Event Calendar
BICA School Holiday Market
This fun for the whole family Art Market features 20+ artists and artisans, including many BICA School students. The event will also feature fun kids crafts, festive beverages for sale, and some art school-style surprises. Entrance is free, and donations to support BICA School are always welcome!
Proceeds from this and all BICA School events go to support BICA School’s lab and programming.
Chrysanne Stathacos Performance & Exhibition Closing
On the last day of Chrsyanne Stathacos’ exhibition Cooking with Roses, Stathacos will give a short performance, Rose Mother Queen, where she will step into the unknown!
BICA School Holiday Market
This fun for the whole family Art Market features 20+ artists and artisans, including many BICA School students. The event will also feature fun kids crafts, festive beverages for sale, and some art school-style surprises. Entrance is free, and donations to support BICA School are always welcome!
Proceeds from this and all BICA School events go to support BICA School’s lab and programming.
Natty Wine School: Bleed Like I Do
Natty Wine School is back and bringing you a Halloween bash that you won’t want to miss!
50% of proceeds from this event will go to BICA School, BICA’s free education program.
We know you've missed the natty and we're bringing it back just for you. But how do you feel about Halloween? Art? Dancing? Delicious food? Great company? Well we have what you need, all of it, everything. This time around we are partying for a good cause (and because we love to dance)! For those of you that don't know BICA, they are a Buffalo institution that is here to support the arts community through engagement and education. Their latest venture involved renting some awesome new studio spaces that they are providing for free to some amazing young artists. We see this as a great opportunity to not only kick off the new spaces with a bang (wait until you see the indoor dance space) but also to give some of these artists an opportunity to show some work AND raise money to support BICA at the same time. 50% of profits from the event tickets and beverage sales will go directly towards their efforts
Obviously we will be pouring some delicious bevvys for you. We got incredibly lucky and will have Extra Extra here cooking you up some tasty treats. We have a DJ lineup to keep us dancing into the night. And art! Did we mention art? Ya'll it's Halloween and we want to get weird. Wont you come get weird with us? The category is; Horror. Bring your best gore! Bring me zombie realness! Costumes are not required, but like come on, its Halloween.
PLAY/GROUND Sunday
Come to RiverWorks on Saturday and Sunday to see PLAY/GROUND, an immersive ambitious art festival in the GLF Grain Silos. Thirteen family-friendly installations span the silos and surrounding area at RiverWorks, along with art activities for kids and all the fun and magic a day at RiverWorks offers.
PLAY/GROUND Saturday
Come to RiverWorks on Saturday and Sunday to see PLAY/GROUND, an immersive ambitious art festival in the GLF Grain Silos. Thirteen family-friendly installations span the silos and surrounding area at RiverWorks, along with art activities for kids and all the fun and magic a day at RiverWorks offers.
PLAY/GROUND VIP Opening Night Party
Don’t miss Buffalo’s premiere art party! Be the first to see all the installations, PLUS unique performances and experiences that will ONLY be available during opening night. Door prizes, live music and DJs, food and beverages including the PLAY/GROUND 2022 beer, and all the amenities Buffalo Riverworks offers!
Chrysanne Stathacos Artist Talk
In an informal talk, Chrysanne Stathacos will speak about her work and the meaning of the rose within her practice.
Chrysanne Stathacos is a multidisciplinary artist of Greek, American, and Canadian origin. Her work has encompassed printmaking, textile, painting, installation, and conceptual art. Stathacos is heavily involved with and influenced by feminism, Greek Mythology, eastern spirituality, and Tibetan Buddhism, all of which inform her current artistic practice. She is currently based in Athens and Toronto and represented by The Breeder (Athens).
Stathacos has presented projects in museums, galleries, and venues internationally. She has recently participated in exhibitions at Museo d'Arte Orientale (Turin), Henie Onstad Art Centre (Oslo), Cooper Cole (Toronto), SITUATIONS Gallery (New York), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin), and the 13th Gwangju Biennial (South Korea). Stathacos was also featured as a contributor to AA Bronson’s House of Shame, published by Edition Patrick Frey (Zürich).
Amidst the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, Stathacos’ work became deeply engaged with body politics, and her commentary on issues of sexuality and gender became more pronounced. Through her work, Stathacos was creating images and experiences that connect issues of body, environment, and future. Her works from that time represent this pivotal moment in the artist’s practice.
Stathacos is known for her support of women artists in her collaborative exhibitions, writing, and social practice. Two major collaborative works from the early 1990s still resonate today: The Abortion Project with Kathe Burkhart, and The Banquet with Hunter Reynolds, (1959-2022). The Abortion Project commemorated women’s reproductive rights and was presented at Artists Space, Simon Watson Gallery, Real Art Ways, Hallwalls, and New Langton Arts between 1991 and 1993. The Banquet was first performed at Thread Waxing Space in 1992, inspired by Surrealist Meret Oppenheim’s Spring Feast. On May 1, 2017, Participant Inc. celebrated The Banquet’s 25h Anniversary as part of Ephemera Office Enterprise. She is a founding Director of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Initiatives, (dgli.org) a non- profit organization that works to help Tibetan Buddhist women practitioners in the Himalayas.
