WHERE CREATIVE MISCHIEF IS MADE

At dusk one night in May, nearly 1,000 people, resplendent in river suits, illuminated iceberg fascinators, and rain cloud lantern hats, holding luminescent jellyfish parasols and fish lanterns, streamed into Sunbeam Lenape Park in Frenchtown to kick off Aqualumina, ArtYard’s festival of light and water held at the river’s edge.

Over the next hour, the fairy-lit spectators actually became the parade, walking in pairs along the rail trail, a continuously moving procession in the lantern light, past musicians, singers, a juggler, and an ethereal dancer, her long dress flowing as she swirled with her surreal life-sized puppet-partner, who was dressed in a suit but with the head of a fish. The parade of spectators wound their way back to the park, where participants from ArtYard’s movement workshop danced and the crowd, in unison, sang Hold on, hold on, my dear ones. Here comes the dawn!

But the real luminosity along the river is not something that can be seen. It’s the electricity generated from the connection among people in the crowd. And it’s the lives that ArtYard has changed over the decade since its founding.

In the River Towns and beyond, ArtYard is celebrated as a catalyst and an incubator, an interdisciplinary alternative contemporary art center. Its waterfront building contains exhibition spaces and a 162-seat theater, and its residency program is dedicated to presenting original—and often transformative—work while fostering unexpected collaborations. As ArtYard founder Jill Kearney muses, “I feel like we’re an overnight sensation that took ten years.”

The idea that would evolve into ArtYard can be traced to 2005 and a series of experiments in an unheated former dairy barn on Kearney’s property in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, where she and her husband, Stephen McDonnell, organized literary, music, theater, and dance events on an improvised stage. In 2013, McDonnell suffered a stroke, and two years later he sold Applegate Farms, the natural and organic meat enterprise he’d founded in 1987, to Hormel Foods for about $775 million. “Our ship sunk at the same moment that our ship came in,” Kearney says. “I suddenly had the resources to do something that I had only dreamed of in an earlier time in my life. I had to figure out how to reinvent our lives in a constructive, communal way.”

Around this time, Kearney’s friend, the Cuban multimedia artist Elsa Mora, called her and said, “I have a dream that we might start an art center together.” To Kearney’s ears, Mora’s dream was nothing less than a life-changing vision. Of this moment, Kearney recalls: “I recognized these words as though I had been stalled at the stop sign for decades drumming my fingers, waiting for that precise sentence to circle the planet and land in my car.”

Soon the friends discovered that the writer Elizabeth Gilbert and her ex-husband Jose Nunez were selling their building on Trenton Avenue in Frenchtown, which housed Two Buttons, their gallery of Asian art, clothing, and homewares, and the Lovin’ Oven restaurant. “We were starving for community and for connection,” Mora says. “We saw there is potential here. We decided to make a gallery and see what happens.”

ArtYard was incorporated in 2015 as a nonprofit arts center, with Kearney as executive director and Mora as artistic director and curator. The campus was set along the rail trail, overlooking the Delaware River, and included Gilbert’s former store, a former electronics warehouse, and, later, an abandoned egg hatchery. “I loved the idea that this was close to home, along the river, and equidistant to Philly and Manhattan,” says Kearney, who now lives in Erwinna. They called their new venture “ArtYard” to reflect the mission’s collaborative theme as “an ordinary public place where art is invented, ideas exchanged, and relationships forged.”

This bigger-than-life concept, of course, required a bigger-than-life launch. “Jill had this idea: Let’s build this gigantic egg that people can hatch from, a symbolic hatch of ideas,” Mora says. “She comes up with ideas that are absolutely fearless and crazy in a wonderful way, and I’m the doer. I said, ‘Sure, let’s do this,’ and I started making costumes and planning.”

In retrospect, the friends had no idea what they were about to undertake. “My superpower and my Achilles heel are the same thing: I never realized how hard something’s going to be until I’m doing it,” Kearney says. “But everything worth doing is hard.”

In September 2016, Kearney introduced ArtYard’s inaugural exhibit with The Hatch, foreshadowing the “playful creativity” to unfold over the years. About thirty community members joined in to build a fourteen-foot-tall, welded steel egg from which a flock of giant bird puppets and costumed paraders hatched, then proceeded along the rail trail to the old warehouse to view an installation by Canadian artist Bruno Billio and screen the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill in a handmade theater with recycled upholstered seats.

ArtYard hosted ninety-three events that first year. “We have been building the plane while flying it,” Kearney says. “It was very scrappy and homemade. We didn’t really have a plan. We just opened our doors.”

