University at Buffalo Art Galleries awarded $100,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support exhibition programming over the next two years.

January 13, 2021,  Buffalo, NY — The University at Buffalo Art Galleries has been awarded a grant of $100,000 from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support a two-year program of exhibitions. As part of a research-focused university, UB Art Galleries is committed to advancing art as inquiry. UB Art Galleries recognizes that an artist’s work takes many forms and is thus programming with a spirit of intrepid experimentation and eagerness to draw from the university’s resources and faculty expertise.

In the next two years, UB Art Galleries will present exhibitions that explore a range of topics including an architectural site of national trauma, potentials of an anarchist education, concrete poetry and language as artistic material, and medical humanities and history. Threaded through this dynamic range of exhibitions is a deep engagement with Buffalo’s creative communities, their present concerns, and recent histories. Artists who will receive support from this grant include Heather Hart for her reconstruction of the balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; Collective Question (Steven Chodoriwsky, Chris Lee, Julie Niemi) for their exhibition on UB’s anarchist educational community Tolstoy College (1969–85); Gregg Bordowitz who will present new work in response to the holdings of UB’s poetry collection; and Maria D. Rapicavoli whose lens-based practice examines forced mobility and gendered violence in the Italian immigrant experience. Rapicavoli’s exhibition additionally received Q-International Grant from La Quadriennale di Roma Fondiazione in December 2020.

Curator of Exhibitions at UB Art Galleries Liz Park shares her excitement about the upcoming exhibitions, “I am thrilled to accompany the artists on their journey to realizing their vision and to present their work at UB Art Galleries. Their keen insight, expansive thinking, and rigorous and diverse practices are inspirations that we need during a time of crises and reflections. I am looking forward to sharing this inspiration with the arts community in Buffalo.

"The University of Buffalo Art Galleries program draws upon the university’s many resources and rich history to create exhibitions relevant to its local community that also address critical topics in contemporary culture at large,” says Rachel Bers, Program Director of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “Its support of projects dealing with immigration, labor, medicine, and the history of the counterculture aligns with the Foundation’s belief that artists are key contributors to public discourse and bring nuanced and unexpected perspectives to bear on issues of national interest."

These compelling exhibitions reflect UB Art Galleries’ newly articulated mission to advance art as inquiry and provide the artists an open-ended experimental context in which their nascent ideas are supported with research tools and expert guidance from the university community. Our aim is to empower artists to take risks—in line with the spirit of the Warhol Foundation’s mission to advance visual art and foster innovative artistic expressions.

“This is fantastic news for UB Art Galleries. As we begin to emerge from the challenges that 2020 brought, this support comes at a crucial time,” says Robert Scalise, Director of UB Art Galleries. "It will not only strengthen our ability to empower artists to explore new projects at UB, but also aid in providing a forum for conversation and collaboration across disciplines within the university and the greater WNY community.”

The first round of exhibitions funded by this grant will open in fall of 2021.

About the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given over $218 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide. warholfoundation.org

About Q-INTERNATIONAL

The Q-INTERNATIONAL grant is part of the new program of the Quadriennale di Roma, aimed at increasing the visibility of Italian artists outside the national boundaries through an activity of constant dialogue and exchange with international organizations.

About University at Buffalo Art Galleries

At the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, we support art and ideas that are urgent and relevant to our time and place. We advance art as both inquiry and creative practice available to everyone. Across our two locations at the Center for the Arts and UB Anderson Gallery we provide opportunities to experience and research art through our exhibitions program and collection. ubartgalleries.org