On View

May 10, 2024 - Dec 1, 2024

Karen Tashjian and Mark Lavatelli, each with decades of artistic experience in Western New York, have, over the last few years, established their studios in adjacent spaces in the Niagara Frontier Food Terminal. This building complex, once among the largest in the world of its kind, and its neighboring Clinton Bailey Farmers Market, inaugurated in 1930, were pivotal centers for the sale of agricultural goods from regional farms for decades. In more recent years, the terminal has evolved into a community hub, hosting a diverse array of businesses and artist studios.

Sharing a fascination with the dynamic relationships between positive and negative spaces, Tashjian and Lavatelli often juxtapose fractured and solid colors in their works, approaching abstraction as a deconstruction of representations of the real world. Both artists share an affinity for the 20th century artist Richard Diebenkorn, whose Ocean Park series started in the late 1960’s represents a similar kind of abstraction away from the real. Their takeaways are unique to each body of work. Both artists are graduates of Cornell University.

Their studios, situated side by side, serve as spaces where their artistic exploration unfolds. In their creative process, both artists apply multiple layers of paint, occasionally scraping away to reveal subtle traces of earlier brushstrokes, creating a rich and layered visual experience within the shared artistic enclave of their adjoining studios. Recent collaborative oil paintings display their shared painting interests.

On View

May 12, 2023 - Dec 31, 2024

Brilliance: The Stanford Lipsey Art Glass Collection, is both worldwide in origin and world-class in quality. It features 50 works of art glass by 45 artistsfrom 11 countries including works by internationally celebrated glass artists Harvey Littleton, Greg Fidler, John Healey, Lino Tagliapietra, Michael Taylor, and many other of the most prominent artists in the field. 

Collected over three decades, The Stanford Lipsey Art Glass Collection is a gift from Judith C. Lipsey and her late husband, Stan, the former publisher of The Buffalo News. The Lipseys made their gift in honor of Burchfield Penney Director Emeritus Dr. Anthony Bannon in recognition of his and the Burchfield Penney’s contribution to the arts and cultural life of Western New York.

On View

Nov 8, 2024 - Mar 2, 2025

This exhibition explores how both American artists infuse observational painting with abstraction to convey a multi-sensory experience of nature. Burchfield died 14 years after Glier was born, so they are generations apart, but both use an abstract visual language, derived from plein air observation, to describe an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the artists and their subject, the living world. They engage the full range of the senses, improvising with color, motif, and repetition to evoke abstract representations of sound, smell, and touch to describe the dynamic, multi-sensory experience of perception. And it is here, in the act of translating the sensory experience that nature provides that the two artists model a kind of reciprocity between artist and subject that reflects a vision of the natural world as partner rather than resource for exploitation.

The exhibition title acknowledges the concept of a “grammar of animacy” created by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, to describe the linguistic attributes of the Potawatomi language. She noted that 70% of the words in Potawatomi are verbs, compared to English in which the ratio is 30%. There are verbs in Potowatomi for “to be a hill,” “to be red,” and “to be a long sandy stretch of beach,” which is very different from English, a noun-based language, that seems very well suited for a culture of things. Kimmerer described Potowatomi as a “grammar of animacy” since it has few nouns to indicate uniqueness, but endless verbs to describe the ceaseless exchange between all things. Similarly, Burchfield and Glier invent visual, abstract vocabularies to describe intangible but dynamic aspects of landscape like light, air, sound, and temperature as elements in the visual depiction of a volatile, but glorious, living world.

On View

Sep 13, 2024 - Mar 2, 2025

Ann Clarke is the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s eighth recipient of The Langley H. Kenzie Award, created to honor and celebrate Mrs. Kenzie’s dedication as an artist and others like her. It recognizes an outstanding artist from the biennial, juried exhibition, Art in Craft Media, by granting the recipient a solo exhibition in the following year. The award is supported by the Langley H. Kenzie Award Endowment, established by her daughters, Rachel King and Mary Kenzie in 2008. Past recipients include Bethany Krull (2010), Karen Donnellan (2012), Jesse Walp (2014), Jozef Bajus (2016), Anne Currier (2018), Ani Hoover (2020), and Taeyul Ryu (2022). The exhibition is fittingly presented in the Sylvia L. Rosen Gallery for Fine Art in Craft Media, named for the patron whose generous endowment funds the biennial exhibition and collection acquisitions. The Burchfield Penney’s staff and board are grateful for the financial support all our patrons provide to make this exhibition possible.

A celebrated fiber artist, Ann Clarke creates extraordinary works that provide compassionate messages within compelling imagery. Her newest series, Interior Landscapes, includes large-scale rugs installed on walls for museum visitors to contemplate. Dreamlike images of trees challenge us to consider the vulnerability of our wooded landscapes. Oversized, empty chairs remind us of the consequences of loss—of both people and the environment in which we make our homes. Her upward glancing Self Portrait extends her empathetic Portal Series of eye portraits of her mother changing with Alzheimer’s disease, and other people—using the polar opposite scale of 18th- and 19th-century miniature paintings of lover’s eyes safeguarded in jewelry. And her playful patches of Grass on the floor provide an optimistic element of levity.