What unfolded next, Mora says, was organic. “Every person who joined the adventure was just perfect,” she says. “We were all drawn to do something. We didn’t know exactly what, but we knew it was needed and it was going to be important for ourselves and others. We felt joy: Suddenly we had this amazing community of people that keeps us going through our personal journeys, because everybody’s struggling with something.”

In May 2021, ArtYard opened its new home, just a three-minute walk away along the rail trail: A 21,000-square-foot building on Front Street, reminiscent of an early factory, with galleries and a 162-seat theater, featuring a courtyard, with river views, designed for communal gatherings. “We wanted to make a real statement but still integrate architecturally into the town,” Mora says.

The building was designed to further ArtYard’s mission to make art accessible. Mora cites Monuments—the permanent installation of four monumental recumbent figures by the South African sculptor Ledelle Moe, sprawled across three locations on the campus—which acts as a catalyst for people to connect with the art inside the gallery. “They stop to take pictures, then open the gate, get curious and come inside,” she says.

In the five years since the ArtYard Center opened, it has hosted more than 500 interdisciplinary programs, including visual art exhibitions, artist and curator talks, live music and dance performances, film screenings, literary events, community festivals, workshops, residencies, and activities specially designed for families and kids. At the heart is its mission to invite community members to engage in creative processes and by doing so foster meaningful connections. “I’m less interested in entertaining people than I am interested in engaging with people,” Kearney says.

Kearney’s inspiration for ArtYard was derived from a great variety of sources: from growing up against the backdrop of the Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago, one the country’s first alternative art spaces, founded and directed for six decades by her parents, John and Lynn Kearney; from Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, in Glover, Vermont; from MASS MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts; and from Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, which chronicles the fragmentation of American civic life and the resulting loneliness and erosion of social mobility. The arts, Kearney knew, could be a powerful human connector.

Kearney was also influenced by communities where creative expression is woven into quotidian aspects of daily life. Time spent in New Orleans exposed her to a culture of neighborhoods making things together and celebrating their shared identity through public rituals. Summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, offered a similar spirit, shaped by the town’s Portuguese fishing heritage and vibrant arts community. “Provincetown brought out interesting hybrid parades, with the Daughters of the American Revolution on a float next to drag queens,” she says.

For Kearney, these communal acts of making and celebrating cultivated mutual respect and appreciation for ordinary people. Whether participating in a parade or cheering from the sidelines, people become connected to one another and to their community. “It changes the oxygen in a town,” she says. “I wanted to create something like that—inviting people to make things together, to be part of the parade—because when people make things together, it creates a completely different community.”

ArtYard’s artist-in-residence program grew out of a connection between Kearney and Cora Cahan, then president of the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City. After visiting ArtYard, Cahan saw its potential as a creative retreat for artists developing new work. Cahan later brought the center’s namesake and founder, the legendary ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, to ArtYard, and their collaboration helped launch the artist-in-residence program.

Resident visual and performing artists live in one of two buildings on the ArtYard campus—a Victorian building at 12 Bridge Street with five apartments and the Creekside Residency, a five-bedroom house at 50 Trenton Avenue set between two branches of the Nishisakawick Creek. ArtYard partners with arts organizations such as Works & Process and Pomegranate Arts, both based in New York City, and Sundance Lab, based in Park City, Utah, to identify prospective resident artists who need a concentrated time or a group that wishes to live together and be fully enveloped in its project. Works incubated at ArtYard have gone on to venues such as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and the Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles. The New Jersey Ballet was in residence to develop choreographer Roderick George’s newest work, “Wings of Desire,” which the ballet performed at ArtYard in January.

Although you’ll recognize the names of several artists-in-residence—Isabella Rossellini, Yo-Yo Ma, Jon Batiste, and Suleika Jaouad—all of the artists are accomplished in their fields. Notable examples include:

• Alexandre Arrechea, a Cuban artist and founding member of the influential collective Los Carpinteros;

• Samora Pinderhughes, a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist;

• Robin Frohardt, an internationally known playwright, puppet designer, and visual artist;

• Davóne Tines, an acclaimed opera singer;

• Larry Keigwin, choreographer and the artistic director of a New York City–based dance company;

• Joseph Keckler, a prominent figure in experimental performance and contemporary music; and

• Brian Sanders, a contemporary dancer who’s been working with ArtYard since its launch.

“It’s important that people with name recognition come and validate what we’re doing, but we expect greatness from them,” Kearney says. “I’m as interested in the people who you have never heard of who are doing something unique and beautiful, as those are more impactful.”

