Narrator: A long lost trove of glass plate negatives were donated to the New Jersey State Museum.

They reveal scenes from the 1890s through the early years of the 20th century.

Ciotola: Grant Castner's material is so personal because it shows the faces of people.

Narrator: Two Muslim artists from the Trenton area focus on their cultural and spiritual identities in an exhibition at Art@Bainbridge.

Located on Nassau Street, the gallery is part of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Steward: We are not a museum that has ever had "a project space," as they might be termed, in which more experimental or early career work would be exhibited, and this became that space.

Narrator: And Mark Morris is one of today's most celebrated choreographers.

His work is as wide-ranging as the music he chooses.

Morris: I'm a choreographer because of my relationship with music.

For me, there's no other real reason to do it.

As a musician, I'm a choreographer, and as a choreographer, I make up dances to music.

Man: [ Lyrics ] Isn't it a pretty one?

Narrator: "State of the Arts," going on location with the most creative people in New Jersey.

Man: [ Lyrics ] He started to sing Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by the Pheasant Hill Foundation; Philip E. Lian and Joan L. Mueller, in memory of Judith McCartin Scheide; and these friends of "State of the Arts."

Morris: I'm an expert in choreography, but that doesn't mean people should do it the way I do it or even like it, you know?

It's absolute free choice.

The only thing I encourage people to do is take the opportunity, if you can, if you live someplace where you can do that, watch and listen.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: Mark Morris is, without question, one of the most celebrated choreographers of our time.

He's collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, John Adams, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and one year, with both Paul Simon and early music pioneer Christopher Hogwood.

We met the choreographer in his colorful office at the Mark Morris Dance Center, right across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Morris: I'm a choreographer because of my relationship with music.

For me, there's no other real reason to do it.

And as a musician, I'm a choreographer, and as a choreographer, I have a dance company and I make up dances to music.

So, I have a music ensemble, and I have a dance group, and they work always together because that's my number-one priority and value is those things together, which were always together through all human history, and I still think they should be.

Fowler: His dances are all so different, which I think also is in response to the fact that his musical inspiration is so different.

He's choreographed to Monteverdi and to The Beatles and basically almost everything in between.

Narrator: Mark Morris's take on Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" is both disturbing and funny.

It's called "The Hard Nut."

[ Music plays ] A recent work, "The Look of Love," is set to the music of Burt Bacharach.

Chorus: [ Lyrics ] It won't be long Till happiness steps up to greet me Narrator: "Spring, Spring, Spring" is based on an arrangement of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" by the jazz trio The Bad Plus.

[ Music plays ] "State of the Arts" interviewed 30-year-old Mark Morris in 1988.

He was living in Hoboken, and his career was taking off.

Morris: I want to do pieces that I haven't done before.

And so, that's why, you know, that's why I'm not, like, a downtown postmodern or something like that.

I mean, I just make up these pieces.

I'm more of a modernist, constructivist, neo-anti-something, you know?

And the convenient and serendipitous bit was that when I decided to put on a concert of my own, my first concert as the Mark Morris Dance Group, I applied for a grant with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and got it.

And I put on my first performance.

I mean, I'm not exactly modeling my career on anybody else's because, you know, it's unprecedented.

It's never happened to me.

I don't know what it's like.

I don't know what happens next.

You know, I know that I like how this is going and I'd like to continue it.

I mean, there are other things I'd like to do, but this is it.

You know, I could do this for a very long time if I hold out.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Black: I think the one of the first things that people notice about the work who aren't familiar with it is that it looks easy, it looks like anybody could do it.

And that's sort of a trope that people have said about the company.

We look like a bunch of people who are just waiting at the bus stop.

And that's certainly a tribute to the diversity of body types that we have in the company.

We don't really care what your body type is or what you look like, as long as you can do the dances.

Fowler: The most common phrase that people use is, "Oh, it looks like anybody could do that," which I can guarantee you, having been in the room, is 100% not true, and a lot of effort goes into making it look that way.

