The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art was founded in 2018 by curator Emily Ebba Reynolds and artist and Buffalo native Nando Alvarez-Perez. Our mission is to sustain communities through focused, practical engagements with contemporary art. 

Since 2018 BICA has grown from a project space in a two-car mechanic’s garage to being an integral institution in the fabric of Buffalo’s cultural scene. We serve an audience that has been generationally overlooked in our city: artists and creative professionals, younger artists, artists and creatives of color, and LGBTQAI+ artists.

We are situated on Buffalo’s West Side in the historic Essex Street Arts Center, long a home to Buffalo’s most radical artist-led initiatives like Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and CEPA Gallery.

There are several core programmatic components to BICA’s mission:

• We produce innovative exhibitions featuring locally and internationally recognized artists whose projects enter into critical dialogue with the city of Buffalo

• We publish Cornelia magazine, bringing visibility to the work of artists, curators, and writers in Buffalo and the Southern Ontario region

• We’re home to BICA School, a free contemporary art school for artists, curators, researchers, and organizers who wish to learn together and grow their practice through weekly critiques, reading groups, and collaborative projects 

• We support artists in the production of new work, the creation of new platforms through quarterly microgrants, and administering the Generator Fund – awarding more than $60,000 to artists annually

All of these programs are free to access by the public and have been built from the ground up through conversations with our audiences and wider community. Together they aim at making Buffalo a better city for its residents, one where art and artists are at the center of reimagining civic and institutional possibility.