Giving credit where it’s due.
Buffalo is rightfully proud of its murals. Over the past decade, dozens of public artworks have gone up on walls all over the city. Institutions and businesses sponsor them. World famous painters are keen to contribute. Around the world, street artists like Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Kaws and Swoon now show their work in the most hallowed museums. But street art hasn’t always received a warm welcome—in Buffalo or any other American city. To this day, street art and its close cousin, graffiti, are often deemed vandalism—and over the years, many gifted artists have found themselves behind bars.
In the summer of 2021, the UB Arts Collaboratory made its own contribution to Buffalo’s mural movement. Our latest Working Artists Lab has brought together renowned painter Cecily Brown and a group of Buffalo artists and art students to create Buffalo’s latest mural on a massive wall at the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts. As Cecily’s mural took form, we felt it was important to pay our respects to the founders of the street art movement—and to celebrate the artists and unsung heroes who continue to use the urban environment as their canvas. Often operating without sponsors or benefactors, street artists create works meant for our enjoyment at their own peril and expense. Their art, however beautiful, thought-provoking or grandiose, is rarely featured on Buffalo’s many tours. On August 7th, 2021, we changed that.
The Arts Collaboratory’s Street Art of Buffalo Bike Tours took riders on a journey through the history of street art, the challenges faced by those who create it, and their motivations for hitting the streets with a bucket of wheat paste or a can of spray paint. But most importantly, we paid tribute to the incredible power of street art—as a voice for the marginalized, a means of beautifying the blighted, and a way to bring the surprise and delight of art to our daily lives.
If you would like to take the bike tour on your own, click the link in the navigation bar. Otherwise, enjoy the virtual tour right here on this site!
The Arts Collaboratory