For Tiffany D. Gaines, art and community go hand in hand. The photographer and associate curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center has made the history, legacy, and ongoing creativity of Buffalo’s Black Arts community the primary focus of her work. This project not only illuminates an important history that was long under-recognized in American art and culture, but it also shows how that history lives on and, indeed, that many histories are not actually pasts but are alive and continually evolving presents. As she writes of her community, “Buffalo’s cultural ecosystem thrives on the interconnections between artists, cultural workers, and institutions.”
For her thoughtful essays and exhibition, as well as her conversation with Hyperallergic’s Editor-in-Chief, Hrag Vartanian, Gaines carries us through the rich currents of Black Arts in Buffalo, tracing the founding of the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts more than 50 years ago and encompassing long-running institutions like the African American Cultural Center and the Ujima Theatre Company that continue to contribute to the city’s arts and culture. Gaines also highlights the individuals who preserve and extend these legacies, such as Eat Off Art founders Edreys and Alexa Joan Wajed, artist Julia Bottoms, and Gaines herself, whose photographs allow Buffalo’s artists to, in her words, “see ourselves in each other.”