Woman: What do you mean?

Narrator: Over the years, the Mark Morris Dance Group has performed dozens of times at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton.

A recent performance featured works that spanned four decades -- the first set to music of Ivor Cutler.

Morris: That's a recorded piece because the person who wrote it and speaks it and sings it, Ivor Cutler, a great, great Scottish personality and poet and songwriter... Ivor Cutler is dead.

And these recordings were made in the, I don't know, probably '60s and '70s, and they're wonderful sort of verses and little songs, distinctly Scottish, and I just love them.

Cutler: [ Lyrics ] Once I was a little girl My head was in a whirl I-I-I-I'm a girl I climbed a slippy tree for all the boys to see And they gasped at how clever I was Black: I was an original understudy in "A Wooden Tree."

I was specifically understudying Mikhail Baryshnikov.

That was quite a trip, of course, to be in a studio with him.

He and Mark are long-time friends.

They've worked together a number of times.

But Mark, you know, because they're long-time friends, Mark didn't want to give him any notes.

So, any time Misha did something wrong, I had to be the person to give Misha his notes.

Um, of course, that was a very surreal experience because he's Baryshnikov.

Narrator: "Castor and Pollux," an early work first performed in 1980, is set to music by Harry Partch.

Morris: Harry Partch was a brilliant West Coast homosexual, alcoholic composer of great, great imagination and talent and skill, and he wrote astounding compositions.

When he pulled away from European music, he spent quite a bit of time as a hobo, an actual hobo, riding the rails of America and collecting music and stories.

But he worked with an octave, divided into, I think 47 pitches, probably, microtonal.

He built all of his own instruments that were mostly percussion and string, plucked strings, and built all the instruments with his students and his friends.

And in this case, "Castor and Pollux" is a representation of the twins of Gemini.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] The importance, the urgency in civilization, not just in American culture, is for the arts.

That's also reading.

Literacy is super, super important.

From there, you can go to poetry or songs or stories or...

But all of that stuff, that includes music and dance, art of any kind, which scares a lot of Americans, and there's no reason for it to.

It's your friend.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Narrator: Later on the show, the very different work of two artists, each focused on their Muslim identities.

But first, rare glass plate negatives rediscovered after more than a century.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Ciotola: Grant Castner's photographs really tell a story of everyday life in New Jersey in the period from 1880 to the 1920s.

Narrator: At the New Jersey State Museum, a sprawling exhibition of photographs by Trenton resident Grant Castner is a window to a world long gone.

In 2019, Nick Ciotola, the cultural history curator for the museum, got a call from a potential donor.

Ciotola: I immediately called him back because this was one of those collections that initially sound very intriguing and very interesting because he said they were glass plate negatives and they were about New Jersey history.

I was able to go and look at the collection in a storage locker in Hunterdon County, and I picked up one of the glass plate negatives, and I saw that it was an image of Trenton over 100 years ago, in the early 1900s.

The image was filled with modern transportation for that time period.

One image, one glass plate negative, one photograph by Grant Castner really encapsulated that time period, that story of New Jersey history, that turn of the 20th century urbanization and modernization and transportation history that was going on.

So, I realized right away that this was a special collection.

It was a collection that we would want to preserve here at the New Jersey State Museum for future generations.

And over the past five years, we've been researching and interpreting the collection.

And now it will culminate in the exhibition "Discovering Grant Castner: The Lost Archive of a New Jersey Photographer."

Narrator: Archivist and photographer Gary Saretzky provided expertise about the photographic techniques current during Castner's time.

Saretzky: Grant Castner lived from 1863, during the Civil War -- born during the Civil War -- and he died in 1941, just as World War II was starting.

He spanned that period, and at the beginning of that period, photography employed primarily the collodion process, also known as the wet plate process.

It was very tedious.

Narrator: Wet plate, or collodion, photography is complicated.

It requires long exposure times and ready access to a darkroom.

Saretzky: So, photographers who worked outside, they would have wagons with them, darkroom wagons, and they would go in and out of the wagon, you know, and it took a long time to make a picture.

So, there weren't a whole lot of amateurs working in the collodion era, which lasted until 1880.

Narrator: And then came the invention of the gelatin dry plate glass negative.

Saretzky: Those negatives, those gelatin dry plate negatives, as they were called, came ready to use, right out of the box.

This one says extremely rapid dry plate, very sensitive to light.

Narrator: It was a revolution, and the popularity of photography soared.

Magazines showcased the best work and new techniques, and every city had its camera club.

After Grant Castner moved to the boomtown of Trenton, he became part of the scene.

Saretzky: There's a picture of him with a bicycle, and you can see on the bicycle, there's a box that's strapped to the bicycle, and that's where he probably had his glass plate negatives, were in that box.

Narrator: The prints that Grant Castner made are gone.

But his negatives, unlike so many others made at the time, will now be preserved for future generations.

The clarity of his glass plate negatives show a long-vanished world in amazing detail.

Saretzky: Grant Castner was one of the first citizens of Trenton to go up into the top of the Trenton Battle Monument.

At one time, there was an elevator that took the public up to the top.

You could go to a viewing platform, and Grant Castner was one of the first Trentonians to do that.

He brought his camera with him.

Trenton was booming at that time period.

It was transitioning from a smaller city of 30,000 individuals to a city of nearly 200,000 individuals.

It was a time period when the railroads, the Pennsylvania Railroad, was coming into Trenton.

It was a time when automobiles were starting to roam the streets of Trenton, and it was a time period when streetcars ran all through the city of Trenton and connected the outskirts of Trenton to the city.

And Grant Castner captured and documented all of that at a time when Trenton was booming.

Narrator: Grant Castner was observing the world around him and creating carefully composed, thoughtful images.

He cared about aesthetics.

Through photography magazines and camera clubs, he was aware of and emulated great photographers working at the time, including Lewis Hine, the social crusader, and Alfred Stieglitz, the gallery owner and, later, husband of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Ciotola: Castner is a contemporary of the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and Stieglitz was a member of the so-called Photo-Secession, the group that really thought that photography could be an art form and should be considered an art form.

Narrator: Grant Castner's photographs from Trenton's heyday show a world that was vibrant and full of change, and they show the faces of the people who lived in and made that world.

Ciotola: One of Grant Castner's great talents was his ability to photograph people, and I believe that he genuinely enjoyed people.

The personalities of the individuals who he photographs come across in some of these photographs that he took.

Part of that is because he didn't invite strangers into his house to take studio portraits of them.

He actually traveled out into his community, whether it was Trenton or farther afield in Mercer County, even up to Warren County, to take pictures of people in their own environments.

Naturally, that made them much more comfortable having the presence of a photographer.

Saretzky: For me, a lot of the fascination is the quality of the work is so high.

A good sense of style, a good sense of composition, and an awareness of light.

Mostly, it's all natural-light photography, and you have to know where the light's coming from, if you want to make a good photo.

So, I think the quality of the work is really what's going to make people love this show.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: Last on the show, a story about two Muslim artists, one from North Africa and one from Trenton, New Jersey.

[ Music plays ] Dweck: The exhibition is called "Reciting Women," and it brings together the work of two artists who are deeply rooted in the Trenton community.

The exhibition looks at the similarities between Alia Bensliman and Khalilah Sabree's work, in that they're both drawing on the tradition of geometric pattern found in Islamic art and architecture, and they're both, as I hope this exhibition will show, harnessing painting as a way to foster empathy and understanding.

But aside from the similarities, there are a lot of differences between the two artists' work.

So, Khalilah Sabree's series "Destruction of a Culture" draws on her personal journey as an African American Muslim to raise really weighty questions about human suffering and cultural disintegration.

Meanwhile, Alia's series of North African women celebrates the indigenous Amazigh tradition of personal adornment, which she's familiar with from her native Tunisia.

