Events

This exhibition celebrates artists who have worked with the Buffalo AKG’s Public Art Initiative in its first ten years.

The Public Art Initiative was born out of a partnership between the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Erie County, and the City of Buffalo. In its first ten years, the Buffalo AKG’s Public Art Initiative has created more than sixty works by eighty artists. As the first dedicated public art department at an American museum, the Initiative has been celebrated as a sustainable and impactful model for creating public artworks.

Often the Public Art Initiative challenges artists to create their first-ever public works or the largest works of their career. Working in this way 
creates opportunities for robust dialogue in shared civic spaces throughout the many unique neighborhoods in Western New York. These community-led conversations establish new platforms for people from all walks of life to create, experience, and talk about meaningful aspects of our collective creative culture. With Hi-Vis, the Buffalo AKG is thrilled to expand those conversations with the work into the museum itself, to offer a platform for these artists in a new way, and to forge new connections with the communities and neighborhoods of Western New York.

Hi-Vis connects audiences familiar with public works to the museum and vice versa, re-engaging and at times introducing audiences to the depth and breadth of practices that the Buffalo AKG’s commissioned artists embrace, highlighting the work produced over the Initiative’s dynamic first ten years. Perhaps no mode of presentation captures audiences as broadly and as deeply, positioning public installations as one of the most consequential methods of production today. 

Hi-Vis provides an opportunity to engage with the diversity of artistic practices that our commissioned artists engage in, contextualizing their public 
works within the sphere of broader contemporary practices. As such, Hi-Vis is an exhibition assembled to foster a greater connection between our community and the museum itself.

Steina: Playback presents the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, performance, and installation. Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument initially a Sony Portapak a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Icelandic-born artist did not consider US television culture a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”