How one N.J. town kept its arts and culture vibe alive and thriving during the pandemic – Jersey’s Best

On March 13, 2020, Ana De Archuleta was in her Manhattan office running her successful artists management company, ADA Artists, which specializes in opera singers, conductors and directors. A former opera singer herself, she had a feel for artists and presenters and their distinctive needs. Her job was to connect the dots.  De Archuleta, who was born in Puerto Rico, watched as performing arts venues everywhere cancelled their seasons. Her roster of talented artists had nowhere to go, and the agency hit pause. What to do?

She surfed the internet and came across a job posting for a director of Arts and Culture in Maplewood. Maplewood? De Archuleta had lived in Maplewood for nine years. Between the daily commute and her business travel, she didn’t get to spend much time in her town, and she didn’t know that much about its cultural life. With her wide-ranging arts background, this director’s job sounded like the perfect fit for her.

Created in 2010, the Maplewood Arts Council (MAC) needed someone to help guide them through the more-challenging-than-we-imagined times ahead. With her unique combination of talents, she would be able to connect the dots in her own community.

Just a hop, skip and jump from Newark, Maplewood has always been a compact, idiosyncratic island unto itself, a very unsuburban suburb of 25,000 with a dynamic, jewel-like downtown that residents call, “The Village.” With its old-fashioned feel, The New York Times said, “it looks less like a small corner of suburban New Jersey than it does a small town in rural Ireland.” On and around Maplewood Avenue, there’s a movie theater, several performing arts venues, including the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts (popular with local theatre companies), the 1978 Maplewood Arts Center (on 1978 Springfield Ave.) and the Georgian Revival splendor of The Woodland, a mansion owned by the town and now a multipurpose event space. In The Village’s dense few blocks (which were lively on a recent sunny afternoon) are restaurants, cafés, a bookstore, boutiques and a beautifully restored train station (built in 1902) from which residents can commute to New York, 17 miles — or 40 minutes away.

Maplewood has a rich history in the arts. The now temporarily shuttered Maplewood Theater was an off-off-off Broadway stop on the “straw hat circuit” in 1930s and ’40s where Tallulah Bankhead and Helen Hayes performed. Oscar winner Teresa Wright was born and raised in Maplewood, as was Zach Braff, and both graduated from Columbia High School. Other Columbia alums include singer Lauryn Hill, actors Roy Scheider and Elisabeth Shue, and architect, Richard Meier. With its diverse population, mellow vibe, beautiful parks and good schools, the town has been a magnet for artists who have families and want to settle down. Walking around Maplewood you’re likely to come across familiar faces that turn out to be not just your neighbors but actors with impressive IMDB’s, like Joel de la Fuente from Amazon’s “Man in the High Castle” or Michael Gaston from “The Good Lord Bird” and Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Broadway legend Christine Ebersole calls it home and, in a New York magazine interview, said it’s “like Shangri-la. It’s so culturally diverse, and all my children are adopted — a transracial family. And we’re not the freaks. Everybody flies their freak flag high in Maplewood!”

Along those lines, the town has hosted Essex County’s only gay pride celebration since 2018, and it painted several of its crosswalks in gay pride’s rainbow colors. Recently, it inaugurated March 31 as International Trans Day of Visibility and the Trans flag was raised by its next door neighbor, South Orange.

Faced with the pandemic’s distinctive challenges, De Archuleta had a secret weapon: Maplewood’s progressive and talented community. She also wanted to expand on the town’s established tradition of diversity and make sure that the arts reflected and were accessible to all residents, from all backgrounds. It was time for her to connect the dots again. It helped that “because of the pandemic, artists are home, not on tour, not on location, and they’re looking for things to do.

“The more research I did the more I realized the amount of talent that was here: visual artists, Broadway performers, musicians. How can we engage the artists that live here and make it easier for them to experience art during this year? Luckily, I have a great team. The Township Committee is super supportive, as is my boss, town supervisor Melissa Mancuso and the township’s liaison to the Cultural Affairs department, Vic De Luca.” De Luca is a former mayor of Maplewood.

“This is an amazing town that is at its best when it works together and sees itself as a whole, not as a set of individual wants and desires. Fortunately, that’s what artists do,” said writer/producer/activist and longtime resident, Marcy Thompson, one of De Archuleta’s key allies.

One of De Archuleta’s first missions was to create a registry of artists of all disciplines, a sort of clearing house where artists could register. It is a directory for anyone seeking talent and a platform for artists to promote and share their work. There are close to 300 artists listed so far. As De Archuleta created new projects, she encouraged the artists involved to sign up for the registry, which gives her a talent pool to draw from for future projects. The “So” in the SOMA Arts Registry stands for South Orange, the town next door.

