The unlikely link between chickens, deli food, bandages and art

What do Johnson & Johnson, a good brisket sandwich and art have in common? Interestingly enough, Rutgers University and New Brunswick, sort of, by way of George Segal.

That's George Segal the artist, not George Segal the actor.

A lot of people don't realize it, but Rutgers' New Brunswick campus was at the center of a vibrant and influential art community in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For example, now-legendary Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was a professor in the Douglass College art department, right around the time Rutgers College instructor and performance art pioneer Allen Kaprow was beginning to conceive of what became known as Happenings. Enjoying both the proximity and distance from Manhattan's scene, they and others found the freedom to experiment on radical new ideas.

Segal found his way from his native New York City to Central New Jersey in 1940 when his father bought a chicken farm in South Brunswick as part of an organized effort to boost food production during the Great Depression. After briefly attending Rutgers, he studied art at Cooper Union in the early 40s and Pratt Institute several years later, marrying Helen Steinberg, the girl next door, in the interim. Ultimately he earned his bachelors degree at NYU, graduating in 1949 with a degree in art education.

The Segals bought their own South Brunswick chicken farm in 1953, but when finances got tenuous, he started teaching English and art in local high schools. Kaprow lived nearby, and the two became friends, with Segal's paintings eventually becoming part of Kaprow's exhibitions. The pair also shared wall space in New Brunswick's Z&Z Kosher Delicatessen in New Brunswick, perhaps hoping that patrons would fancy a nice piece of art with their kreplach.

A portion of Segal's
New Jersey Turnpike Toll Booth,
as installed at the Newark Museum.

Eventually, Segal's worlds combined: he hosted one of the first Happenings on the chicken farm and began using poultry netting (chicken wire) to frame out the basis of plaster sculptures that he'd arrange in front of painted canvases. He soon abandoned the wire in favor of placing plaster-soaked J&J gauze bandages directly on his models, reportedly coming upon the idea after one of his students gave him the material doctors used to create plaster casts for broken bones. Segal would plaster his models with the gauze, allowing it to set only to a certain firmness, then gently removing and reshaping it back to its three-dimensional form. Thus he'd have a fully-formed, accurate human being, albeit in ghostly white. He'd then place the form -- or several -- into a tableau that he called an 'assembled environment.' It might be a group around a kitchen table, couples on a park bench (as in New York's Christopher Park) or a toll collector in an authentic Holland Tunnel booth (as in the Newark Museum's garden).

Segal's molding methods evolved over time, allowing him to create intensely lifelike details in his plaster sculptures. Understanding that his models had to stay in the same posture for more than a half hour as the plaster hardened, he came to realize that what he was capturing was not a pose or posture, but the subject's actual true stance, revealing a great deal of who they were as people and lending truth to the art itself.

Over the decades, Segal's art has been installed widely -- chances are you've seen either the plaster works or those cast in copper, like the Breadline installation at the FDR Memorial in Washington D.C. If you're like me, they've prompted you to want to participate somehow. Maybe you've found yourself wanting to line up with the hungry men waiting on the bread line, or maybe handing fare to the toll collector at the booth in the Newark Museum Garden. Either way, they've drawn you into their lives and made you wonder: what's on your mind? What challenges are you facing today? And perhaps, in some small way, they've encouraged you to consider the same questions about yourself.

Segal eventually became successful enough as an artist to leave teaching behind, but he maintained a 6000 square foot studio at the South Brunswick chicken farm until his death in 2000. Whether he still had chickens at that point, I don't know.

Creativity in the Palisades: the Art Colony of Ridgefield

Not far from the early 20th century film studios of Fort Lee was once a thriving artists' colony named Grantwood, nestled in the Palisades in the town of Ridgefield. Drive around town today, and you might see last vestiges of the community in street names like Studio Road and Art Lane, or a few remaining homes of the era.

The first community of artists arrived in Ridgefield in the 1890s, with illustrators James Maxfield and Van Dearing Perrine in the vanguard. Capitalizing on the then-bucolic setting to sketch directly from nature, they soon brought other artists to the New Jersey side, bolstering Perrine's Country Sketch Club and widening the range of media being practiced in the community. The club arranged shows of members' works at the National Academy of Design and Art Institute of Chicago, raising the art community's awareness of the enclave in the Palisades while raising funds to construct a clubhouse where its members could work and gather.

Starting in 1912, a second wave of artists and writers brought a decidedly modernist dimension to Grantwood. In some ways, this new generation followed the common mantra we still hear today about those who cross the river from New York: they sought someplace much quieter and less expensive than New York, with the proximity to maintain ties to the thriving art communities of Greenwich Village. Man Ray, in particular, saw Ridgefield as his Walden Pond, a place where, like Thoreau, he could escape civilization and cultivate his artistic being. Writer Alfred Kreymborg, another arrival, blissfully described "the view of the Jersey Meadows, striped and streaked with the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers, lazily rolling away to the horizon."

Just as Maxfield and Perrine had spirited their colleagues across the river, Man Ray attracted progressive thinkers to Grantwood, envisioning "an advanced cultural center embracing all the arts" among the hillside shacks and cottages they built for shelter. Fellow Surrealist and Dadaist Marcel Duchamp lived in the colony for a time, and poet Marianne Moore visited periodically with other like-minded city artists. The resulting group became better known in the greater arts world as "The Others."

Among the writers who flocked to Grantwood (albeit from within the state) was poet William Carlos Williams, who also practiced medicine in Rutherford as his artistic acclaim grew. In his later years, Williams mentored Beat movement poets, most notably Paterson's Allen Ginsberg, whose letters he included in his own epic poem, Paterson. More notoriously, Grantwood earned a reputation for radicalism in some circles, no doubt due to the presence of noted anarchist Emma Goldman in 1910.

Encroaching industry and suburbanization eventually erased the idyllic scenery and peace that had drawn and enraptured so many creative souls and free thinkers, and the colony faded with it. If you look carefully, though, you'll still find a few vantage points where Ridgefield's hills and the meadows below reveal a little of what attracted Maxfield, Perrine, Man Ray and those who followed.