Jersey City Mayor Steven M. Fulop, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy announced Friday an international partnership initiating the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City project – the Centre Pompidou’s first and only North American partnership exclusively selected with the City of Jersey City. This unique cultural cooperation between France and the United States aims to reinvent, develop and activate Jersey City Journal Square’s iconic Pathside Building, located adjacent to the PATH in the New York Metropolitan area’s most thriving city, under the design leadership of architects OMA/Jason Long.

Scheduled to open in early 2024, the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City museum will become an all-new leading international cultural hub located at the heart of historic Journal Square, serving as a dynamic destination for residents and attracting visitors from all over the region.

The Centre Pompidou will provide its expertise to create an ambitious program emphasizing education via hands-on artistic and cultural experiences, with a community component central to Jersey City’s ambitious and inclusive vision for the future, making the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City a promising multidisciplinary art laboratory for cultural and educational programming.

With the addition of exclusive exhibitions created with the modern and contemporary art masterpieces from the Paris Centre Pompidou’s collection, as well as tailor-made and diversified events at the crossroads of all disciplines, the Centre Pompidou × Jersey City’s cultural agenda (to be revealed at a later date) will offer a fusion of art and ideas.

In 2018, the Fulop Administration acquired the Pathside Building, located in the heart of one of the busiest transportation hubs in the tri-state area, and a 15-minute PATH train ride from both Lower Manhattan and Newark Penn Station. The City purchased the 58,000 square-feet building (5,400 square-meters). While the building was slated for residential units at the time, the Fulop Administration made a commitment to instead try to optimize the building to establish Jersey City as a larger destination for the arts.

The international partnership is the culmination of a strategic plan and cultural partner search by the creative consultants Jersey City had hired in 2019, OMA New York, led by Partner Jason Long. This effort included both engagement with the Jersey City community and discussions with a number of potential partners both within and outside the US. Centre Pompidou’s history as an institution dedicated to multiple forms of contemporary art and culture, its dedication to education and cultural organizations match Jersey City’s and the community’s ambitions for the building.