Art in Buffalo

Buffalo has a very vibrant art scene, no doubt because it’s really cheap to live here, which is something artists always like. There seem to be about 6 colleges in the town of Buffalo, including University of NY, State College of NY, Erie Community College, Canisius College, and a couple of smaller liberal arts colleges. The town must have been very prosperous at one time because there are many giant houses here, lots of neighborhoods full of them.

Today we saw part of a very interesting artwork.
In 2006 Buffalo had a freak winter storm (I’ll leave it to the imagination to decide what a FREAK winter storm would be here) which blew down hundreds of large old trees in Buffalo. A number of artists used those fallen tree trunks to make a number of approximately 8-foot high sculptures which they have installed in various places around town


This morning, we saw a number of those sculptures in front of the Presbyterian church. Apparently the statues have sponsors.
The poor buffalo doesn’t yet have a sponsor. Many of the sculptures are of important people from or in Buffalo. This guy with the water is Dewitt Clinton, the engineer who designed the Erie Canal. The guy with the book is Darrell Anton, who became a famous composer and who wrote the song Over the Rainbow. The amusing part of the fish picture is that it’s near the door of a church that has what appears to be a program to feed the homeless called Loaves and Fishes, but you can’t read the sign in the picture.




The rest of the day we spent at the Albright Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). These two museums are right across the street from each other. Albright-Knox is kind of an all purpose museum with a fairly large proportion of modern art, but plenty of older stuff, though no old masters. Seems to start more or less with the Impressionists. It was a really nice gallery, but they had it freezing cold inside, even though it was pleasant enough outdoors.
We only went to Burchfield Penney because we didn’t have much time left, but it was more interesting. For one thing, it had an Arts and Crafts room, with a lot of stuff from Roycroft and other American A&C. It was almost wholly devoted to the works of Charles Burchfield, who is a local guy .

We really had a relaxing day. Finished off with dinner at a place called Saigon, which had Thai and Vietnamese food and was crowded even before 6 p.m. It was quite different from the Thai food in Sacramento, sweeter and with different vegetables (mostly string beans here, probably reflecting that there aren’t many veggies out yet).. We considered going to the place across the street, Pano’s because every time we have driven by, there have been people waiting outside, but in the final analysis we didn’t want to stand around. We did go look at the menu and discovered that they had a variety of Mediterranean dishes – Italian, Greek, and Spanish.

Our final stop of the evening was just to go up and see the Theodore Roosevelt inauguration site where he was inaugurated after the assassination of William McKinley. It was too late to go in, so we just took a picture from the outside