Colleen Gutwein O’Neal is a photographer and curator from the northeastern United States. O’Neal’s work focuses on the human experience through community engagement. She is also an adjunct professor of photography and contemporary art at Rutgers University-Newark, a volunteer at Index Art Center, and a community partner at Shine Portrait Studio. She has been exhibiting work since 2004, and her printed work is included in HYCIDE and Nowhere magazines. Her book, The Camera I Always Wanted, was acquired by the Newark Public Library and the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The following is our interview with her.

The Newarker: Where are you from?

O’Neal: I was born and raised in New Jersey. My parents split up when I was pretty young, and I spent a lot of time visiting with my large extended family on the weekends, so “home” to me was with the family and close friends we would hang out with on any given weekend. It was a lot of schlepping around but it gave me a great view of New Jersey through the car window and opened me up to worlds outside of my regular day-to-day. My home was everywhere and nowhere all at once. I lived on Halsey Street in the early 2000s, but spent a lot of my adult life living in Montclair. 

My current life is split between Newark, where I have been working with Index Art Center / Red Saw Gallery since 2005, and Easton, Pennsylvania, where I moved a few years ago and co-ran and curated at Brick + Mortar Gallery before COVID hit. Being in Easton gave me an opportunity to bring artists from Newark and the Lehigh Valley together, and surprisingly many Newark artists have roots and connections in Easton. The duality is comfortable for me. I feel a sense of home, love of, and commitment to the art communities in both spaces at once. 

The Newarker: How would you describe your art?

O’Neal: My art practice began in photography but has expanded organically to curation, community engagement, writing, activism, and research. While volunteering at Index, I began to exhibit work at City Without Walls, NJIT, and pop-ups in Newark. Watching the rapid growth and changes in the art scene, I was part of in Newark was the impetus for the Newark Artists Photo Documentary Project in 2013. I would meet with artists in their studios or other sites of their choice in Newark and interview them casually while photographing in both digital and traditional formats. I asked each artist to recommend other artists in Newark they wanted to see in the project and after nearly 100 sessions I learned about the history of art in Newark and the strong lineage of artists as activists. Being trained in traditional darkroom practices, I located the Jem Jr. camera manufactured by the J.E. Mergott company on Jelliff Avenue during the 1940s and knew I needed to work with this medium format camera as well. I continued making portraits through 2018 and created a website for the project as well as a series of black and white gelatin silver prints. The last few years I have been working on an auto ethnographic manuscript with the film images, hoping to finish the first draft at some point soon. Recently I had the opportunity to work with the Four Corners mural project who supported a mural in which six artists from the Documentary Project represent a fraction of the whole on Edison Place.

Visiting so many artists and talking in depth with them about their work pushed me towards curation, specifically with the artists I developed relationships with. Index gave me space to learn about and experiment with curation while also supporting the Documentary Project. Now I am working toward creating a type of open source archive of art ephemera and first-hand stories of artist spaces and public works that are no longer physically accessible in Newark. This style of archive was inspired by my continued education at Rutgers-Newark in the American Studies department and has expanded my way of thinking about how environmental inequities have shaped artists and art spaces in the city. The Newark arts community has fostered my growth as an artist for which I am forever indebted. My hope is that through the Documentary Project I can give back something to those who support my efforts.

More recently, I had the opportunity to work with Rutgers professor Kate Doyle who pushed me to consider my personal art practice outside of the Documentary Project. My personal work came to a complete standstill during COVID, I was really depressed and couldn’t create for myself. Now I am exploring my world through a self-portrait series of polaroid images in which my figure is completely excluded, instead I am photographing outward extensions of my experiences in the physical world. I only create during moments in which I am forcefully compelled to, and am inspired heavily by Roland Barthes’ concept of punctum. At the same time, I record ambient sounds on my phone during the act of photographing. I have been compiling the sounds and images in an experimental video.

The Newarker: Any idea of what your next projects might be?

O’Neal: The different mediums I work in overlap and inform each other so I am often working on numerous projects at the same time, echoing the duality/multiplicity of my experiences of “home.” In the most immediate, Lowell Craig of Index Art Center and I have been working on programming for Going Deep: Work and Process by Three Artists, a lecture/interview/physical exhibition of work by Bisa Washington, Patricia Dahlman, and Stafford Woods in a pop-up space for NJPAC’s North 2 Shore festival for which we were awarded a grant. 

In the nonprofit world, I am working with Index Art Center to continue programming while trying to find a new home for the gallery and music/event space since the 237 Washington Street location is slated for redevelopment. I am also working with some wonderful people in Easton to jump-start an arts non-profit, Overtown Media + Arts, designed to serve all ages in the community. 

I am continuing research and archiving work for Mapping Apparitions and Newark Artists Spaces, collecting ephemera, photographs, and personal accounts of arts spaces and public art works no longer physically accessible in Newark. As I began locating spaces I decided to map them on Google Maps to share what I found and included current galleries. Finally, in my highly personal art, I am working on the new experimental polaroid and sound experiment project, now, for a little while.

The Newarker: Where are some of your favorite places in Newark to hang out and why?

O’Neal: I like hanging out with the ghosts of spaces in Newark, being around Index’s previous home at 237 Washington, exploring and writing about 31 Central through my old photographs, and searching for other spaces in old maps at the Newark Public Library’s Charles F. Cummings New Jersey Information Center. In real time, I love hanging out at the excellent galleries we have in the city, Shine Portrait Studio, and walking along the murals so many of my friends and peers have created. Black Swan Espresso is a staple; I always run into artists, poets, and professors, a strong espresso coupled with good conversation is always guaranteed. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention McGoverns Tavern, another place I can always count on for good conversation and, of course, a cold pint. 

The Newarker: Tell us something about you (or your work) that few people know.

O’Neal: The first gelatin silver print I ever made was in grandfather’s darkroom when I was about five or six years old. From that point on I was obsessed with the magic of developing prints and still use some of his old equipment today. Being an artist as well as teaching for decades, I still have imposter syndrome. I don’t want to admit it but it’s true. I also get anxious before every single event and don’t want to go, but am generally one of the last people to leave because I love being out and spending time with people. 

I am an avid gardener and big on saving the dying plants on sale at nurseries and trying to give them a second chance in my garden. Something I don’t think many people would suspect is that I am kind of a sporty jock type. I was a cheerleader growing up, and an MVP on my high school field hockey team. I ran a marathon a few years back, and most recently reached the summit of Humboldt, a 14,070 foot peak in the Rocky Mountains with my brother. Last but not least, I met my partner Joseph while painting a mural in a schoolyard with our mutual friend’s kids in Boonton… and immediately fell in love. 

_{All photos by Colleen Gutwein O’Neal}