Gallery Aferro is a platform for the exchange of ideas in service of advancing human dignity and beauty, with a focus on visual arts as the vehicle, proudly located in Newark, NJ.

Aferro Mobile Portrait Studio for Newark
350 portraits of Newarkers for Newark’s 350th Year

Brought to you by Gallery Aferro, Newark Arts, PSE&G, and Celebrate Newark 350

Why choose only one way of seeing Newark, when we can see it three hundred and fifty ways?

Artist-led Newark nonprofit Gallery Aferro created a mobile professional photographic portrait studio for Newark! The studio travelled across the city during 2016 offering free portraits of citizens like you. Imagine the city’s people being able to revisit the portraits in 2026, 2066, or in 2166, when the descendants of the original subjects can access the images. Just as we wonder about the lives of the people whose images we have from the 19th-20th centuries…

Click here to listen to Gallery Aferro’s Founding Director Emma Wilcox speaking with WBGO’s Junius Williams about Newark 350th and the mobile portrait studio.

One of the most fundamental, core attributes of photographic portrait art is accessibility, and the way it gains meaning continuously over time. We love to look. We love to be seen. All of us. And we love to look back, and think about how we dreamed of the future. After your portrait is taken you will be able to download a high resolution file of the image that can be shared and printed as you wish. Portrait images are added to aferro.org as they were made, to be shared with the city and the world.

The 350 portraits were exhibited in October 2016 for Newark Open Doors with a fun and exciting launch reception for everyone. After that, the portraits of Newarkers will be useful as a civic, visual archive for the city in perpetuity, available for traveling exhibits, or simply to be held in the palm of someone’s hand on a phone screen as they tell friends about the day their portrait was made: That’s me! Look!

This program is proudly sponsored by the PSE&G Foundation and by Newark Celebration 350. Newark Celebration 350 commemorates Newark’s rich 350-year history by celebrating the talents of its citizenry and its remarkable achievements.