In an effort to facilitate healing and promote critical discussion and creative self-expression during these unprecedented times, Just Buffalo Literary Center presented its STUDIO Poetry Series in fall 2020 for the first time ever in a virtual format. The University at Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative funding provided crucial support to ensure a successful season and secure Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anne Boyer.

Sam Van Aken is an award-winning contemporary artist and Syracuse University professor of sculpture who has developed a project called Tree of 40 Fruit Project in which the artist hand-grafts trees that bear over 40 different kinds of stone fruit including peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries and almonds. 

Comunidades Visibles (Visible Communities): The Materiality of Migration brought together artworks by six first- or second-generation immigrant Latinx artists. In conjunction with this exhibition, which was at the Albright-Knox Northland from Feb. 12-May 16, 2021, the Creative Arts Initiative partnered with the AKAG to host a series of films selected by the artists.

“Five Songs for Fillmore Avenue” is an interdisciplinary performance project specially conceived by Collins to take place in poetic conversation with the recent construction of Torn Space’s Light/Station on Buffalo’s East Side, a project designed by Christopher Romano, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, University at Buffalo.