Light-filled, 2,000-square-foot studios renting at $2 per square foot? Nothing like this exists in Brooklyn or Queens, but in Jersey City, Mana Contemporary is setting a new standard in the arts.

This all-inclusive arts compound is housed in a 100,000-sqare-foot tobacco warehouse, with 23 resident artists; Shen Wei Dance Arts and the Armitage Gone! Dance Company; the Eileen Kaminsky Foundation and exhibition space; climate controlled art storage; crating and shipping services; framing; digital printing services; an art supply store soon to come, and a café and wine bar.

At the spring opening on Sunday, newly painted spaces with pristine graphics adjoining construction in progress were thronged with visitors, many of whom used the free shuttle service from Milk Studios in Manhattan. On entering, the crowd was greeted by a kinetic sculpture by Joshua Kirsch featuring an interactive keyboard that programs the movement. Upstairs open studios were being hosted by resident painters, photographers, video artists, sculptors, and Conveyor Arts, a fine-art printing and publishing concern. A performance by Shen Wei Dance Arts invited visitors to mingle among the dancers, who painted their bodies by pressing them onto paint-covered metal plates on the floor.

The next big event at Mana Contemporary will be the opening of the Middle East Center for the Arts on April 1. 888 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, NJ. Information. Directions.

For more about Mana Contemporary and its parent company, Moishe’s Moving, read an article in the Wall Street Journal.

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