Events

Open Buffalo is happy to co-sponsor: 

FAB Forum I: A Community Conversation Around Frontline Arts

Where: El Museo, 91 Allen St., Buffalo, NY 14202 

When: Thursday, March 21st, 2019 from 6 pm - 8 pm 

We’re discussing legacy, history, value, and precarity of Frontline Arts institutions (FA). Because this started as a conversation, we’ll be continuing in that spirit – approaching this theme as an open dialogue among our community of artists, participants, and cultural activists. We ask that you join us in a forum where we will remember, share, explore, engage and respond to these questions:

● What is the role of FAs? What purpose do they serve?
● How have FAs affected you and your family?
● How do FAs sustain? Where does the funding come from?
● What is your understanding of how FAs grow or fail to grow?
● How does all of this impact artists and cultural activists? How are our practices affected by funding?
● What are our legacies and practices of resourcefulness? Of manifesting abundance? Of cooperation, collaboration, and collectivity?
● What would you like to see happen next?

We’ve got a lot to talk about! And over the course of the year – before, during, and after each forum – we’ll be holding space for collective learning around these questions. There are multiple pathways into this conversation:

● Answer our request for archival materials by visiting our website to submit your items
● Join the conversation by attending one or more of our community forums
● Spread the word!

As we move into this conversation, we acknowledge the time and place in which we’re having it. In a country and economy built on the extraction of land and labor from its people through a myriad of forces – including colonization, slavery, the destruction of community ecologies. At a time when wealth inequality is soaring, when vast disparities exist along lines of race, gender, ability, citizenship. And within an ad hoc organization, Frontline Arts Buffalo, that affirms the value of artists’ and cultural activists’ work, that advocates for the equitable distribution of resources to cultural workers in the County of Erie and the City of Buffalo, and that includes a call for economic justice within our mission statement.

We hope you’ll join us on this journey of collective, community learning – in preparation for collective, community growth.

Sponsored by: 

• Frontline Arts Buffalo
• Locust Street Art
• Open Buffalo
• African Heritage Cultural Center
• Ujima, Inc. 
• El Museo