HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: a guided arts walking tour of downtown Jersey City

April 25, 2012 - PRLog -- A Radical Fairie, a retro hair salon, a famous architect, and 25 artists on a fool's quest--what do they all have in common? Downtown Jersey City! Art expert and top tour guide, Mary-Beth Shine will explain it all. From the South Bronx to Red Hook, the Lower East Side to Long Island City Mary-Beth Shine's popular art tours have explored places you may not know about, as well as hidden gems right around the corner. This time Mary-Beth turns the spotlight to Downtown Jersey City. The tour will include stops at some of JC’s most interesting and inspiring hubs of art and expression.

Co-founder of the downtown art gallery Curious Matter Raymond E. Mingst says, "Mary-Beth is smart, insightful and pretension-free. We were thrilled she was interested in exploring Jersey City and jumped at the chance to collaborate on one of her famous tours. At Curious Matter we've created an environment where every visitor feels comfortable enough to talk about art and ask questions. Mary-Beth brings that quality to entire neighborhood explorations and she makes it a tremendous lot of fun. Her tours are absolutely terrific and we have a community eager to engage with and talk about art."

Mary-Beth Shine holds a BA from the University of Massachusetts/Boston and an MA in Folk Art Studies from New York University. She has conducted tours and talks at the American Folk Art Museum, the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, and galleries and museums throughout the five boroughs as an Art History/Appreciation Instructor in the Pre-College Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She has published in ArtJournal.

Curious Matter is an exhibition venue for contemporary visual art located in downtown Jersey City. Curious Matter is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the purposes of Curious Matter must be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.