Arts & Culture
The HigherSelf arts and culture program makes room for Newark to make things — creative expression workshops for all ages, gallery exhibitions of Newark artists, performance space and open mics, and art therapy at The 7 Space. Free or low-cost, like everything we run.
Who it’s for
Newark residents of any age who want to make something, show something, or be in the room while it happens. You do not need training, a portfolio, or a finished piece. There is no wrong door: tell us what you are working on and we will point you to the right space.
What the program includes
- Creative expression workshops for all ages
- Gallery exhibitions featuring Newark artists
- Performance spaces and open mics
- Art therapy programs at The 7 Space
How it works
Tell us what you are working on through the Get Help form, or call (888) 893-7838. A HigherSelf coordinator follows up and connects you with the right room — a workshop, a wall for your work, a slot at an open mic, or art therapy at The 7 Space, our gallery and wellness center in Newark.
Artists looking to exhibit or perform can say so directly in the form — it reaches the same coordinator.
Watch
Culture is how a place tells the truth about itself. These are the pieces we keep coming back to.
- Curated
What a 90s Commercial Break Understood About Attention
A Nickelodeon commercial-break animation from the 1990s. The craft in it was aimed at holding a child’s attention through patience and care, and it rewards watching the whole thing. Short-form feeds now cut every one to three seconds, which raises a question worth sitting with: what does that pace do to how young people focus, and what does it cost their mental health?
Via Rewind Network on TikTok
- Curated
The Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Theme
The song that opened the Neighborhood, and the invitation it made every single time: would you be mine, could you be mine, won’t you be my neighbor.
Via 2000s Kids theme song throwbacks on TikTok
- Curated
Have You Ever Done Anything Mean to Yourself?
Rogers opens with the hard case: the toughest thing is to love somebody who has done something mean to you, especially when that somebody has been yourself. He asks if you have ever done anything mean to yourself, then says to look inside and find the loving part, the part to take good care of and never be mean to, because it is the part that lets you love your neighbor, anyone you happen to be with at any time of your life. Respecting and loving your neighbor, he says, gives everybody a good feeling.
Via GBH on TikTok
- Curated
Mister Rogers and Officer Clemmons Share the Water
Fred Rogers is cooling his feet in a wading pool on a hot day when Officer Clemmons comes by. Rogers asks him to sit down and share the water, and when Clemmons has no towel, Rogers offers his own. Given what public pools in this country meant about who was welcome in the water, making room on the edge of that one said more than a speech could have.
Via GBH on TikTok
- Curated
The Cardigan Was Strategy
A video essay arguing that Fred Rogers was doing something deliberate. A Presbyterian minister watched the country shredding children’s sense of their own worth and answered with a slow, quiet PBS show of fish tank songs and hand puppets. It walks the 1969 wading pool with Officer Clemmons, set against white families pouring acid into public pools to keep Black swimmers out, and notes that Clemmons was among the first openly gay Black men on television. It walks the six minutes of Senate testimony that turned a hardline senator and saved public broadcasting. The closing argument: gentleness is proof of strength.
Via Ashley on TikTok
- Curated
What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel
The words of his song about anger run as captions over decades of PBS KIDS — Daniel Tiger, Sesame Street, Arthur, Bill Nye, and Rogers himself at the piano with Yo-Yo Ma on cello. What do you do with the mad that you feel, when the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right? It is great to be able to stop when you have planned a thing that is wrong, and be able to do something else instead. It opens on the real footage: Rogers reciting those words to the United States Senate in 1969, the testimony that kept public broadcasting funded.
Via PBS on TikTok
- Curated
Mister Rogers Asks Yo-Yo Ma What He Plays When He Is Angry
Rogers asks whether, as a child, Yo-Yo Ma ever played happy things or sad things or angry things just because he wanted to. Ma answers by playing. The Swan for the peaceful, tranquil mood, and then the piece he gets into when the feeling is anger, digging in with all his strength until a lot of frustration is gone. Ma posted it forty years to the day after the episode first aired, thanking PBS for Fred’s vision and noting that three generations of his family grew up on it.
Via Yo-Yo Ma on TikTok
- Curated
You Will Always Have Them With You in Your Memory
When a bubble is gone you cannot see it with your eyes anymore, and when an opera is over you cannot hear it with your ears anymore. But you can remember. Rogers builds the idea out of the two smallest losses he can find, and once it is standing, lets it carry the one that is not small: what friends feel like, and that you will always have them with you in your memory. PBS KIDS shared it in remembrance of a mother’s love.
