• Bette Blank
Bette Blank has a Ph.D. in Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, but her art is about the emotions and feelings of everyday life. State of the Arts producer Susan Wallner talks to Blank, a grandmother, about her decision to give up her day job in 2000 to pursue painting full-time. According to the artist, it was her mother’s death which caused her finally to pursue her dream — and it prompted her to create a painting as well. In “Tug of War,” Blank depicted her mother’s hospital room, filled with family, medical personnel, and angels, as showing the “struggle between the living, loved ones and her dead, loved ones (angels).” Family memories, everyday experiences, and Bible stories are some of Blank’s favorite themes. Although her style has a naïve, almost primitive look, Blank has studied art at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts among other places. A resident of Madison, New Jersey, she has had solo shows in New York and New Jersey, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in New York. Her paintings can be seen in the 2007 New Jersey Arts Annual: Fine Arts at The Noyes Museum of Art in Oceanville, New Jersey through July 15, 2007. She is also included in Text Messages, an exhibit at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York, NY from June 15 - August 15, 2007.

• The Art of Glass
Dena and Ralph Lowenbach, of South Orange, New Jersey, have been collecting museum quality glass for decades, and want to share their passion with the public. They also feel strongly about the city of Newark (where Ralph grew up) and its world-class museum. So they have promised their collection to The Newark Museum and, to mark that commitment, have lent some of their major pieces to the museum to be shown right now. State of the Arts producer Amber Edwards meets the collectors and tours “The Art of Glass: From Gallé to Chihuly,” at the museum through August 5, 2007. The exhibit, which draws on both the Lowenbach's personal collection and the museum’s existing treasures, traces the development of 20th century studio art glass from decorative arts, growing out of the arts and crafts movement, to contemporary sculpture using glass as a primary artistic medium. A veritable “who's who” of glass artists, the pieces on view display both the precursors and the evolution of contemporary studio glass and illustrate the enormous breadth of work in the field today.

• Bay-Atlantic Symphony
State of the Arts producer Eric Schultz visited the Bay-Atlantic Symphony for the first of its annual concerts at the Cape May Music Festival, where it has been orchestra-in-residence for the past five seasons. Two days before the season opening, a crisis hit when the orchestra learned that their piano soloist did not have the proper visa to travel to the United States. So, music director Jed Gaylin called his old friend Clipper Erickson, a well-known concert pianist based in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Erickson spent the next two days relearning one of Bach’s most difficult concertos, and delivered an electrifying performance! Viewers see Schultz speaking with Gaylin and Erickson, and performances of Suite No. 1 and Piano Concerto No. 1 by J.S. Bach, and the famous Water Music by George Frederic Handel. Gaylin points out that performing at a summer festival right next to the beach in Cape May creates a wonderfully relaxed and free atmosphere for making music, which the audiences sense. The Bay-Atlantic Symphony will perform in Avalon, New Jersey on August 25 & September 15, 2007 in their Symphony by the Sea series. A fully professional orchestra, the Bay-Atlantic Symphony performs throughout rural southern New Jersey with both winter and summer concert series, and at numerous educational outreach events.

• Visibility Unseen
Why would an artist leave a painting untitled? Indecision or aesthetic intention? Principled restraint or slacking off? State of the Arts producer Christopher Benincasa explores these questions in a visit to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum’s new exhibit “The Heritage of the Russian Avant-Garde.” Zimmerli curator Jeffrey Wechsler talks about what it means to call a piece “Untitled,” based on the 50-plus works on display from the Zimmerli’s extensive Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. The current exhibit focuses on the Sterligov School, a late 20th century group of abstract painters who worked in Leningrad from 1960-1990. These artists based their approach on Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism and Mikhail Matiushin's Organic Culture, and sought to convey their perception of the world as a non-representational reality, “a visible invisibility, and a visibility unseen.” As you’ll hear in this story, some kinds of art are better off untitled. The exhibit, on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, runs through October 14, 2007.

State of the Arts, the award-winning, half-hour arts magazine, airs every Friday at 8:30 pm, followed by an encore presentation each Wednesday at 11:30 pm.

The current episode of State of the Arts can be viewed online at www.njn.net. Individual stories will be available to view following their broadcast by visiting the program online at State of the Arts.

Funding for State of the Arts is provided by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The series producer is Susan Wallner and the executive producer is Nila Aronow.

NJN is available on all New Jersey cable systems, satellite systems, and Time Warner Cable channel 750 in NYC.
State of the Arts is also available via video streaming at njn.net after the original broadcast.
Additionally, the program is repeated on NJN’s JerseyVision available on Comcast Digital Cable in New Jersey.
(Check http://www.njn.net/digital/schedule.html for detailed listings.)
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