with another staff member. A quick tour offered a glimpse of a flamenco class and watercolor painters, and sewing machines lined up for a class on mending and patternmaking. The Arts Council provides a wide range of programs including exhibitions; performances; free community cultural events; and studio-based classes and workshops in the visual, performing, and literary
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arts. She is especially proud of the Arts Council’s programs for Elm Court community housing and community projects such as oral histories of the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood (check out the quilt on display), the Arts Council’s work with the Princeton Young Achievers, and an art program at Princeton Nursery School. “We have to do a better job of letting people
know what we do,” she says. “We need to reach out. New constituencies are an important way to raise money. In nonprofit fundraising, sources of foundation grants are dwindling.” Cleaves says she will be exploring partnerships with corporate businesses, such as exhibitions, memberships, and art-based activities with area employees. The couple decided to live as a family in 2018. Wilentz had owned the home, but previously sublet it. “Everyone came with a big heart,” Cleaves says. She and her two children moved into the Edgehill Street house together, and hung their art side by side on the walls. Wilentz leans toward old political drawings, his collection of Robert Frank photographs and Dylan-related art, like the album art for the 1965 release Bringing It All Back Home. Cleaves leans to landscapes including some of her father’s paintings (her paternal grandparents were artists too). The furniture is theirs. They both love opera and hold season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Life at home is pretty typical, they say. Most evenings they are both home reading. He, perhaps a history book, documents, or, on a recent jag, the work of Albion W. Tourgée, a 19thcentury American writer and lawyer involved in Reconstruction, who later defended Homer Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson. She, perhaps, is reading Belgian author Georges Simenon, who writes about the detective Jules Maigret, or the volume on her living room table, Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel, about five female painters who changed modern art. Sometimes music wafts from the cello, guitar, or piano, which her children play. Wilentz, who says he does his best on the guitar, finds it interesting “going through the schools for the second time. It takes a good bit of patience, but it’s really fantastic. There’s usually something exciting going on. There’s at least one project in progress, be it painting, or poetizing, or writing, or cooking up who knows what.” Despite, or because of, their interests and schedules which are both divergent and overlapping, the family has dinner together every night. They support one another. “I’m very proud of what Caroline has done, getting to work for the Arts Council, it’s the perfect job at the perfect time,” says Wilentz. And Cleaves proudly mentions that he is a recent recipient of Princeton’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, an honor that is all the more meaningful because it is from his humanities faculty colleagues. “I guess we are an average family embedded in different loci in the community,” she says. “We are parallel, but the overlap is at the dinner table.” And Princeton will be the better for it.