About
“I started as Berus Gallery in 1976. The name derives from the meaning to do something with zealous enthusiasm. I began through an early curiosity in Haitian art, and later moved into the opening of interest in Bucks County art. This culminated in the 1994 publication “New Hope Modernists”, which was the inaugural exhibition of the newly reorganized Michener Museum.
I have always had a connection with the Jersey Shore, ever since my childhood growing up on the Barnegat Bay until later moving to New Hope and then Lambertville. My first success as a dealer started with the marine art of Henry Luhrs, the grand old man of Jersey boat building, selling out his work every year at the Jersey Shore Boat Show in Asbury Park.”
- Roy Pedersen
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Pablo Picasso
Story
Roy Pedersen has been a dealer in the Lambertville, New Jersey area specializing in American Fine and Decorative arts for the past 25 years. He has lectured and written on the topics of modern painting, American Pictorialist photography, history of American frame making, color wood block prints and the furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement. He has also been featured in two video documentaries: Art of the River Towns and The New Hope Modernists.
Over the past two decades, Roy Pedersen has become the prevailing expert on the history of New Jersey painting, a subject about which he has built a voluminous body of work, through his collaboration with organizations including Morven Museum, Bay Head Historical Society, The Present Day Club, and Ocean County College. Though these collaborations, he has worked to expose the achievements of New Jersey artists and their contributions to the cultural heritage of New Jersey and American art.
In 2013, Roy Pedersen in collaboration with the Princeton, NJ, establishment - Morven Museum and Gardens - curated Costal Impressions: Painters of the Jersey Shore, an exhibition drawing an audience of more than 10,000 visitors. Accompanying the exhibition, Roy’s book Jersey Shore Impressionists: The Fascination of Sun and Sea received the 2014 Independent Publishers Association (IPA) Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence in the Art Book category. Perhaps best summed by the Mid-Atlantic Emmy award winning NJTV Production – State of the Arts, the exhibition was dubbed “a rare treat, bringing many newly discovered artists to the public’s attention…They remind us what summer down the shore is all about”.
Most recently, Roy completed the project: Newark and the Culture of Art that too opened at Morven Museum in the Fall of 2016 and ran until February of 2018. This was the first comprehensive overview of the development of the arts in Newark that for the first time looked at the importance of the Newark School of Fine Industrial Art (NSFIA). This show further exposed the impactful breadth of New Jersey Regional Painting, from the natural shore landscapes to the historical American industrial scenes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Pedersen Gallery prides itself as the first to recognize the regional and national importance of the artists of the Jersey Shore that bring recognition to New Jersey and an identity in the arts. Roy Pedersen’s passion has and continues to be the discovery of NJ Regional Artists in the significant categories in which they worked: impressionism, modernism and regionalism, all for which they deserve attention.