Via PBS KIDS on TikTok
- Curated
LeVar Burton and the First Reading Rainbow
Reading Rainbow began with an episode called “Tight Times.” LeVar Burton spent the years after it handing books to children and telling them the books were theirs. Literacy at HigherSelf traces to this work.
Via Buffalo Toronto Public Media on TikTok
- Curated
“The Bottle” — Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, 1974
From Winter in America on Strata-East. Brian Jackson’s flute carries a Caribbean groove that made it an underground hit and has been sampled more than seventy times since. The groove is doing work: it moves like a party record while the verses walk through the people the bottle took, one at a time, which is how it gets played in rooms that would never sit still for the subject stated plainly.
Via Jazz Is Dead on TikTok
- Curated
Danny Cochran Sang His Complaint to the City Council
A Vietnam veteran from Newcastle Pines took the public-comment microphone at a Shreveport city council meeting and played a song he had written, which was the complaint itself. Asked for his address for the record, he said it was on the music. The track names the problems: overgrown grass hiding ditches deep enough to take a pedestrian, streets cracking apart that need proper repairs rather than temporary patches, handicap ramps missing where nobody thought to look, appliances left in driveways on Earl Street, branches blocking the sightline onto Florence Lucas Road. The council heard all of it. “We didn’t get lost in the beat and the melody. We did hear the complaint. Forward it to us and we’ll go bar by bar, line by line.” One councilman said he would have handed over his own pulpit for it. Another said it was the first complaint he ever enjoyed.
Via Love Shreveport-Bossier on TikTok
- Curated
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and the Room That Played It
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, 1967 on Motown, one of four duets Ashford & Simpson wrote for them. What the clip is really about is the room. It names the Funk Brothers who cut it in Detroit, player by player and instrument by instrument: James Jamerson on a 1961 Fender Precision, Robert White and Joe Messina on guitars, Benny Benjamin and Uriel Jones on drums, Jack Ashford on tambourine, Jack Brokensha on glockenspiel, with Paul Riser’s arrangements carried by the Detroit Symphony. The names almost nobody learned, on a record almost everybody knows by heart.
Via Joe Chiari on TikTok
- Curated
Geometry of Circles — the Sesame Street Animation Philip Glass Scored
Six colored circles split apart and reform into geometric patterns, set to music Philip Glass wrote in 1979 after animator Cathryn Aison commissioned him from her storyboard. It was made as a primer for visual thinking, and it scans like the Dance numbers he was writing around Einstein on the Beach at the time. Sesame Street put minimalist composition in front of children on a weekday afternoon and trusted them with it. It later hung in the Museum of Modern Art.
Via sir_moose_a_lot on TikTok
- Curated
A Loaf of Bread, a Container of Milk, and a Stick of Butter
A mother sends her daughter to the store and offers to write the list down. The girl says she does not need it: I remember. Then she walks the block holding the three items in her head, loses them at the counter, gets them back, and comes home saying it again. The sketch is doing something quieter than a memory drill. It hands a Black girl the whole segment, lets her be competent in it, and ends with her mother telling her she has a good memory.
Via sir_moose_a_lot on TikTok
- Curated
Everybody Sleeps
Footage of animals asleep, one after another, a camel lying flat in the dirt with its head down. No lesson is stated and none needs to be. Everybody sleeps, so whatever else is true of you, that much is shared with a camel.
Via LittleJerryFan92 on YouTube
- Curated
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Nina Simone tells the story before she plays it: an article in the New York Times about Lorraine Hansberry and the play made from her words, a photograph that would not let her go, and the phrase that arrived like a light — to be young, gifted and black. She wrote it as an anthem for Black children, and it has been one ever since. Sung here by the woman who made it.
Via Nina Simone on YouTube
- Curated
You Are Special
Fred Rogers feeds his fish and sings the plainest promise television ever made: you are special, there is only one like you in this whole world. Then he says the thing underneath it — it is not so much what we have in this life that matters, but what we do with what we have — and turns the alphabet into the only two words he says are worth making: friend, and love.
Via Houston Public Media on YouTube
Resources
The gallery. The 7 Space is our art gallery and wellness center in Newark. Exhibitions, performance space, and the art therapy programming live there.
More to watch. The full Video Library collects everything we have gathered, filterable by topic.
Young artists. The Youth Mentorship program runs creative arts programming with working artists for ages 12–24.
Need something else in the community? Browse the Newark Resources directory for housing, food, legal, and other free or low-cost support across the city. You can also text your ZIP code to (888) 893-7838 for the closest organizations.
Urgent, or want to help a neighbor? Visit Mutual Aid to request or offer direct support.
Making something? Use the Get Help form or call (888) 893-7838. A real person responds within one business day.