Project For Empty Space

Our offices and exhibitions will be closed this Friday, October 2nd.

We will reopen Monday, October 5th!

➡️ Join PES Studios on Sunday, October 11, from 1–5 PM at📍800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Blvd., Newark, NJ, for our annual FALL OPEN STUDIOS! Explore four floors of 50+ artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails. RSVP via 🔗 link in bio!

Visit the studio of Mashell Black! Mashell Black | Studio 319 ✨

🗣️“I have removed every painting from my studio. The studio itself is now the artwork. Each day I paint directly onto the walls, allowing each layer to transform the one before it. And on October 11, everyone is invited to a free collaborative painting event.”

Learn more about the artist at 📲 mashellblack.com or in person on Oct. 11th!

🌟 PES STUDIOS, part of Project for Empty Space, is a nonprofit arts initiative creating safe and equitable spaces for social dialogue. We support socially engaged artists by amplifying narratives often erased, while holding space for reflection and imagining new futures.

This event is held in conjunction with the Newark Arts Festival ().

📸 Carlos Hernandez (Carlos Hernandez)

It’s that time of year again! 🍂 Join Project for Empty Space from October 9–11 for three days of arts programming, exhibitions, and experiences held in conjunction with the annual Newark Arts Festival, a citywide celebration of the arts. Learn more and RSVP at tinyurl.com/3daysofart 📲

➡️ From an evening of art-making, music, food, and gathering under the stars at Fall NIGHT FEST to contributing to a new public mural, joining a community sing shout, and exploring exhibitions alongside the artists who created them, the weekend is packed with ways to experience Newark through art.

➡️ Then, on Sunday, experience one of our most magical days of the year: PES OPEN STUDIOS. For one day only, our normally private artist studios open their doors to the public. Explore 50+ artist studios and creative spaces across four floors (ch*****ne included)! 🍾

Tomorrow! Tuesday, September, 29 | 6:30 PM

Join NJPAC (NJPAC) for “city of notes: a community mural-making event” a community workshop with artist and landscape architect Haemee Han (JAEMEE STUDIO).

This event is presented as part of Public Art @ NJPAC, a partnership between Project for Empty Space and NJPAC that is bringing a series of new public art commissions to NJPAC’s expanding campus.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll help create elements for “The City in Notes”, a new participatory mural coming to NJPAC’s campus next year. Your ideas and contributions will become part of a lasting public artwork rooted in Newark’s music, culture, and community.

RSVP: bit.ly/njpacmural

➡️ Join PES Studios on Sunday, October 11, from 1–5 PM at📍800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Blvd., Newark, NJ, for our annual FALL OPEN STUDIOS! Explore four floors of 50+ artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails. RSVP via 🔗 link in bio!

Visit the studio of Patricia Reynolds! Patricia Reynolds | Studio 323 ✨

Patricia Arias-Reynolds is a Latinx multimedia visual artist, public muralist, and program facilitator known for her transformative glass mosaic installations and innovative art and wellness programming. Working across public and community-centered spaces, Patricia constructs vibrant visual narratives that center cultural identity, resilience, and civic engagement.

As a public artist, she approaches her work as a bridge between creativity and activism, designing permanent public interventions that embody the spirit and history of the communities they represent. Parallel to her public art practice, she develops and facilitates multidisciplinary art and wellness programs specifically tailored to the maternal health sector. Through these initiatives, she integrates hands-on creative practice with holistic support systems, providing mothers and birthing parents with expressive tools to navigate health, identity, and personal empowerment.

Patricia holds an BFA in Fine Arts from Rutgers University-Newark and serves as the founder of La Busy Bee Studio. Her work encompasses public murals, educational workshops, and community-engaged participatory research across New Jersey.

Learn more about the artist at 📲 labusybee.art or in person on Oct. 11th!

🌟 PES STUDIOS, part of Project for Empty Space, is a nonprofit arts initiative creating safe and equitable spaces for social dialogue. We support socially engaged artists by amplifying narratives often erased, while holding space for reflection and imagining new futures.

This event is held in conjunction with the Newark Arts Festival ().

📸 Carlos Hernandez (Carlos Hernandez)

➡️ Join PES Studios on Sunday, October 11, from 1–5 PM at📍800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Blvd., Newark, NJ, for our annual FALL OPEN STUDIOS! Explore four floors of 50+ artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails. RSVP via 🔗 link in bio!

Visit the studio of Shoshanna Weinberger! Shoshanna Weinberger | Studio 205 ✨

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Montclair, NJ, Shoshanna Weinberger received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2003 and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. She has lived and worked in Newark, New Jersey, since 2006, where her studio practice explores her Afro-Caribbean-American lineage through abstraction using mixed media drawing, painting, collage, and site-specific installation. Weinberger is also an Adjunct Professor in the Arts, Culture and Media Department at Rutgers University–Newark.

For more than three decades, Weinberger has exhibited widely throughout Jamaica, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, South Africa, and the United States. Exhibition highlights include the National Gallery of Jamaica; The Newark Museum of Art; The Bronx Museum; New Jersey State Museum; Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK; and NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.

Learn more about the artist at 📲 shoshanna.info or in person on Oct. 11th!

🌟 PES STUDIOS, part of Project for Empty Space, is a nonprofit arts initiative creating safe and equitable spaces for social dialogue. We support socially engaged artists by amplifying narratives often erased, while holding space for reflection and imagining new futures.

This event is held in conjunction with the Newark Arts Festival ().