Steward: We have always exhibited faith.

The works of the Italian Renaissance are, generally speaking, works of faith.

It is, I think, in this moment, especially fraught, trying to do so.

What maybe guides us to the selection are artists who are under-known, but whose work we think is worth paying attention to.

Bensliman: My name is Alia Bensliman.

I am a visual artist, contemporary artist, and I paint with intricate lines, and I also do portrait art.

I was born and raised in Tunisia.

Tunisia is in north of Africa.

It's a small country, slightly bigger than New Jersey state.

I wanted to talk about indigenous women from North Africa, specifically young North African women.

So, I imagine, and I also get inspired by photographs of Amazigh women, and I showcase their traditional clothing and traditional jewelry, but also I showcase their facial tattoo, their body tattoo.

The art of tattooing Amazigh have a lot of meaning.

The more you get tattooed, the better ranking you have, and also it talks about a story.

So, the more tattoos you get in your body, the larger story you talk about your life.

Dweck: Alia focuses on the Amazigh people, who are the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, who have been present in the Maghreb since antiquity.

And so, Alia, who claims some Amazigh heritage, celebrates this really strong visual culture by painting these portraits of sort of imagined -- imagined North African women.

Bensliman: I grew up where religion is so obvious in my family.

For me, it's not only being Muslim as a religion, being Muslim also as culturally.

I embrace that, and I wanted to use it in my art in a sense where I wanted to include the Islamic geometry with the portraits.

I wanted to show the past and the future fused together in my work.

Dweck: For Alia, as a... perhaps you could say secular Muslim, faith is very much about tradition.

It's about family, it's about continuity, and it's also about visual culture.

For Khalilah, faith is about her being a devout Muslim.

It is about practice.

It is about spirituality.

It's about text and about prayer.

Sabree: My name is Khalilah Sabree, and I am an artist.

I'm a Muslim artist, and I am also a mixed-media person.

I use photography, drawing, painting to create works that are very personal to me and that express my concern for world culture.

Dweck: Her series "Destruction of a Culture" was originally called "The Hajj Series," and Khalilah has made this pilgrimage to Mecca several times.

In 2004, she took a photograph while she was making Hajj of two African women, covered in hijab, staring away from the Kaaba toward the modern city of Mecca.

She reproduced it.

She enlarged it on a copier in black and white, over which she layered paint and ink and pen and print.

If you were to line them up, you would see a continuity of line, but also a dramatic show of progression in increasing darkness and a sort of play with visibility and invisibility of the women's figures in the painting.

Sabree: They're more about the emotion.

They're not about a specific place or a particular people.

It's about how things and your life can change in an instant.

It's about the crumbling of a society.

It's also a spiritual catharsis for me, where I can -- things that I think about can come out onto the canvas.

Events in the world, in Africa and Asia and other places where war occurs, those things are feeding me, also, visually.

It's showing the buildings falling.

And I think about the people under the rubble and what that might be like.

I have always been a searcher.

I studied religion in college at Trenton State College, the College of New Jersey, on that journey, but as fate would have it, I met someone at TCNJ who was a Muslim, and that's how it all started.

It's the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

Being a Muslim... ...has brought definition to a lot of things that I did not understand.

Dweck: Both of their work is deeply personal.

It reflects on their identities as Muslim American women and on their journeys of belonging.

But at the same time, both of their work ask really big questions about cultural disintegration, cultural preservation, and cultural identity.

Steward: These artists are being exhibited in our space, in part because they work on multivalent bases.

Their work is in part about faith.

I think it's also about their historical identity as women.

It's about their identity as teachers, as visual artists.

Dweck: Whether it's about faith or whether it's about storytelling, it's about finding one's voice.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: That's it for "State of the Arts" this time.

Find all of these stories and more at StateoftheArtsNJ.com.

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Thanks for watching.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by the Pheasant Hill Foundation; Philip E. Lian and Joan L. Mueller, in memory of Judith McCartin Scheide; and these friends of "State of the Arts."