“In my early 20s I hungered to travel the world. My grandmother, who had escaped the 19th century pogroms in Ukraine, would say, “why go to Europe when you have a beautiful backyard?”

It took until I became her age, living through the pandemic, to understand the wisdom of her words. All these years I’ve been searching for Utopia, for Shangri-La, Brigadoon, Eden, and it turns out to have been in the very garden I cultivate. As Dorothy said in the Wizard of Oz, “Everything you were looking for was right there with you all along.”

For me, making art is part of cultivating the garden. I am drawn to the grid, to circles and dots, to paisley and patterns. Subject matter includes simple architectural structures, ancestral places, celestial bodies, imaginary beings, and found objects. I like to experiment and find the happy accident. The titles I choose help to develop the stories I seek to tell, although I encourage viewers to come up with their own stories.”

-Ilene 2022

Ilene Dube is a writer, artist, curator, and filmmaker. She won the Mercer County Purchase Award in 2014 and a Mercer County Senior Art Show first place award for mixed media in 2021. Her artwork has been exhibited at Phillip's Mill, Hobart Art in the Native Landscape, ArtsBridge, Grounds For Sculpture (student exhibition), Monmouth Museum, the Gallery at Mercer County Community College, Ellarslie, Artworks Trenton, Arts Council of Princeton, ArtJam, West Windsor Arts Council, Plainsboro Library, Hopewell Bistro, Northfield Bank, and is in the private collections of Joyce and J. Seward Johnson Jr., Libby Ramage, Heather Barros, the estate of Priscilla Algava, and others.

Her short stories, poetry, and personal essays have appeared in more than a dozen literary journals, and her arts writing has appeared at Philadelphia Public Media, Hyperallergic, ArtPride’s Culture Vultures, and others. She has produced segments for the Emmy Award-winning PBS show State of the Arts. Independently she has produced short documentaries that have screened at the New Jersey Film Festival, Nassau Film Festival, Trenton Film Festival, Princeton Environmental Film Festival, and at arts centers and libraries. Her documentary about artists in Roosevelt, N.J., was the catalyst for an exhibition she guest curated at Morven Museum & Garden, Dreaming of Utopia in Roosevelt, New Jersey, and her film “Painting the Moon and Beyond: Lois Dodd and Friends” became the topic for an exhibition she curated at the Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie.