Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit organization in Buffalo, New York, that shows the work of artists of diverse backgrounds in film, video, literature, music, performance, media and visual arts. The institution offers the public programs and exhibitions that focus on such themes as gender, race, popular culture, consumerism, and sexual identity. The ideology behind Hallwalls has always been one of a cooperative of artists. Programs have included artists in different mediums, who work together to present exhibitions that touch on similar themes.

Past examples include the collaboration between the performance artists Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein with the Buffalo-based post-punk band The Vores in Monsters of Nature Design; representations of the John F. Kennedy assassination by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco’s 1975 film The Eternal Frame with the photographer, sculptor, painter and video artist Eric M. Jensen in Parallax Views; the 2008 exhibition series The Imaginary Line featuring the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ursula Biemann, Jim Finn; and a commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Love Canal by Fereshteh Toosi.

The biennial festival Ways In Being Gay: Ways in Between Gender started in 1988 by the then Hallwalls performance curator Ron Ehmke, celebrated its 20th year in 2008. The year-long celebration began with Derek Jarman’s final film Blue.

The annual literary festival, Babel, which Hallwalls co-sponsors, featured a reading by Michael Ondaatje, the winner of the 1992 Man Booker Prize for The English Patient,’’ in 2008. Hallwalls also collaborates with other non-profit organizations in Western New York. Since 1986, ARTGREASE, both Hallwalls' and Squeaky Wheel's shared timeslot on Buffalo Public-access television cable TV, Channel 20, has given the institution a chance to serve the community with its half-hour television program, Artwaves. Hallwalls also co-sponsors, along with organizations Just Buffalo Literary Center, Gay & Lesbian Youth Services of WNY, and Compass House, Spotlight on Youth, an open-mic poetry program dedicated to young poets and artists in Buffalo.

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