MIXING IT UP

It is a damp day in Frenchtown, and while my pink Vans are sinking into the wet ground, street artist Joe Strasser, 59, is completely comfortable in sturdy work boots as he ushers me around the mud stretching from the back of his house to the banks of Nishisakawick Creek. “It’s an intense place,” Strasser says.

When the months get warm and the muddy yard dries out, it becomes the site of The Mix, an eclectic outdoor art show featuring twenty or more visual artists, plus music, food, and, when safe to do so, a bonfire. Embracing the landscape, creators set up tents and tables and lean their work against rocks and trees in a marriage of art, nature, and community that Strasser always manages to build, no matter where he finds himself.

As an artist, Strasser has taken a rambling path. Raised in Readington, in Hunterdon County, in 1989 he decided to try surfing at Oʻahu’s North Shore. He became inspired by the Honolulu Museum of Art and started painting, drinking coffee, discussing philosophy at the now-closed Coffee Gallery in Haleʻiwa and, eventually, selling his work: a mixture of abstract paintings and brightly colored nautical art for tourists “I realized,” he says, “there’s something to this.”

For the next decade, Strasser traveled around the United States, living out of a van. In the early 2000s, he settled in Miami, traveling the east Florida coast from Miami to West Palm Beach to sell his work, but the organized “white tent, white table” and street show arrangement weren’t for him. He much preferred to take over spaces with fellow artists under bridges and overpasses.

He jumped to the New York City art scene after reconnecting with his current partner, Noelle Mills, who was his high school sweetheart from Hunterdon Central. A textile artist, Mills was impressed by the profluence of Strasser’s art. “It’s like a bodily function for him,” she says.

The couple relocated to Brooklyn in 2010, where Strasser started showing his work, now more abstract multi-media collages, on the streets of SoHo, finding success with New York and international collectors. They resettled in Frenchtown four years later, after Strasser, while on a walk about town with his brother-in-law, discovered the perfect rambling 1799 house at the base of Kingwood Avenue.

These days Mills commutes to New York City for her work as a textile designer, Strasser works out of an old barn converted into his studio, and their two youngest children, Rosalie, 14, and Uela, 10, enjoy the proximity to nature and, yes, lots of mud and rocks. Natasha, 35, and Kira, 25, children from Strasser’s earlier relationships, also live in Frenchtown, where Natasha is the bar manager at FiNNBAR and Kira works at Purotu Salon on Bridge Street. Of course, all four daughters are frequent contributors to The Mix.

The Mix started organically in 2016. After leaving New York, Strasser was wondering if he would lose his collectors, but they followed, journeying to Frenchtown for his open studios on weekends. “People started noticing,” Mills says, “and started asking to participate.” At first, there were no rules, parameters, or schedule. On a random weekend, artists would arrive and spread their art out in the yard along the creek bank and among the trees. By 2018, The Mix had become a recurring event. Worried that Mills and Strasser would become overwhelmed, a group of regulars offered to assist. “I didn’t even pick the name,” Strasser says.

Today, The Mix has a Facebook page, a mailing list, and planned themed shows, like TROUT (2021) and CATS (2025), where anyone, experienced or not, can offer an interpretation. “It gives the shows such great energy,” Mills says. They do have repeat artists, such as Shannon O’Connell, an artist and teacher at River Valley Waldorf School in Upper Black Eddy, who’s been showing anime stickers and realistic local landscapes at The Mix since the beginning, and Leo Lock, 77, a Frenchtown resident who regularly shows his paintings, which he describes as “abstract figurative surreal cartoon neodoodleism.”

There are musical performances, too, by Alex Wolfson and Lolly Hopwood. In 2024 The Mix presented a live performance of The Devil & Daisy Dirt, a multimedia storytelling production with live music, written and directed by Alex Dawson, of Highland Park, New Jersey. The same year The Mix showed the short film Porch Pirates, by Frenchtown director Tyler Wallach, on the side of Strasser’s studio.

The Mix’s connection to community was never stronger than after the devastation wreaked by Tropical Storm Ida in September 2021. The storm caused severe flooding along the Nishisakawick, filling Mills and Strasser’s yard with tree limbs and other debris, pools of water, and large rocks. Lots of rocks. A section of his studio called the “chicken coop” had slid twenty feet to the side of the driveway. Dozens of neighbors arrived to move rocks and clear logs. “We didn’t know until that moment what it meant to the community,” Mills says of The Mix.

This summer artists will be invited to submit work on RESISTANCE (September 5–6) and TEETH (October 10–11), while children ages 1 to 14 will show works inspired by FOOD (July 11–12). Meanwhile, Strasser continues his own work of abstract mixed-media paintings and sculpture, improvising with found objects such as creek wood, leather screws, and automotive paint. “Jazz is a very big inspiration,” he says.

According to Mills, Strasser’s democratic view of art and artists and his effusive, generous spirit draw people to The Mix. Strasser expresses The Mix’s draw even more simply. “People feel very much like they can be themselves here,” he says. “I’m so happy about that.”

Melissa D. Sullivan is a fiction writer, attorney, and regular contributor to River Towns. She looks forward to attending The Mix this summer with more water-resistant footwear.