📸 Carlos Hernandez (Carlos Hernandez)

➡️ Join PES Studios on Sunday, October 11, from 1–5 PM at📍800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Blvd., Newark, NJ, for our annual FALL OPEN STUDIOS! Explore four floors of 50+ artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails. RSVP via 🔗 link in bio!

Visit the studio of Malloy Marcial! | Studio 325 ✨

MalloyMarcial is a material-based artist whose practice centers on the fluid shifting nature of the figure. Working primarily in watercolor, MalloyMarcial embraces the medium’s unpredictability to explore the body not as a fixed image, but as a site of negotiation. Each piece is shaped by the material’s autonomy and her willingness to listen. The unspoken becomes shape and the shape becomes memory. She does not seek to explain, but to cradle the moments when the self is neither one nor another, but multiple layers. The act of becoming.

Learn more about the artist at 📲 malloymarcial.com or in person on Oct. 11th!

🌟 PES STUDIOS, part of Project for Empty Space, is a nonprofit arts initiative creating safe and equitable spaces for social dialogue. We support socially engaged artists by amplifying narratives often erased, while holding space for reflection and imagining new futures.

This event is held in conjunction with the Newark Arts Festival ().

📸 Carlos Hernandez (Carlos Hernandez)

➡️ Join PES Studios on Sunday, October 11, from 1–5 PM at📍800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Blvd., Newark, NJ, for our annual FALL OPEN STUDIOS! Explore four floors of 50+ artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails. RSVP via 🔗 link in bio!

Visit the studio of Brandon Bravo! .art | Studio 213 ✨

Brandon Bravo is a Puerto Rican-Ecuadorian artist whose work explores identity, heritage, and belonging. Born in Rhode Island and raised across the East Coast as a military child, he lived in North Carolina, Virginia, Jersey City, and Woodbridge, New Jersey—experiences that shaped his perspective on movement and cultural duality. He studied Studio Arts at Kean University and currently serves as Operations Director at Canvas & Grapes Studio.

Growing up in the United States, Bravo understood Puerto Rico primarily through family stories and traditions. Only through later visits to the island did he begin to experience his cultural roots firsthand. This ongoing process of discovery informs his work, which reflects the tension and harmony between his American upbringing and Puerto Rican identity.

Through painting, Bravo investigates personal and collective narratives rooted in memory, family, and diaspora. His practice merges classical techniques, such as wet-on-wet and glazing, with contemporary storytelling, resulting in layered compositions rich with symbolism and emotion. Each piece becomes a space to examine heritage and question what it means to belong.

Learn more about the artist at 📲 Brandonbravo.com or in person on Oct. 11th!

🌟 PES STUDIOS, part of Project for Empty Space, is a nonprofit arts initiative creating safe and equitable spaces for social dialogue. We support socially engaged artists by amplifying narratives often erased, while holding space for reflection and imagining new futures.

This event is held in conjunction with the Newark Arts Festival ().

📸 Carlos Hernandez ()

A NEW MURAL IS COMING TO NEWARK’S IRONBOUND!

Project for Empty Space is excited to announce that artists Karena Bravo (KARENA©️💫) and Mike Maka (Mike Maka) have been selected to create a new large-scale exterior mural at 604 Market Street for RWJBarnabas Health and Saint James Health’ .

Congratulations, Karena and Mike! 🎉

The mural will transform the new site into a visible expression of care, belonging, and community wellness.

🌿 HELP MAKE THE MURAL!

On Saturday, October 10, from 11 AM–2 PM, join us at Riverbank Park, adjacent to the site, for a free, all-ages collaborative painting workshop.

In partnership with Ironbound Community Corporation, the artists will lead participants in creating imagery inspired by medicinal plants, healing, nature, family, and community care. Elements created during the workshop will become part of the final mural!

Come paint with us, get your hands dirty, and help shape a new piece of public art for the Ironbound. All ages are welcome!

➡️ Join PES Studios on Sunday, October 11, from 1–5 PM at📍800 Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson Blvd., Newark, NJ, for our annual FALL OPEN STUDIOS! Explore four floors of 50+ artist studios and community workshop spaces while enjoying a warm brunch and breakfast cocktails. RSVP via 🔗 link in bio!

Visit the studio of Layqa Nuna Yawar! Lenny Correa | Studio 207 ✨

Layqa Nuna Yawar (b. Cuenca, Ecuador) is a multidisciplinary artist based in the unceded lands of the Lenni-Lenape, current-day Newark, New Jersey. His practice explores the intersection of migration, decolonization, and the reclamation of public space. Layqa treats the public square as both a canvas and a sanctuary, with his name itself—a self-constructed reclamation of his Kichwa-Kañari heritage—serving as a blueprint for his mission: to peel back the layers of colonial history and reveal the vibrant, subaltern history underneath.

Layqa is best known for his large-scale public commissions that transform architectural surfaces into monuments for silenced narratives. In 2023, he completed a landmark 350-foot mural for Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal A, reimagining the airport as a site of invisible transit and labor. By elevating the portraits of everyday workers and migrants to a heroic scale, he challenges the traditional semiotics of power and the whitewashing of history.

Learn more about the artist at 📲 layqa.info/ or in person on Oct. 11th!

🌟 PES STUDIOS, part of Project for Empty Space, is a nonprofit arts initiative creating safe and equitable spaces for social dialogue. We support socially engaged artists by amplifying narratives often erased, while holding space for reflection and imagining new futures.

This event is held in conjunction with the Newark Arts Festival ().

📸 Carlos Hernandez (Carlos Hernandez)