When Robin Parness Lipson walks along the boardwalk what she sees are bustling restaurants and gift shops and the energy of a bright future being shaped. And as part of that future, she sees her baby, her dream, the New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art: a glittering monument to the idea that New Jersey is not just the home of Snooki and the Situation, or feuding housewives, or the Bada Bing Club, but a place where cultured, philanthropic people can build something that makes a difference.
“We’re creating a cultural brand, and it’s going to rebrand the state,” said Ms. Lipson, the wife of a parking garage developer, who came from humble beginnings and discovered a love of contemporary art only in the last few years.
Ms. Lipson has not yet raised any of the $5 million it is projected that she will need to open the museum, nor does she have a lock on the boardwalk real estate she covets, or a team of slick consultants armed with surveys and statistics. But she is a bona fide expert at using charm, guileless candor, boundless energy and terms of endearment to bring home what she wants: a new museum on the Jersey Shore devoted to emerging artists.
“I’m blessed with this life right now,” she said recently. “And I have a choice,” she went on. “I could go to lunch and go shopping and, you know, do those things, or I can do something that might make somebody else’s life a little richer.”
New museums are not born every day, and when they are, they are usually founded either by major art patrons — Whitneys, Guggenheims, de Menils — or, as in the case of the New Museum, by a visionary curator. Ms. Lipson is neither. But she does have the support of wealthy friends with a major art collection: Michael and Susan Hort. The Horts, who appear annually on ARTnews’s list of the world’s 200 top collectors, host a popular art party, a brunch at their Tribeca loft, during the annual Armory Show.
Ms. Lipson also has a dozen young artists, curators, event planners and others who are part of her dream. These volunteers have done everything from build a Web site, njmoca.org, to plan an inaugural exhibition and gala on Oct. 23.
“It’s just so different,” Haley Mellin, a painter who is organizing the inaugural exhibition, said of Ms. Lipson’s ideas for the museum, including pop-up exhibits around the state. “I was really attracted to that vision.”
The building of her dreams is a 1920s power plant, designed by Warren & Wetmore, whose work includes Grand Central Terminal. Abandoned for 30 years, the plant is owned by the development company Madison Marquette, which owns much of the property on the boardwalk here.
Ms. Lipson tried to get a meeting with Madison Marquette’s president, Gary Mottola, for weeks to make her pitch. She finally got it on a recent morning in a sunbaked conference room. Ms. Lipson was in a black skirt and sleeveless top and big sunglasses, Mr. Mottola in a Stone PonyT-shirt; a reporter attended.
Ms. Lipson noted that while New Jersey had many regional museums, it had nothing that drew international tourism.
“Except Madam Marie,” Mr. Mottola interjected, referring to the stand of a former boardwalk fortuneteller made famous by Bruce Springsteen in his “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).”
Ms. Lipson said the museum would be an economic catalyst in the way that Mass MoCA, a contemporary art museum that opened in 1999, has been in North Adams, Mass. “It was blighted; there was a high crime rate,” she said.
Mr. Mottola appeared to take umbrage. Asbury Park, he said, was “the biggest music destination in the world.” The D.J. Tiësto had recently played at the Convention Center. And celebrity glamour? What about the New Jersey Hall of Fame, which has Jack Nicholson’s second-grade report card and Susan Sarandon’s cheerleading jacket in its temporary space on the boardwalk?
He might be interested in having an art museum, he said, but “not in the context of ‘We’re blighted, this is going to make us unblighted,’ ” he said. “We’re already way past that.”
She was able to interest Mr. Mottola in hosting the inaugural gala in another one of the company’s buildings, the Paramount Theater, and she saw that as progress.
“I just have to bring him into our world,” she said.
The museum will depend on loans rather than having a collection, allowing it to operate more efficiently and avoid “the crunch situations that major museums get into,” Ms. Lipson said. As for the Horts’ collection, “If a curator comes and wants access to the collection, they can have it,” she said.
The Horts, who have a home in Monmouth Beach, are planning to support the museum, and say they feel others will too. They haven’t previously been major donors to existing museums. For Ms. Lipson, who keeps in daily touch with her young volunteers by phone, e-mail and Facebook, the museum is already bearing fruit as a community-builder.
“I’m so enriched by meeting everybody, and I’m having so much fun with this,” she said, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm. “I’m loving it.”
Information provided by Kate Taylor of the New York Times.
