Location: 617 Main Street in the Market Arcade Building (Get Directions)

In large-scale banners, Amy Fisher Price (American, born 1980) re-creates the disappearing signs of once-industrial cities. Her works are a lasting and reverent record of the iconography that dotted the urban landscape as a kind of visual language of the city. Often homemade and hand-painted, these signs adorned factories, corner stores, independent businesses, and the like, many of which have been lost to redevelopment in the post-industrial era. Often working from found and discarded fabric, Price meticulously recreates elements of the signs by hand and sews the cut elements together. Price will sometimes incorporate thoughts of her own into the banners, almost giving the buildings another chance to speak.

Price is based in Detroit, Michigan, where she has exhibited widely and embedded her works directly into the spaces that inspire them. Her work in Buffalo began with multiple research trips, exploring the city, meeting with residents, archivists, artists, and historians. To execute the project, Price and the Buffalo AKG have partnered with the Buffalo-based Oxford Pennant and CEPA Gallery. 

Oxford Pennant creates a wide range of felt pennants and banners, often working in a similar heritage aesthetic as the artist. Price was in residence in the manufacturing buildings at Oxford Pennant, where she explored fabrication techniques, executed some of the banners for the exhibition, and prototyped an editioned piece to be manufactured by Oxford Pennant and released in conjunction with her exhibition.

Price’s banners will hang in the three-story atrium that runs along the center of the Market Arcade Building on Main Street in downtown Buffalo. Her work will go on view to coincide with an exhibition at CEPA Gallery. Price has collaborated with CEPA Archivist Rachel Nicolosi and Curator Sophie Barner to organize a show of photography from CEPA’s archives. CEPA Gallery itself has a storied history as one of the alternative arts spaces that sprung up in the 1970s. The images selected give context to Price’s practice and focus on Buffalo’s visual identity as documented throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century. Many of the works in the archival exhibition were pulled from the revered 1978 exhibition Portraits of Buffalo and will serve as the lead-up to Portraits of Buffalo II, slated to open in early 2025. 

The exhibition opening will take place on November 15, 5–8 pm, at 617 Main Street in the Market Arcade Building.

Price’s banners will be on display until late spring 2025.