Art & Design alum Hop Peternell (MFA‘19) grew up surrounded by creative people—their father is a cookbook author who spent more than 20 years as head chef of Alice Waters’s legendary restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and their mother is a visual artist. Peternell can recall a childhood spent drawing and being inspired by graffitied city walls they encountered on a family trip to Europe.
But Peternell says their experience attending an arts boarding school in Napa as a teen was transformative.
“That was the first time in my education where someone was like, What do you like? What’s your interest in?” they say. “It was amazing to be given that freedom.”
Today, Peternell is nurturing that same creative freedom in others, as a co-founder with their mother, Kathleen Henderson, and Lydia Glenn-Murray, of Studio Route 29, a communal art-making space in Frenchtown, New Jersey. As a nonprofit guided by the progressive art studio model, Studio Route 29, in operation since 2022, aims to cultivate a supportive environment for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities to create self-directed work. Artists have access to a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, and music.
But the studio seems devoted not just to making art, but to sharing the work widely and giving their artists a public forum. Studio Route 29 provides opportunities for their artists to make an income through gallery exhibitions (often held at ArtYard, a neighboring interdisciplinary arts hub in Frenchtown; Studio Route 29 also has its own gallery space), community events, and a storefront. In addition, they run a small press, Beauty Books, featuring artwork, poems, and stories from the community, and they host a monthly screening series, Films for Friends, highlighting video, audio, and performance work from studio artists.
Along with the other staff members, as studio director, Peternell offers administrative and creative support to the artists. This can look like helping an artist learn a new medium or, as Peternell often does, writing about the art and promoting the artists’ work and events to a broader audience.
“It feels like a really good arrangement to me,” Peternell says. “I couldn’t make [the work our artists are making], and I’m not trying to. We’re working towards making a connected world, where there’s people with disabilities who are making art, who are part of the art world, and [who are] getting the accolades and the opportunities that they deserve.”
Through Studio Route 29, artist Brian “BJ” Armour Jr. (pictured) has had his work shown internationally, including at Miami Design Week and Art Basel Week in Switzerland.
“We feel tremendously blessed,” says Beverly T. Williams, a Studio Route 29 board member and Armour’s aunt. “Since his very first day [at the studio], BJ has blossomed and exhibited skills previously unknown to my partner and I. BJ has become confident in engaging with others, both inside and outside of Studio Route 29…[and] has learned to wholeheartedly engage with visitors to the studio about his art and music, rather than shying away.”
Peternell says that they are optimistic about the future of progressive studios and young people who are just entering the art world at this moment.
“If you’re studying art now,” they say, “there’s a lot of room for expanding the ways that we study art and think about art. There’s lots of galleries who I think would like to be including work by disabled artists in their programming. I feel super excited about it.”
Image caption: Peternell, right, engineers a recording session with Studio Route 29 artist Brian “BJ” Amour Jr. Courtesy of Studio Route 29.