OPENING NIGHT PARTY [ages 21+]

Join us for the opening night of JAB Fair at Mana Contemporary, featuring two special programs in the courtyard.

BODIES OF FLORA

Artist Sue Huang, the 2025–2026 Rutgers–New Brunswick Laureate, reimagines vanished plant species from New Jersey. Told as a ghost story and presented as a live lecture-performance, the work draws on the history of botanical science to bring these forms back as spectral presences. It invites the audience into a collective act of conjuring—restoring presence to what has been lost. Sound Design: Lee Tusman

TINTYPE PORTRAITS

Cole Caswell of AgNO3 Lab sets up in the courtyard of Mana Contemporary, making tintype portraits one at a time using wet plate collodion — a 19th-century photographic process. Each participant leaves with an actual tintype in hand as Caswell walks them through each step of the process as it unfolds. Sign up for a 15-minute session during the party, with special pricing. 

NOTE: Must be 21 years of age and older to enter. One (1) drink ticket and light snacks included.

This event is part of In Care of Unfinished Places, a program within JAB Fair 2026 featuring artists, writers, designers and researchers whose work is rooted in place-sensing. Attune more deeply to Journal Square – not just where the fair takes place, but in a neighborhood where 40+ languages, ancestral Lenape lands and the Hackensack River are parts of stories still being told.