One such artist is Sasha Stiles, who contacted Kearney after discovering ArtYard on a visit to Frenchtown in 2019. Then living in Jersey City, now in Milford, New Jersey, Stiles was developing projects that integrated technology into her poetry practice. But she says she encountered resistance from the literary world due to her work with AI. A Harvard- and Oxford-educated poet, Stiles had been working with the social robot BINA48 as a poetry mentor, exploring language and cultivating a literary consciousness within the artificial being, and wanted to bring her work to the public. “I opened up a conversation about potentially doing something together,” Stiles says, “and I was surprised and delighted, because Jill was so excited and open to the idea of bringing this humanoid android to Frenchtown.”

“A Valentine for the Future,” held in February 2020, featured a performance lecture by Stiles and the sentient robot, a discussion, and an exhibition of a series of poems that Stiles had written in conjunction with GPT-2, a large language model created by OpenAI. “Jill gave me my first solo show and space to play with the idea that I could bring my work with language into the art arena,” Stiles says. “This enabled me to think about the work that I do in a much more multidisciplinary way and gave me affirmation about the appetite for this kind of discourse and artistic creation. I credit this experience for being the springboard for what happened afterwards.”

Since her solo show at ArtYard, Stiles’ digital poem REPETAE: Again, Again, fetched the highest price—3 ETH (Ethereum), or about $5,000—in a 2023 Christie’s auction of digital art. A Living Poem—her AI-assisted digital poem that continuously rewrites itself—went on exhibit in 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I’m grateful to ArtYard for going out on a limb and doing something so far out,” she says.

ArtYard welcomes about 10,000 visitors a year to its main galleries, which cycle through three to five exhibits at a time. And then there are the Very Small Galleries—or in ArtYardspeak, VSG—that are mini-dioramas hidden in wall recesses. The scenes change with each exhibition cycle, sometimes created by the featured artist, other times by separate artists. You can discover three VSG in ArtYard and, if you’re resourceful, you can find a fourth at FiNNBAR, a block away. “My father and mother dragged me through every museum and church everywhere we went,” Kearney says. “And I always felt like, Where’s the little interactive element that that makes me feel at home here? I wanted to create a space that had a high standard of featured art, but was playful, interactive, unexpected, and beguiling to make people feel welcome. And when I was a kid, if I could peek into something, I would feel excited and welcome.”

With each exhibition, the ArtYard staff collaborates with curators and artists to mount something that has never been done before. “There’s always something that gets made custom to either the artist’s experience here or our engagement with the artist process,” says Ulla Warchol, an architect and ArtYard’s head preparator. “If someone says, ‘We can just hang art on the walls,’ I’ll say, ‘What if we don’t use the walls at all? What if we hang it from the ceiling?’ Eric Fiorito, the technical director, and I brainstorm what’s possible. Making art accessible is key.”

ArtYard ultimately wants to make you think, feel, and connect with other human beings. “We often invite curators who are a little bit out of the box to curate shows,” Kearney says. One of her favorite exhibitions was when Claire Dolan, founder of the Museum of Everyday Life in rural Vermont, took a simple prompt and turned it into a powerful literary project: What does a chair mean? She invited people to send stories about meaningful chairs in their lives. When a story resonated, she asked for a photograph—and often borrowed the chair itself for the exhibition.

The resulting installation, in October 2025, featured chairs with remarkable histories: one where a marriage proposal took place, another belonging to a wheelchair user who contributed his own perspective and became part of the exhibition through a section called “Ask a Man in a Chair.”

“I love Jill’s idea of mischief,” Warchol says. “She dreams big.”

In the months leading up to festivals like The Hatch and Aqualumina, which take place on alternate years, the public is invited to make costumes, hats, lanterns, sculptures, and props at ArtYard workshops. Others engage as volunteers. Linda Christiansen, a nurse and Frenchtown resident of seven years, was a self-described “hermit” until she stumbled upon ArtYard in 2019 and, intrigued, entered the gallery. She decided to visit more exhibitions, joined workshops, then attended a transformative poetry reading by Hayden Saunier. “That one evening changed me forever,” says Christiansen, who regularly volunteers at exhibitions. “I now have poetry books and listen to poetry on Audible.”

The creativity infuses itself into the fabric of the town, in its storefronts, its homes, and its school. “I think of ArtYard like a local industry, but an industry for creativity,” says Barbara de Wilde, who co-owns Frenchtown Bookshop with her husband, Scott Sheldon. “And with that industry comes workers who are artists, which attracts people from other places ... who enjoy culture and are curious.”

