Hallwalls Contemporary Art Centre, Buffalo

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit organization in Buffalo, that showcases artists of diverse backgrounds in film, video, literature, music, performance, media and visual arts. Since its inception, Hallwalls has been dedicated to promoting artists from multiple backgrounds and mediums. The institution offers the public programs and exhibitions that focus on such themes as gender, race, popular culture, consumerism, and sexual identity. Programs have included artists in different mediums, who work together to present exhibitions that touch on similar themes. Past examples include the collaboration between performance artists, Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein with Buffalo based, post-punk band, The Vores, in Monsters of Nature Design, representations of the John F. Kennedy assassination by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco’s 1975 film, The Eternal Frame with photographer, sculptor, painter and video artist, Eric M. Jensen in Parallax Views, and the 2008 exhibition series, The Imaginary Line, featuring Mexican performance artist, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ursula Biemann, Jim Finn, and a commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Love Canal by Fereshteh Toosi.

The annual literary festival, Babel, which Hallwalls co-sponsors, featured a reading by Michael Ondaatje, winner of the 1992 Man Booker Prize for The English Patient, in 2008. The gallery has also made it a mission to showcase work that directly showcases Buffalo’s fading industrial past, with exhibitions such as Jesse Webber’s: You Can’t Smoke in Here, Mr. Corbusier, You’ll Burn This Mother Down, featuring silkscreen prints of photographs of several grain elevators taken by husband and wife team, Herd and Hilla Becher.