Dreaming of Utopia: Roosevelt, NJ
In 1934, the US government bought up acres of farmland in Monmouth County to build a model of cooperative living for Jewish garment workers. Roosevelt, originally known as Jersey Homesteads, was among 99 communities across the country created as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Located fourteen miles east of Trenton, Jersey Homesteads was an agro-industrial cooperative which meant that it was owned and run jointly by its members who shared its profits and produce. The dream of this New Jersey utopia was quickly abandoned when the Homesteads factory failed within two years of its 1936 opening.
What remained from the $3.4 million experiment was 200 modern homes, a factory building, a school, and a community determined to stay. Ben and Bernarda Shahn, who had come to Jersey Homesteads to work on the mural reproduced above [???], decided to move to the affordable and comfortable town. Gradually like-minded artists, writers, and musicians followed, creating an unusual, and sometimes disparate, mix with the remaining garment workers.
This exhibition explores how the dream of a simultaneously rural and modern utopia eventually gave way to a community with a distinctively creative population, many of whom became known on a national scale.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1961
Jonathan Shahn (1938–2020)
Bronze
Collection of Jonathan Shahn Sculpture
Jonathan Shahn’s five-foot-tall bronze bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt, located in the amphitheater near Roosevelt Public School, was a project 16 years in the making. Ben Shahn conceived the idea for the bust in 1946. His son Jonathan, was later selected by committee for the project. The younger Shahn was a 23-year-old art student at the Boston Museum School when he completed the bust in 1961. The park was designed by architect Bertram Ellentuck. Notably, this was the first memorial to be dedicated to Franklin D. Roosevelt in America.
A pamphlet put out by the Roosevelt Memorial Association explained, “To us [Roosevelt] is no abstraction, no mere symbol of ideas: to us he is a very human person without whose deep concern for unimportant men and little places our town would never have come into existence. We want his likeness on our public school grounds where our children play and where we pass on our way to the store and the post office.”
Roosevelt through the lens of Sol Libsohn
Sol Libsohn (1914–2001) had an esteemed career as a photographer. Beginning in the late 1940s, he pointed his lens towards his hometown of Roosevelt and captured the community of artists, writers, musicians, politicians, and children enjoying life in this unique suburbia.
Roosevelt Party, 1970
Ani Rosskam (b. 1952)
Ceramic, acrylic, paint
Collection of Ani Rosskam and Bill Leech
Ani Rosskam was a teenager when she made Roosevelt Party. Growing up in Roosevelt as the daughter of documentary photographers, Edwin and Louise Rosskam, she experienced life in this artistic community firsthand. Her family often hosted Roosevelt’s artists and she enjoyed their humor, their stories, and their discussions of art. She attended many parties in her hometown where she would sketch her surroundings. She based the figures on real people attending a wild 1960s party.