The Art Hanging Between the Books

There are certain places we have learned to enter with expectations. A restaurant promises food. A theater promises a performance. A library, despite the considerable evolution of the modern library, still tends to summon an image of books, tables, computers and the particular quiet that comes from many people agreeing, more or less, to keep their voices down.

On a Tuesday evening in September, the Tenafly Public Library offered something else.

Just beyond its doors, the walls had become an exhibition space. Paintings and other works appeared one after another, different in subject, medium and temperament. Some asked you to move closer. Others worked better from several steps back. There was no obvious visual language connecting everything, which was precisely the point. This was a group exhibition by members of the Fort Lee Artists Guild, and the variety on the walls reflected the variety within the organization itself.

The September 22, 2026 “Meet the Artists” reception marked the opening of the Guild’s exhibition at the library’s Edna Kawulitz Gallery, where the work will remain on display through September and October. The Guild describes itself as an eclectic visual-arts organization whose members work in oil, water media, acrylic, sculpture, ceramics, mixed media and digital manipulation, among other forms. Its history reaches back to 1978.

That history is worth considering for a moment. Bergen County is filled with cultural institutions that are easy to miss precisely because they have been here for so long. They operate without the gravitational pull of a major museum or Manhattan gallery. They meet in municipal buildings and historic houses. They teach classes. They hang paintings in libraries. Their members make things in spare rooms and studios and on computers, then bring those things into public view a few towns away.

The Fort Lee Artists Guild is one of them.

Its members do not appear to have been recruited around a particular aesthetic. The Guild explicitly embraces work ranging from realism to abstraction. That breadth was apparent walking through the Tenafly exhibition. The experience was less like entering a show organized around a grand curatorial argument and more like being introduced to a group of people through the things they had made.

And eventually, we met some of them.

One of the artists was Max Cartagena.

Cartagena’s biography reads less like a conventional progression toward visual art than a collection of creative lives that eventually found one another. Born and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he has written and recorded music, worked on independent films in Hollywood both in front of and behind the camera, modeled and designed websites. That digital work eventually developed into his own form of digitally generated art. He has collaborated with artist Jane Sklar, and his work has been exhibited at the Salmagundi Club and elsewhere in New York and New Jersey.

There is something appealing about encountering that history only after seeing the work. Artists are often presented to us backward. We read the biography, learn the credentials, note the exhibitions and awards, and then look at the thing they made. A local exhibition allows for a more accidental sequence. You notice something on a wall. You wonder who made it. Then the person responsible for it may turn out to be standing a few feet away.

“I try to show that there’s the eye and there’s the imagination, and not just the hardware or the software.” – Max Caratgena

If Max said something in your interview about how he creates the digital work, what inspires him, or how he came to this particular form of art, I would use his exact sentence here. Even a very short quote would work beautifully because we’ve just given the reader his background.

Then there was Barry Shiff.

Shiff is associated with a considerably more traditional medium. Fort Lee recreation materials identify him as an award-winning watercolor artist and instructor whose subjects include landscapes, seascapes and sailing vessels. He has taught watercolor workshops for adults through the borough, including classes designed for beginners as well as experienced painters.

None of that, however, was the most memorable introduction to Barry that evening.

That came from his pocket.

As we talked, it became apparent that Shiff had brought along something of a portable archive. Tucked into his pants pocket was a small photo album filled with images of his portraits. It had the feeling of something kept close because the person carrying it genuinely wanted the work close, too. When asked if he would show us some of what was inside, he happily obliged.

Out came the album.

He began turning the pages.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about a tiny physical album of artwork appearing from someone’s pocket in 2026. We have become accustomed to carrying enormous visual archives everywhere, although ours live behind glass screens. A phone can hold thousands of photographs. An Instagram account can function as a portfolio. A website can place decades of work into a grid that can be summoned from anywhere.

Barry had an album.

And somehow the album felt more revealing.

“Tucked into Barry Shiff’s pocket was a miniature archive of the work he was proud to have made.”

The portraits inside expanded the exhibition beyond the pieces hanging around us. Here was another body of work, carried into the room by the artist himself, waiting for the possibility that somebody might ask.

We did.

This is one of the pleasures of meeting artists where they live and work, geographically speaking. The distance between viewer and maker collapses. A painting ceases to be simply an object with a small card beside it. There is a person nearby who chose the subject, struggled with the composition, decided when it was finished, framed it, transported it and watched strangers stand in front of it.

At some point, Barry’s partner decided, with good humor, that perhaps the interview had gone on long enough. Interview shop was closing.

It was a small moment, and a funny one. It also seemed like an appropriate ending to an evening devoted to something inherently personal being made public. Artists spend hours alone with their work. Exhibitions reverse the arrangement. The work leaves the private space where it was created and enters a room full of people who can examine it, discuss it, misunderstand it, love it, walk past it and occasionally ask its creator to pull even more examples out of his pocket.

The exhibition also says something about libraries, particularly the role local libraries have assumed as community spaces. The Edna Kawulitz Gallery exists inside the Tenafly library, which means an art exhibition can be encountered without planning a museum visit or buying a ticket. Someone can come looking for a novel, bring a child to the library, use a computer, attend a program, or simply wander in and find original art hanging along the way. The September 22 reception was free, and the exhibition remains accessible during regular library hours.

That accessibility is important for local art because local art has an unusual visibility problem. The Metropolitan Museum of Art does not need anyone to explain where to find it. Smaller creative communities depend upon a network of modest spaces and ordinary encounters. A historic house becomes a gallery. A municipal program becomes an art class. A library wall becomes exhibition space. An artist who lives a few miles away becomes someone whose work you now recognize.

The Fort Lee Artists Guild has been creating opportunities for those encounters for nearly half a century. Today, it operates as a nonprofit visual-arts organization and maintains a local community art space at Fort Lee’s Judge Moore House, while its members continue exhibiting elsewhere in the region. The Guild has been particularly active this year: Barry Shiff and Max Cartagena were also among the artists included in its “America 250” exhibition during the summer.

The Tenafly exhibition extends that presence beyond Fort Lee itself.

That may be the more interesting geography of Bergen County. Its seventy municipalities can encourage us to think in borders: this belongs to Tenafly, that belongs to Fort Lee, something else belongs to Englewood. Culture tends to travel more freely. An artist works in Fort Lee. The paintings hang in Tenafly. People from surrounding towns walk through the doors. Someone stops. A conversation begins.

“Some of Bergen County’s most interesting art may be hanging a few towns away, waiting for someone to stop.”

By the end of the evening, the library was still a library. The books had gone nowhere. The shelves remained where they had been. Yet for a few steps through the building, another Bergen County had revealed itself, populated by painters and digital artists, portraits and landscapes, experiments in color and form, and people who have apparently been making far more things around us than most of us realize.

Some even carry the evidence in their pockets.