Justice in the Arts

Justice in the Arts

MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

The 2019 and 2020 Exhibition Program featured a special exhibition series reflecting Buffalo Arts Studio’s belief that artists and curators can effect change through purposeful collaborations balancing community need with artistic excellence. This two-year series, titled Justice in the Arts, promotes the creation of new work that fosters critical dialogue about social, ecological, economic, and representational justice through panel discussions, exhibitions, and residencies. It also educates emerging and student artists through formal classes, guided mentorship, and teaching assistantships. The program continues to expand arts access to underrepresented artists and audiences through community partnerships, public forums, studio space, working facilities, and hands-on workshops. This eight-exhibition series realizes Buffalo Arts Studio’s mission to provide exposure for visual artists, create community cultural connections through exhibitions, public art, and educational programs, and give special attention to artists from underserved and marginalized communities.

Reinhard Reitzenstein (Buffalo, NY)

WTF (Where’s the Forest), on view at Buffalo Arts Studio from May 24-June 28, 2019

Exhibition Catalogue, Reinhard Reitzenstein

What Time is it on the Clock of the World?   Post-Exhibition Community Commentary by Harper Bishop

EXHIBITION PRESS:

“Reinhard Reitzenstein, WTF (Where’s the Forest)” – Cornelia Magazine, Summer 2019

“A Tree Grows in Trico” by Melinda Miller, The Buffalo News, 2019

“A Tree Falls in the Forest” by Bruce Adams, Buffalo Spree Magazine, 2019

“A Unique Tree Exhibit at Buffalo Arts Studio,” Ashley Rowe, WIVB TV, Buffalo, NY, 2019

Reinhard Reitzenstein’s WTF (Where’s the Forest) was the first exhibition in a two-year project that reflects the belief that artists and curators can effect change through purposeful collaborations that balance community need with artistic insight. Titled “Justice in the Arts,” this comprehensive project includes four exhibitions each year that foster critical dialogue about social, ecological, economic, and representational justice. Much of Reitzenstein’s work centers around the tree as an archetype for self and the symbiotic relationship humans share with the forests of the world. The tree serves as a marker of the ravages upon, and attempts at reconciliation with, the natural world.

WTF brings the remains of a full tree covered in yellow beeswax into Buffalo Arts Studio. Suspended from the ceiling, Feel the Buzz hovers over the concrete floor, bisecting deep cracks that have grown over time and faded yellow lines that once guided machinery through the factory. The encounter with the tree and its scent within the former automotive plant points to the complicity of the industrial past and gentrified present in the production of greenhouse gasses and eradication of green spaces necessary to counteract global warming. Add a Little to a Lot and There Will be a Big Heap combines real tree roots and crown with a series of laser-cut discs and simplified tree forms to create a column that connects the floor to the ceiling. The branches at the top of the sculpture reach out to seemingly hold up the concrete support beam, echoing the signature Albert Kahn columns throughout Tri-Main Center. This juxtaposition of the natural and the industrial prompts viewers to take the time to really see the dynamic beauty of the trees themselves.

Stacey Robinson (Cambridge, MA)

Black Imaginings, on view at Buffalo Arts Studio July 26-September 7, 2019

Exhibition Catalogue, Stacey Robinson and Black Kirby

Robinson’s exhibition Black Imaginings featured large-scale digital images that explore representational justice informed by the work of W.E.D. Du Bois and his notion of “double consciousness.” Robinson creates multimedia works as resistance to Black oppression by illustrating the global conflicts of integration, miseducation, unresolved slavery, unresolved emancipation, and colonialism’s effect on Black people’s collective ability to self-organize and self-govern. His graceful yet powerful digital illustrations stand as counter-assessments to Black stereotypes and misrepresentations of Black existence.

Robinson makes his intentions clear in Radical Imagination, the work that opens Black Imaginings. He calls viewers together, speaking to the collective “we” directly. “We must speculate, then actualize our future existence as a militarized revolutionary act.” The hand of the artist reaches into the image, empowering both the regal figure and the viewer tasked with safeguarding our radical imagination.

As Robinson’s work looks to a utopian future, it also challenges the Western canon of the past. Black Zodiac reimagines the astrological symbols within an Afrocentric context. Robinson adds Egyptian iconography, incorporating the scales of Osiris weighing one’s heart against the feather of truth. The weight of truth is present in all of Robinson’s work, challenging viewers “to be very conscious of our strategies for survival.”

Black Kirby, a collaboration between Robinson and John Jennings (Riverside, CA)

Night Boy, on view at Buffalo Arts Studio July 26-September 7, 2019

Exhibition Catalogue, Stacey Robinson and Black Kirby

EXHIBITION PRESS:

“Black Kirby returns: Robinson and Jennings team up for a show at Buffalo Arts Studio,” by Elizabeth Licata, Buffalo Spree, July 2019

Black Kirby’s exhibition, Night Boy, is the latest collaboration of Stacey Robinson and John Jennings. “Night Boy” is a graphic novel that tells the story of a 15-year-old victim of police brutality. Night Boy finds himself a pawn in a supernatural power struggle, but overcomes many obstacles to become the guardian of the City of Light. Along with the story by Damian Duffy, the artwork will be pitched to potential publishers and will hopefully join Black Kirby’s other publications including “I Am Alfonso Jones,” “Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners,” and “Black Kirby Presents: In Search of…Motherboxx Connections” on bookshelves internationally.

John Jennings and Stacey Robinson are the collaborative duo Black Kirby. John Jennings is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and a Cooperating Faculty Member in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning essay collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University. Jennings sits on the editorial advisory boards for The Black Scholar and the new Ohio State Press imprint New Suns: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Speculative. He is currently the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University.

Phyllis Thompson (Buffalo, NY)

Making Memories, Telling Visual Stories, on view at Buffalo Arts Studio from September 27-November 2, 2019

Exhibition Catalogue, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas and Phyllis Thompson

Phyllis Thompson’s solo exhibition, Making Memories: Telling Visual Stories, uses monotype printmaking to construct images rooted in childhood memories that focus on experiences both real and imagined with family and friends. She uses a monotype process akin to the direct process of collaging, because, like memory, it is an imperfect system that often brings forth surprising results. Her process includes visual elements such as patterned fabric, textured papers, and faded photographs to construct portraits of ancestors she has never met. These ancestors, whose solemn, reserved eyes stare forward into time, envision a moment where they may be both physically and systematically unshackled.

Thompson achieves this unshackling through the physical manipulation of the figures, removing them from the picture. This bodily removal leaves an echo of whiteness in the composition, and fading more still, until their silhouettes are akin to wallpaper. In this space, in the removal of physical form, Thompson’s spiritually present predecessors are abstracted; falling back and melding into wallpaper that is replete with vines, curlicue and blocks of color, all of which recall the artist’s earliest explorations in monotypes. The work presented therein becomes meditations on individuals, feelings, memories, and experiences, which are replayed through visual representation and allusion.

In addition to Justice in the Arts, 2019 included solo and small group exhibitions by established artists such as Sheila Barcik (Buffalo, NY) whose intimate drawings serve as poetic meditations on the human condition in uncertain times. Sculptor Lee Hoag (Rochester, NY) employs quotidian objects from around the home into surreal, amalgamated torems. Printmaker Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas (Rochester, NY) uses multimedia monotype and collage to construct historical narratives in which geography informs both personal and cultural identity. Emerging artists Annie Beilski (Buffalo, NY), Obsidian Bellis (Buffalo, NY), and exhibited their drawings, paintings, and sculptures that explore gender, sexuality, and the body through the lens of Fourth Wave Feminism.