The Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced a landmark exhibition that will respond to the tragic slaying of ten members of Buffalo’s Black community on May 14, 2022. Before and After Again will feature new paintings, poetry, and prose by artists Julia Bottoms, Tiffany Gaines, and Jillian Hanesworth, who previously served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Buffalo and was recently nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the “Choose Love” video with the Buffalo Bills. The exhibition will be on view free of admission charges in the Buffalo AKG’s M&T Bank Gallery from March 8 to September 30, 2024.

Since the May 14 racist mass shooting at the Tops Friendly Markets in the city’s East Side, which brought national attention to the active forces of racism and segregation that continue to plague Western New York, Bottoms, Gaines, and Hanesworth have engaged in intimate, profound dialogue with members of Buffalo’s Black community, including the families directly affected by the tragedy, to consider the humanity and resilience of this community in the face of systemic racism. The resulting artworks that will comprise the exhibition include portraiture, symbolically charged still life painting, a series of fourteen new poems, and written testaments to communal healing.

“I believe this project can hold room for a community in mourning, while simultaneously searching for joy in the memory of those lost,” states Bottoms. “My work relies heavily on a fusion between realism, symbolism, and a sense of the intangible spirit of the subject. I believe a major component of the project’s success is that which will occur in the space between the canvas and the audience: remembrance, reflection, mourning, and celebration.”

“Helping the community heal while addressing the very real systemic issues our community lives with is the most important responsibility an artist can face,” said Hanesworth. “I am very proud to work alongside Tiffany and Julia on this project and my hope is that it will offer a moment of reflection and validation in order to help the community continue to heal as we move forward together.“

“There is nothing that could ever reconcile the immense tragedy and loss faced by our community, but art is powerful in that it offers space for reflection, healing, and contemplation,” said Gaines. “I am honored to work with Julia and Jillian on an exhibition that I hope will honor the necessity of processing our collective grief, and will also activate the arts as a means of addressing real, systemic issues to envision a brighter, more equitable way forward.”

Before and After Again is an embodiment of the Buffalo AKG’s mission to serve as a creative and welcoming space shaped by and for its community. With its newly renovated and expanded campus, the museum has the space and resources to realize that mission and act as a platform for these three Black women artists and the vital stories and ideas they express. The M&T Bank Gallery and the Seymour H. Knox Building are free of admission charges year-round, meaning the exhibition will be accessible to all throughout its five-month duration, including the second anniversary of the shooting.

Aaron Ott, the Buffalo AKG’s Curator of Public Art and curator of Before and After Again says, “I see this exhibition not as a memorial, but a living expression of resistance, resilience, humanity, and a love that prevails over all other forces. Led by powerful local Black voices, the exhibition stands to elevate growing, critical, and crucial dialogue in our city about equity and our shared cultural responsibility to elevate and respect the lives of our Black citizens, neighbors, friends, and families.”

About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In summer 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the BuffaloAKG opened anew to the public. The project is funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

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