State of the Arts has been taking you on location with the most creative people in New Jersey and beyond since 1981. The New York and Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award-winning series features documentary shorts about an extraordinary range of artists and visits New Jersey’s best performance spaces. State of the Arts is on the frontlines of the creative and cultural worlds of New Jersey.
State of the Arts is a cornerstone program of NJ PBS, with episodes co-produced by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Stockton University, in cooperation with PCK Media. The series also airs on WNET and ALL ARTS.
On this week's episode... New Jersey Heritage Fellowships are an honor given to artists who are keeping their cultural traditions alive and thriving. On this special episode of State of the Arts, we meet three winners, each using music and dance from around the world to bring their heritage to New Jersey: Deborah Mitchell, founder of the New Jersey Tap Dance Ensemble; Pepe Santana, an Andean musician and instrument maker; and Rachna Sarang, a master and choreographer of Kathak, a classical Indian dance form.
The New Jersey State Council on the Arts is hosting quarterly Teaching Artist Community of Practice meetings. These virtual sessions serve as a platform for teaching artists to share their experiences, discuss new opportunities, and connect with each other and the State Arts Council.
Register for the next meeting.
The State Arts Council awarded $2 million to 198 New Jersey artists through the Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship program in the categories of Film/Video, Digital/Electronic, Interdisciplinary, Painting, Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, and Prose. The Council also welcomed two new Board Members, Vedra Chandler and Robin Gurin.
Read the full press release.
These monthly events, presented by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, are peer-to-peer learning opportunities covering a wide range of arts accessibility topics.
For comics, the ideal future is not a return to hidden servers, but a comprehensive, legal, open index: a library of Alexandria for comics, where every issue ever published is browseable, searchable, and accessible either for free (public domain) or for a micro-payment. Projects like or Grand Comics Database point this way, though they lack file hosting. Conclusion: More Than a File List The "index of comics" is a ghost of the early web—a plain-text whisper in an age of algorithmic noise. It represents a time when sharing was as simple as putting files in a folder, and discovery meant typing a URL and seeing what appeared.
In the sprawling ecosystem of the internet, certain phrases act as keys to hidden doors. For collectors, archivists, and nostalgic browsers, few strings of text carry as much weight as "index of /comics." index of comics
Index of /comics/marvel/1980s [ICO] Name Last modified Size Description [DIR] Parent Directory - [ ] Avengers_Annual_10.cbr 1987-03-15 14:22 18M [ ] UXM_141.cbr 1986-11-02 09:13 12M [ ] Secret_Wars_01.cbr 1985-05-20 22:01 15M [ ] DD_168.cbr 1987-01-10 17:44 14M For comics, the ideal future is not a
In fact, blockchain-based decentralized storage (IPFS, Arweave) often uses content-addressed indexes. Some Web3 archivists explicitly mimic the old "Index of" aesthetic to signal trust and transparency. It represents a time when sharing was as
This feature explores what "index of comics" really means, who uses it, and why it represents a unique, endangered moment in internet history. Before the dominance of sleek content management systems (WordPress, Squarespace) and cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox), the early web ran on FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and simple HTTP servers. When you visited a folder on such a server, the machine often defaulted to displaying a plain list of files and subfolders.
For the curious few who still type intitle:index.of "comics" "cbr" into a search bar, each index is a tiny archive rebellion. It is messy, legally ambiguous, and often ephemeral. But in its monospaced honesty, it offers something rare: a direct, unfiltered line to the stories that collectors refuse to let vanish. “The index is ugly, but it doesn't lie. It tells you exactly what's there—no cover art, no ratings, no DRM. Just comics.” — Long-time digital archivist (anonymous)
