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Two sport success House of art and glass Ewing resident’s works featured at Straube Center
By DAN AUBrey
“I’m living in a house form the 1830s, so obviously I am interested in history,” says artist Barry Hantman inside his 13-room home on Grand Street in West Trenton. With 20 of his works at the Straube Center in Pennington and several works at the Element Hotel near the Mercer County Airport, Hantman is
ready to talk about his history of art making and collecting. “Mixed media and assemblage,” he says about his work, “I’ve been doing it since the 1960s when I was living in Philadelphia.” He was also visiting old buildings, where he would find pieces of glass, wood, and ceramics to use. Although he says plexiglass is his “latest” find, he sees the addition as part of a stream of creative work has “a kind of flow from one to another.” Sitting in a front room surrounded by his collection of
outsider art, various glass pieces, and furniture, Hartman talks of his personal history and says he was born in Newark— he calls it by its hometown reference of “Brick City”—but brought up in nearby Union. “My mother was a suppressed artist, so she got me into art,” he says, adding that she took him to the Newark Museum and museums in New York. Hantman says that while she drew and painted, she was a homemaker when he grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s. See HANTMAN, Page 6
Lenape’s importance to region on display at area exhibition By DAN AUBrey
Shawnae Biggs is pictured during a soccer game earlier this year. She will be a key contributor to the girls’ basketball team this upcoming season. For more on Biggs, turn to Page 19. (Photo by Todd Cloward, Toddc LLC.)
The introductory panel to the exhibition “Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories”—currently on view at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania— states something remarkably important to the region. But it isn’t in the words. It is the image on which the text is written: an overhead view of
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the Abbott Marshlands at the estuary where the Crosswicks Creek meets the Delaware River. Much of Mercer County was first populated by the Lenape Indians, and the earliest inhabitants of the area that is now known as Ewing Township were the Lenape. The Abbott Marshlands (located in part of Trenton, Hamilton and Bordentown) is
the site of what had been one of the largest Eastern settlements of Native American. There is documentation of human activity there for 13,000 years, and it is roughly in the center of the land called Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape). They are the indigenous people whose territory included all of what is known today as New Jersey, New York Bay and See LENAPE, Page 8
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