Chrysanne Stathacos: Cooking with Roses Opening
Join us to celebrate the opening of our exhibition Chrysanne Stathacos: Cooking with Roses!
This exhibition is the first in a series of three exhibitions on the theme Recovering Futures. This series is supported by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
PLAY/GROUND 2022 Kick-Off and Beer Release Party
We’re kicking off PLAY/GROUND 2022 early with a PLAY/GROUND beer release, live music, and a celebration of past PLAY/GROUNDs at the Hotel Lafayette. Your ticket comes with a free PLAY/GROUND beer, some food, live music, art, and a limited edition print by acclaimed Buffalo artist Julian Montague.
Curator Tour of Bits and Little Pieces
Conrad Guevara, guest curator of Bits and Little Pieces, will give a tour of the exhibition and talk about his inspirations for the show and the artists he chose to work with.
Conrad Guevara is an artist based in Los Angeles and is one-third of the artist collective Bonanza who exhibited at BICA in 2019.
Bits and Little Pieces Opening Reception
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Bits and Little Pieces, an exhibition curated by Conrad Guevara opening Friday, July 8th, 2022. Bits and Little Pieces is a continuation of BICA’s curatorial exchange program initiated in 2020 with Wedding of the Waters, curated by A. Will Brown, connects curators from outside of the region with artists in Western New York and puts their work into dialogue with an international art world. This exhibition includes works by Becky Brown (Buffalo), Phung-Tien Phan (Essen, Germany), Larell Potter (Buffalo), Joseph Rayo (Brooklyn), Kathryn Shriver (Savannah), and Charlene Tan (San Francisco).
Bits and Little Pieces is inspired by inspiration itself or, perhaps, by boredom itself. It takes as its starting point those things which catch our eyes in the static, that make us gasp in the middle of an infinite scroll. Whether it’s the devotional handicraft of a small sculptural detail, an awkward moment of shared humanity, or a curiously indecipherable composition, the works in Bits and Little Pieces are “Saved to Collection,” they are the ones that make you think twice before you remove them forever from the prosthetic memory of your camera roll.
Open Essex
Open Essex is an open-air art fair!
Come by to enjoy art, food, beverages, and fun! This event is also a closing reception for Mads Lynnerup: Someone Was Looking for Someone. Local artists will have art on view outside in our parking lot, in their cars, etc, and Chango4 will provide musical entertainment all day long.
Participating Artists:
Joshua Thermidor
Sarah Fonzi
Karle Norman
Syd Archie
Hannah Boone
Switch: a queer collaboration energized by Jacob Vogan, Mickey Harmon, and Jordan Celotto
JP4hire
Nando Alvarez-Perez
BICA School Info Session
BICA is looking for the first cohort of students to participate in BICA School — a free art school, an alternative model of secondary art education — created in response to a crisis of arts education nationally. The cohort will meet regularly for a curriculum of critiques, reading groups, exercises, and experiences designed in collaboration with BICA exhibiting artists, curators, scholars, local artists, and more. Meeting inside the exhibitions, these students will be immersed in an environment where they are encouraged to expand their practices artistically and curatorially through the use of a dedicated project space at BICA.
On Wednesday, June 15 at 6:30 pm interested students are invited to BICA for an informational meeting and grill out. RSVP here.
Color and Light - An Exhibition to Accompany Sunday in the Park with George
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art and Starring Buffalo are excited to present Color and Light, an exhibition in the lobby of Sheas 710 Theater that will accompany Starring Buffalo’s production of Sunday in the Park with George. The exhibition takes the characters, songs, and script of the acclaimed musical as a point of departure and connection between works by contemporary artists.
Ani Hoover is a Buffalo-based interdisciplinary artist who creates artworks that connect the personal and the universal. Hoover’s recent series of drawings contain symbols, emojis, stickers, doodles, and graffiti. The dots, circles, and contrasting colors Hoover uses are guided by her own rules, reminiscent of George Seurat’s pointillist paintings. Hoover’s work has been exhibited widely both in Buffalo and beyond and is in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, and in many public and private collections around the country.
Alex McLeod is based in Toronto, Canada. He works in animation, print, rapid prototyping, and interactive media in Toronto. He has exhibited internationally at such institutions as The Austrian Film Museum, MASS MOCA, and the Museum of Image and Sound. In Color and Light, McLeod’s video work, The Gallery (2020), depicts a computer-animated gallery space, perhaps a location for the next iteration of the Chromolume #7, the fictional artwork Seurat’s great-grandson is exhibiting in Sunday in the Park.