The town-wide reading experience “One Book/One Frenchtown” was an innovative community connector, de Wilde says. In 2024, people were encouraged to read The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay, a professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington who has taught poetry workshops and hosted book events at ArtYard. Though he grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, Gay is considered an honorary Frenchtown resident. In 2025, the communal reading of The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad, who has a nearby home in Hunterdon County with her husband, Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste, became a townwide journaling event. “People gathered at places like the bookstore and FiNNBAR, and children at Frenchtown Elementary School joined in to share the reading and writing experience and journal from prompts in the book,” de Wilde says.

In addition to drawing people together, ArtYard has proven it has the power to draw people outside of themselves. In late 2020, choreographer Michael Vitaly Sazonov of Alexandria invited Mora and Kearney to his Dance for Parkinson’s classes online. Their encounter sparked a pilot program of creative movement workshops in 2022, and the workshops continue to be a gathering place for exploration and creativity among older adults and new parents, some of whom dance while wearing their babies. He also teaches a Latin dance class for adults. Since its inception, Sazonov has hosted twelve multi-week workshops on ArtYard’s McDonnell Theater stage and has created choreography for The Hatch and Aqualumina. “I invite participants to take the creative force into their lives and the real world,” Sazonov says. “Sometimes we go deep, but other times we go silly.”

Sazonov cites the healing power that results from the “catalyzing force” of a creative community connection. “The movement workshops connect people of different ages and backgrounds through this shared artistic process,” he says. “I’ve seen people who are shy or have Parkinson’s disease start dancing up a storm. When people who have been part of the classes see each other on the street, they share a little sparkle in their eyes.”

ArtYard is the rare nonprofit arts center with abundant assets and little to no debt. Kearney and McDonnell seeded the organization with a contribution of $20 million in 2015, according to a tax form filed the following year with the Internal Revenue Service. They contributed another $15 million in 2021. (ArtYard was formed as a private operating foundation, a legal distinction that sets it apart from private foundations and public charities.) Its 2024 operating expenses were $2.8 million, its revenue $2.2 million, nearly half earned from sales of assets. Despite the $600,000 shortfall, ArtYard’s net assets increased from the previous year by $1.8 million. From its original three-person staff, ArtYard today employs fifteen people. As executive director, Kearney takes no salary.

Only recently has ArtYard turned to a more robust fundraising model. “It happened because people began coming to us,” Kearney says. “They had experienced ArtYard and wanted to help ensure its continued existence.”

In response, in 2025 ArtYard started a select donor group of about three dozen people called the Sonder Circle, whose members donate $10,000 per year to ArtYard. According to the ArtYard website: “The Sonder Circle is an invitation-only group of like-minded, curious seekers of art, humanity, and creative mischief who serve as informal ambassadors for ArtYard and gather to explore art together.” The word sonder is taken from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster) a 2021 book by John Koenig that resulted from the author’s quest to find words for emotions that lack their own words. Sonder, according to the book, is “the awareness that everyone has a story.”

ArtYard has received additional support from the Hunterdon County Cultural and Heritage Commission, the Seedlings Foundation, the N2 Stone Foundation, the Derald H. Ruttenberg Foundation, and community donors. In turn, ArtYard supports Studio Route 29, the progressive art studio founded in 2022 by Executive Director Kathleen Henderson, Studio Director Lydia Glenn-Murray, and Studio Director Hop Peternell, Henderson’s son. The studio provides opportunities for creative expression to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, who have historically lacked access to such resources. “There are 300 progressive studios like Studio Route 29 around the country,” Kearney says, “but we are the only one we know of that is a collaboration between a neurodiverse and neurotypical arts center.”

ArtYard dedicates its Courtyard Gallery to Studio Route 29 artists, with proceeds from art sales benefiting both the artists and the nonprofit. Their work is also exhibited and sold across the street at FiNNBAR, another Kearney passion project. After purchasing and renovating the former Frenchtown Inn, Kearney brought in chef Cal Peternell—husband of Henderson and a twenty-two-year veteran of the venerable Berkeley, California, restaurant Chez Panisse—to lead the restaurant. Since opening to acclaim in 2024, FiNNBAR has directed seventy percent of its profits to Studio Route 29. (Read more about FiNNBAR and Studio Route 29 in the Fall 2024 and Fall 2025 issues of River Towns, respectively.)

“None of these people were artists before they came to Studio Route 29, many people who have come to the workshops never thought they were creative, and the curators who are curating half of our shows have never been curators before,” Kearney says. “The idea is: Make of your life something inventive and meaningful.”

Patti Zielinski is the chief arts writer for River Towns and the former executive editor of Art & Antiques magazine.