I checked out the registry and came across a familiar name, Matt Ramsey, an amazing performer whom I knew from my time with Blue Man Group. A Blue Man since 2000, Ramsey worked until the shutdown and hopes the show will return and he with it. Originally from Idaho, he went to school in Missouri, then went to New York, where Blue Man Group was his first job. He married Bonnie (a realtor with Adamson Ramsey Homes) in 2002, and they have three children. “Maplewood is ideal for people who want to have a small-town, idyllic Americana experience, but it has a lively, engaged community.” He was first invited to see the town by another Blue Man, Michael Dahlen, who had settled there with his family. “The school system provides all kinds of opportunities, and there’s more diversity, which is really important to us. It’s the type of place where kids can safely roam and be kids,” Ramsey said.

He has performed with several bands in The Village on weekends. The Maplewood Arts and Culture website highlights the work of various types of artists from Maplewood’s rich inventory and regularly includes an Artist’s Spotlight. One recent Spotlight focused on fiber and textile artist, Josephine Dakers-Brathwaite, with generous displays of her work and descriptions of her process.

In addition to the pandemic, this hectic, tumultuous time saw the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with Black and Women’s History month. To address these hot button issues, De Archuleta and her team created a series of relevant virtual and live events, promoted by social media, that have kept the town actively engaged. These include the Black Lives Matter Poetry Project, which publicly displayed poems by local and internationally known poets on signs and banners all around town. And Windows for Women, where women business owners displayed works by local women artists in their windows.

SHEroes is a stirring exhibit gracing the windows of 1978 Arts Center, which celebrates the contributions of female essential workers, including nurses, teachers, policewomen, store clerks and custodians, with their pictures and stories.

For some live events, like the Gazebo Concert Series on Springfield Avenue, the focus was on nonwhite musicians who played reggae and bomba, the first native music of Puerto Rico, which had the crowd on its feet. To stir more spice into the cultural pot, De Archuleta and her team recreated the Mexican tradition of Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) at Woodland Hall. The now international holiday celebrates our ancestors with altars bearing gifts. Updated for 2020, the Maplewood version had three altars, one for COVID-19 victims, one for victims of police brutality and one for families.

“With all these activities, there was not one case of COVID-19 last summer. Whenever I had an event, I contacted the health department.” They deployed “social distancing ambassadors” who monitor events, take temperatures, hand out masks, gently apply guidelines and generally take the worry out of being not-so-close.

Since last summer, downtown has been closed to traffic every Friday and Saturday, and residents have come to expect live performances downtown every weekend; this includes hip hop, country, and salsa musicians and performances by local dance companies on or around Maplewood Avenue.

“The first time we did this, people got so emotional. They had been cooped up since March, and they were so glad to be out and hear live music again.”

The train station is steps away from downtown and has a tunnel that connects the east and westbound platforms. It was recently transformed into a uniquely Maplewoodian art gallery with an exhibit, Art in Motion, for which the tunnel walls are graced by the work of eight artists, most of them from Maplewood, turning the otherwise blank and gloomy tunnel into a colorful destination.

The Maplewood 2020 Photo contest asked residents of all ages to take pictures that celebrated life in Maplewood. The response was overwhelming, and the result was an exhibit at the 1978 Arts building and on MAC’s website.

There was a town hall meeting on April 12 with all of Maplewood’s arts organizations to introduce them to available resources and help them find ways to get up and running again. The speakers included individuals from the New Jersey Council of the Arts, Arts Pride and a CPA with knowledge of PPP grants and SVOGs (Shuttered Venue Operator Grant), which distributes funds to live arts presenters, theaters, museums and such and has $15 billion in grants available.

“The resources are here, and we’re figuring out how to utilize them,” De Archuleta said. Using her PR instincts, she created a narrative, using social media and other tools, that got townspeople’s attention and got them involved. “This job has really opened my eyes about how to reach people of different backgrounds so that not only wealthy people have access to the arts.”

When Vic De Luca asked De Archuleta if she was afraid of getting burnt out, she thought, “All my life I have been looking at puzzles, figuring them out and seeing how things work together. That’s my job.”

What is it about Maplewood that sets it apart? “The people here are doers. They’re always wanting to do things, always wanting to raise their voices. And they raise their children to do the same. This community is constantly buzzing.” And so is De Archuleta.

Manuel Igrejas has worked in the theater as a playwright and a publicist on and off-Broadway. He was the publicist for Blue Man Group for 15 years, and his other clients included Richard Foreman, John Leguizamo, Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, STREB, Julie Harris and Peak Performances.