BICA co-founders Nando Alvarez-Perez and Emily Ebba Reynolds will give a talk for the San Francisco Art Institute’s Professional Development Series on starting your own art space. The talk is open to anyone who would like to join. Email now to RSVP to the talk.

Small things are in.

Microbrewing, microdosing, microcomputing — so we’re giving out microgrants. Artists and curators are frequently asked to donate their time, labor, and money to make exhibitions or performances happen. We hope this grant will help offset some of that.

What it is:

A $300 good-faith grant for artists and curators who are realizing a project in the greater Buffalo area. This is no-strings-attached money that an artist or curator can use in whatever way they feel it’s needed.

What we fund:

Exhibitions, performances, or other projects that contribute to the visual arts in Buffalo. 

Your project must: 

• Include at least one public event (an opening, a performance, etc)

• Take place within three months (in the past or forthcoming) from the application date. IE: You could apply with a project that took place up to three months ago or a project that will take place in up to three months.

How to Apply:

You can apply online! Applications are due midnight on January 1, April 1, July 1, and October 1.

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if a sculptor were on Shark Tank? Or a contemporary dancer were on America’s Got Talent? Work In Real Time is a monthly arts salon-meets-project incubator that will take place in the atrium of UB Center for the Arts. Every month artists across disciplines will present their works in progress to a panel of judges and at the end of each evening a total of $1,500 and expertise from artists and funders will be awarded to worthy projects. Work In Real Time will take place on March 10, April 15, and May 5 and start at 4:30 p.m.

Work In Real Time producers are seeking submissions from artists to participate in this playful public competition. Artists should propose new projects they are working through, or projects that they have hoped to realize but have yet to. The producers are excited to include artists from every discipline and experience level. Selected artists will have up to 10 minutes to present their ideas in an engaging and exciting way. Each presentation will be followed by 10 minutes of questions and responses from a rotating panel of judges, including a guest visiting artist in each round. To submit a proposal for one of the three events, artists should fill out a submission form below.

Work In Real Time is a public platform to present works in progress and to empower artists from UB and the Buffalo community to implement new directions, practices, or collaborations in their artistic ideas. Work In Real Time aims to nurture the growth and development of interdisciplinary works by UB students in the arts and foster a dialogue among UB, Buffalo, and visiting artists to enable cross-pollination between disciplines, sensibilities and cities.

Work In Real Time is organized by UB Arts Collaboratory, UB Center for the Arts, the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Kyla Kegler (MFA '18) and UB faculty and students.

“Humor is a way to counteract feeling helpless, no?” – Carlos Franco Maldonado

Carlos Franco Maldonado: ay. ai. aí. is a playful look into the complexities, recurring motifs, and paradoxes of Puerto Rico–an island in constant struggle for agency in a post-colonial world. In a carefully choreographed multimedia installation Maldonado explores the convergence of nature and culture into a media landscape by mapping the improbable connections between the internet memes of the North American alt-right, the rise of cryptocurrencies in the Caribbean, and the climate change induced disappearance and migration of the Puerto Rican-native coquí frog. 

An artist who works across disciplines, Maldonado considers the components of this installation as an “archipelago” that creates a complex system of interrelations, resembling a deconstructed landscape of the caribbean region, that takes into consideration the infrastructure, economies,  climate, and media that shape it. The installation includes a banana tree, a functional waterworks sculpture, and choreographed video projections sourced from mass and social media. 

Together the works act as a model that reflects the delicate balance of stability and fluidity that define the Caribbean region, the spooky interconnected logic of contemporary life, and the artist’s own connection to and migration from Puerto Rico.

As the exhibition unfolds, Maldonado will be planning and seeking collaborators for a performance to be staged during Puerto Rico day in Buffalo. 

About the Artist

Carlos Franco Maldonado is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Maldonado holds a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Visual Art from the University of Puerto Rico and a masters in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. His works and projects have been presented at the Lab, SOMArt’s Cultural Center, and The Thing Quarterly in San Francisco; at Lvl3 Gallery in Chicago; Nikolaj Kunshal, Copenhagen, DK; Quinta del Sordo, Madrid, SP; and Universidad de Medellín, Medellín, CO among others. He’s currently resident at ISCP in Brooklyn, NY. cfrancomaldonado.com

About the Series

The 2020 exhibition season at BICA is an exploration of humor and its use in contemporary culture. How do artists use humor to reframe local and global narratives, probe questions about personal identity, and radically reconsider popular culture? Can a joke be weaponized? Can humor be used to rewrite history? Can a laugh bring down the government? We’ve invited Carlos Franco-Maldonado, Lex Brown, and Kate Rhoades to exhibit work and realize projects based around how humor is used to make a difference in the world, and we invite others to propose projects, open mics, meme workshops, and other activities that can simultaneously bring levity and action to Buffalo in this polarizing election year.

Celebrate the launch of Issue 2 at Hallwalls during the opening of two new exhibitions by artists Katie Bell and Sarah Sutton. Learn More ››

Artists' Talks start at 8:00 p.m. in the Cinema
Exhibitions continue through February 28.

This exhibition by Ithaca-area artist Sarah Sutton will feature a series of monochromatic oil paintings that combine representational imagery with distortions and abstractions that create scenarios in flux. They are essentially landscape paintings, but Sutton's treatment of the landscape toys with its sense of space and the notion of the built vs. the natural environment. Figurative forms occasionally emerge from the complex hybrid imagery, though they are frequently camouflaged or overwhelmed within the scenic cacophony. Her work depicts moments of collusion and collision that are not intrinsically meant to go together. It is within the resulting ambiguity that Sutton attempts to address how histories, boundaries, and skins can dissolve into one another.

As she has said, "I imagine in-between spaces, scalar fluidity, and psychic spaces, where the private and public realm collapse. Most of the time the question centers on combining spaces or moments that aren't meant to go together, letting them collude, collide and clash and then looking for pattern, resonance and schematic visual structures that emerge as I paint. The subject matter centers on the complex history of capitalism, the movement and extraction of natural resources, as well as speculative futures."

www.sarahsutton.net
www.interaliamag.org/interviews/sarah-sutton/

Katie Bell’s exhibition is a site-specific installation conceived of as a one-act drama starring anonymous artifacts. Functioning like a theatrical set, the gallery holds static characters that reference the interior architecture of corporate and commercial spaces. Sculptural objects are often fractured or untethered to a contextual structure. Functioning as a whole, the individual artefacts are a nod to players on a stage, held captive in space and time. 

Bell’s visual language is partially inspired by the work of Constructivist artists including Alexandra Ekster, Malevich and El Lissitzky's 'Proun Room.' Her work often incorporates flat planes and shapes with hard edges, but never in isolation. Individual objects stack, pierce, lean and push one another, jockeying for space.

Movement and suspension are equally courted, as Bell’s arrangement suggests passageways and thoroughfares that draw a viewer through the installation while revealing small moments and tableaux along the way. Noting Hallwalls’ origin as the hallway space between the studios of Charles Clough and Robert Longo, Bell’s interest pulls from ideas of how space is partitioned, connected and organized. Bio:Born 1985 Rockford, IL

Lives and works in New York, NY

katiebellstudio.com