An Open Letter to the Candidates for Mayor of Jersey City
Following the Mayoral Arts Debate,
White Eagle Hall, October 15, 2025
by Raymond E. Mingst
As Jersey City prepares for new leadership, we hope all candidates will remember that our city’s greatness has never come from small visions, but from bold ones.
At the recent mayoral arts debate, each candidate was collegial, attentive to the audience, and eager to address its concerns: affordability, local arts grants, permitting, and other administrative and small-scale fixes. These are important needs, and our local organizations deserve support in proper measure. Yet what struck me most was what went unsaid. None of the candidates acknowledged the larger cultural ecosystem.
The event was hosted by vocal opponents of the Pompidou project, and all the candidates aligned with that opposition. The framing of the Pompidou as a waste of investment won easy applause in that room. Even the moderator, somewhat nonplussed, was handed a long, one-sided preamble of anti-museum arguments to recite before asking a question — treating it as a foregone conclusion that the project is frivolous.
The candidates’ attentiveness to local arts leaders was admirable, but it also revealed the limits of the conversation. In a recent interview, one of those leaders, now running for City Council, said of the Pompidou: “First, it was going to be a museum, and then they told us it would be more of a community center working with local artists… Are you just cannibalizing us? What makes this project special?” This view reflects a profound misunderstanding of what a 21st-century museum is. The best museums today are not static vaults but active civic engines — simultaneously museums, community centers, laboratories, and schools. To frame this as confusion is to mistake dynamism for incoherence. More than that, it exposes a deeper anxiety: a fear that new investment will shift attention and resources away from what some already control. But protecting turf is not the same as building a thriving cultural ecosystem.
Pompidou x Jersey City is not a duplication of what we already have — it is a multiplier. The project has been evolving through years of conversation, countless hours of planning, and sustained meetings with local leaders, educators, and artists. Far from being imposed, it has been shaped through dialogue. Consider just one initiative: the Night of Ideas event, co-curated with Villa Albertine and the Centre Pompidou at Hudson County Community College in March of last year. Hundreds of Jersey City residents came together for debates, installations, workshops, and performances on urban growth, sustainability, and inclusivity. It was the most thoughtful, well-attended public conversation about the arts we’ve ever seen in this city. There was palpable excitement in the air. Yet not a single candidate mentioned it. That silence disregarded the contributions of our international partners and dismissed the efforts of local artists, residents, HCCC students, and faculty — the very people the candidates claim to champion.
Events like the Night of Ideas also revealed something too often overlooked in these debates: Jersey City’s cultural ecosystem is broad and layered. Alongside the vital work of local artists and organizations, there are residents who look to New York for world-class programming — not for want of calendars or promotional websites, but because they seek a range of quality and experience not yet consistently present here. Our neighbors attending HCCC that evening showed that Jersey City can sustain both local initiatives and ambitious international exchange. A thriving ecosystem needs roots and horizons. Pompidou x is uniquely positioned to provide that balance.
The Centre Pompidou itself is one of the most significant cultural institutions of the modern era. When it opened in Paris in 1977, the radical design by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers turned the museum inside out — pipes, escalators, and structure placed on the exterior — as a declaration that culture should be transparent and accessible. Its international satellite centers have proven how adaptable and generative its model is, elevating local communities and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. To dismiss this as simply a “French museum” is to ignore its history as a global laboratory for art, ideas, and civic engagement.
Look out to our harbor. The Statue of Liberty, now inseparable from our identity, was once denounced as a distraction and a waste. This extraordinary gift from France required American investment to finance and build its pedestal at a time of deep economic hardship — depression, bank failures, overcrowded tenements. Jersey City itself was filled with struggling immigrant families. Many argued the money should go to bread and roads, not to a statue. And yet thousands who had little to spare gave what they could, and made that vision possible. Today, the Statue stands in New Jersey waters as a beacon of hope for the world.
We face a similar moment with Pompidou x Jersey City. It is easy to score applause by calling it unaffordable or dismissing it as foreign. But real leadership means balancing the urgent needs of the present with the courage to invest in a larger vision. A world-class museum here would not diminish our local organizations; it would elevate them, contextualize them, and connect them to global networks of art and ideas.
If those before us had lacked courage, the Statue of Liberty would not grace our skyline today. The question now is whether Jersey City’s next leaders will show the same courage — to balance urgent needs with a bold commitment to the future. To the candidates: it is not enough to echo local fears. Your responsibility is to expand the conversation, to lift up local voices while also daring to place Jersey City on the world stage. Anything less is not leadership, not vision, but administration without imagination.
Photographer, Jack E. Boucher. This file comes from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) or Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). These are programs of the National Park Service established for the purpose of documenting historic places. Records consist of measured drawings, archival photographs, and written reports.
ADDITIONAL WIKIMEDIA NOTES: Donated by citizens of France to celebrate Franco-American friendship, the Statue of Liberty is significant for its physical and symbolic characteristics. Richard Morris Hunt prepared the plans for the 89 foot high pedestal; French engineer Alexandre Gustav Eiffel sheathing. Many consider this frame noteworthy in itself, because its ability to support an irregularly-shaped structure subject to high winds. Symbolically, the Statue of Liberty reflects the political ideals of the late nineteenth century. It commemorates America's founding principles of liberty, freedom, and opportunity in America for all. More than sixteen million immigrants passed by the Statue of Liberty on the way to the Ellis Island Immigration Station.