Kyla Kegler makes performances, paintings, videos, and objects that highlight the pleasure, awkwardness, and slippages of being human. A few years ago Kegler began using the basic tenets of color theory to create compositions based entirely on the visual interactions between different hues. Her work in color theory permeates into performance and video where color is used as a cue for the viewer to understand a character, to create sensations in viewers, and more. Kegler lives and works in Buffalo, NY.
ABOUT SUNDAY IN THE PARK
Tickets are on sale now for SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, June 10 at 7:30pm and June 11 at 2pm and 7:30pm at Shea’s 710 Theater (By phone at 716-847-1410 or online at starringbuffalo.org.) Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s masterpiece about love and art won the Pulitzer prize and was nominated for an incredible ten Tony Awards. Inspired by the painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, SUNDAY merges past and present into a beautiful and poignant parable for all ages.
The cast features Tony Award Nominee Josh Young (Jesus Christ Superstar, Amazing Grace, Evita) as George, five-time Broadway actress Emily Padgett (Side Show, Grease, Bright Star) as Dot, and Buffalo star Karen Saxon (Ujima Theater Company) as The Lady performing alongside an ensemble of Buffalo area stars including Keith Ersing, Jake Hayes, Matthew Iwanski-Jackson, Jetaun Louie, Michele Marie Roberts, Sara States, Andrea Todaro, and Josh Wilde, as well as dozens of Western New York singers, dancers, and musicians.
About Starring Buffalo
Starring Buffalo shows offer Buffalo audiences unrivaled access to Broadway’s greatest theater artists, and provide Western New York students the chance to learn from, work alongside, and be inspired by the stars in both master classes and performances. The organization launched in 2018 with THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME starring Broadway’s Ben Fankhauser (Newsies, Spring Awakening) and Dan’yelle Williamson (Memphis, The Lion King), presented LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS starring Matt Doyle (Company, The Book of Mormon) and Lindsay Nicole Chambers (Hairspray, Legally Blonde) at their new home, Shea’s 710 Theater, in 2019, and recently completed a sold out run of RENT starring Jay Armstrong Johnson (Phantom of the Opera) in October. For additional information and tickets please visit StarringBuffalo.org or Sheas.org.
Opening Reception for Mads Lynnerup: Someone Was Looking For Someone
Join us in celebration of Mads Lynnerup’s exhibition, Someone Was Looking For Someone!
About the Exhibition
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Mads Lynnerup: Someone Was Looking For Someone, opening Friday, April 15, 2022. Lynnerup’s practice incorporates video, performance, sculpture, and installation; his work acts as ephemeral, elusive commentary on the ways social and economic issues are expressed in everyday circumstances, as well as tendencies and trends within the art world.
Mads Lynnerup’s work often takes place in public space. Whether it’s focusing on daily routines in his home city of Copenhagen or chasing after a bus in San Francisco where he teaches, Lynnerup self-reflexively inserts himself as a performer in his own life, intervening in otherwise banal routines and spaces with humor and absurdity, heightening our own awareness of our social experience. For the exhibition Someone Was Looking For Someone, Lynnerup has written a series of short phrases which came into his mind during the pandemic. In the days preceding the opening of the exhibition, these phrases will appear unannounced in various locations throughout Buffalo — on construction equipment, a rock-climbing wall, clothing, signs, newspaper, flyers, store windows, etc. These looping, open-ended phrases interact with their environment and their incidental audiences, adding new, unexpected significance to their surroundings. Unlike other forms of text in public space, particularly advertisements, these statements have no brand or product attached to them, subtly forcing the viewer to contemplate their own relationship to the phrases and produce their own meaning out of them. Alongside the exhibition, Mads has developed a free newspaper that serves as a catalog and which also functions as a performative object to extend the exhibition back into the public space and beyond The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Visitors are invited to take the newspaper and document themselves reading it in their own favorite public spaces.
Lynnerup received an MFA from Columbia University in New York City and a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Lynnerup has an extensive national and international exhibition record including commissions and exhibitions at Creative Time, PS.1, MTV, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Mori Art Museum; Tokyo; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany to mention a few. He is a Eureka Fellowship recipient as well as an Artadia, and Toby Devan Lewis Award winner. In addition, he is currently the chair of the New Genres program and an assistant professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.
This program is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Services Inc.
Ice Dye Party
Get in the icy season spirit with an evening of ice dying and warm beverages. For $50, you will get your own limited edition BICA long sleeve shirt and guidance through the dying process, as well as a free beverage. If you’re not in the mood to dye, but want to watch and criticize your friends, grab the “Just here to party” ticket for $15.
This event is a fundraiser for BICA and all proceeds will go to supporting our programming and operations.
