Backyard Shenanigans
An annual summer series of interactive art experiences hosted in a backyard setting that cultivates community & creative connections.
LIBBY Projects + Editions: Building the Multiples Future
Expanding Buffalo’s creative fabric through mentorship, residencies, and sustainable studio growth.
Frontera de carácter (Frontier of Character)
Frontera de carácter (Frontier of Character) is an exhibition that utilizes photography and Adobe building materials to express my identity as a second-generation Mexican American and references the experiences of living within my Mexican and Northwest American cultures.
Gatheringspace
A new creative workspace for artists exploring the intersections of photo/video, performance, and printed matter. The Generator Fund will support initial costs establishing an adaptable space and subsidize materials for use in workshops and by guest artists.
Bodega 333
A magic market focused on childlike imagination, community, and creating safe spaces. A local gallery is transformed into a playful storefront, creating an immersive exhibition space for unique and free public programming. Bodega 333 is a dreamlike space where all are invited to wander and wonder.
Into Dust
Into Dust is a short film love story about two young Buffalo Natives who, along with the rest of their class, learn that the world is ending in less than 24 hours. Feeling powerless, they decide to throw one last big party where things take a dark turn.
Lost Woods
Lost Woods is an interactive public art exhibition using blanket forts, treehouses, and other makeshift childhood structures to explore the formation of queer identity in adolescence.
![TRANSVERSALS [Dead Futures]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/648c9a30dc20306b8d72cf96/1761946313403-UOACRNS59SPVNSD3E4IJ/transversals_kinetic-photo.webp)
TRANSVERSALS [Dead Futures]
TRANSVERSALS is a hybridized experiment in producing and publishing essays, visual arts, and mixed media on theory, theory-fiction, and other speculative genres. Artistic creation is a struggle when meritocratic ideals place trend before rigor, flash before nuance, major before minor. We believe the struggle is worth the effort.
Expanding the WNY Print Community
Mirabo will establish the Growing the Western New York Print Community Program Program. It will offer free residencies to 3 to 4 artists for one week. A Mirabo printer will guide each resident through their residency. Each artist will participate in a group show in the Mirabo gallery.
Vague Questions
Vague Questions is an interview series that documents the reactive mind. The concept is to take questions that may appear in everyday life, take them out of context, and allow the interviewee to assign their own topic to them. The questions are essentially Rorschach tests in language form.
IMKirkwood the Artist
The Generator Grant will fund an exhibit of my artwork in God City Senior Living Apartments Community Center. I tell stories of the little moments in life: joy, pathos, awe, jealousy, love. My work is figurative. When I create my visual narratives, I use elements such as character, setting, and point of view. There is more to the emotional life of Black people than anger and sorrow.
Field Service
Groupwork provides “Field Service”: redefining reality in Buffalo's open spaces through a curated sensory experience. Embedded within the trees, skies, and open fields, video art and soundscapes illuminate and augment our shared space, creating a momentary yet memorable dialogue between the natural world and its transient guests.
Gold Leaf Glass Sign Art - Workshop & Public Exhibition
The Generator Fund will support the creation of works using gold leaf that are similar and different from more traditional uses in hand-painted signs.
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words is a presentation of shared stories of an autoethnographic nature, written poetry, and visual aids in the form of portraiture. Awarded funds will go towards the cost of printing, zine-making, and installation materials.
Rites of Spring
This multi-media project reworks an early Modernist example of the vegetal other as a media performance that seeks to project beyond the human and address both the rite and rights of Spring itself. This Generator Fund Kinetic Grant will target operational costs such as tech purchases and custom fabrication.
LIBBY Projects + Editions
LIBBY Projects + Editions is a creative fabrication studio specializing in producing art editions, apparel, and designed objects. The Generator Fund will help kickstart LIBBY by hosting two shows in the next year and acquiring printing production equipment.
Agatha Falls
The Generator Fund will provide six months of programming for Agatha Falls, a new performance and time-based media art space in Niagara Falls, NY, in The Tugby Lennon Building at 322 Niagara Street.
Dreams Travel Wondrous Wires
Dreams Travel Wondrous Wires is a dream-like, short experimental film that explores altered states of consciousness through The Seth Material, a formative series of New Age texts published by Jane Roberts as the result of her channeling the non-physical entity, “Seth.”
Glass Landscapes and Polaroid Emulsion Lift Workshop
Glass Landscapes merges stained glass and photography to create a body of work investigating memory, landscapes, and their distortions. Accompanying the creation of the work is a series of free public workshops on Polaroid Emulsion Lifts.
Vision Of Vocation: Finding Rest
In Vision of Vocation: Finding Rest, Joel explores themes of labor, purpose, value and overlooked moments of stillness within the lives of workers. I plan to create frames for the drawings I will show as an intentional finishing touch that will supplement the subjects.