagement to express what is going on in the world in a way that is accessible and it can enter your pores in a different way than just a text.

I think one of the things that makes art powerful is the ability for people to find empathy within it and find themselves or find something in it that they can connect to.

The talent is unbelievable.

We don't know why, but they're all here in this area.

Hey, the music is there.

The music is here, and that's what we are.

We're the music.

Having a state that invests in the arts allows artists to thrive.

We're lucky, we're lucky to live where we are.

Myself as a young person, if I didn't have an arts community in my one square mile town and a school that appreciated the arts, would probably be doing something very different.

So to live in a state where people support young creatives and creatives of all ages continues to make this a really robust arts community.