MELISA GERECCI
Generations of the Catch
+ 778 Mayor KENNETH A. GIBSON BLVD.
GENERATIONS OF THE CATCH, features artist Melisa Gerecci as part of a series centered on Newark’s food culture, community traditions, and shared social spaces. Exploring cultural foodways, family ritual, urban agriculture, and downtown gathering, the installation highlights how food functions as memory, identity, care, and celebration across Newark’s communities.
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Melisa Gerecci is a teaching artist who grew up between Houston and Istanbul. She works across drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, using experimental narrative structures and site-based interventions to tell layered stories. Her public art commissions include work along the East Coast Greenway, and she has received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts through the Newark Artist Accelerator. Her work is held in the Special Collections of the Newark Public Library, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas at Austin. She earned her JD from New York University School of Law.
melisagerecci.net | @megerecci -
This installation highlights Newark’s fish markets and seafood businesses as cultural and commercial spaces where foodways, migration histories, and neighborhood economies intersect. Fresh fish markets connect the city to coastal trade routes, immigrant culinary traditions, and everyday cooking practices passed down through generations.
GENERATION OF THE CATCH reflects labor, skill, and cultural memory through preparation, exchange, and shared meals. Ice displays, nets, crates, scales, and market imagery evoke Newark’s relationship to seafood, trade, and community
nourishment. -
Just Fish Bar & Grill
103 Halsey St.
justfishbarandgrill.comKing Fish Market
21 William St.Mi Lindo Ecuador Restaurant & Fish
Market 18 St.Newark Fish Market
203 Market St.Popular Seafood Market
129 Ferry St.
popularseafoodmarket.com
