Simon Ripoll-Hurier, "The Signal Line” (2023), exhibition version.

« Somewhere, perhaps in the unconscious mind, there exists what we will label “the Matrix”. The Matrix knows no boundaries and has no limitations – it contains all information about all things. » 

(declassified CIA archive, 1988)

About 50 years ago, the CIA was looking for new ways to collect intelligence, and

launched a secret program on psychic vision and extrasensory perception. Is it a

coincidence that this happened at the same time and place as the creation of the 

Internet? Are “the cloud” and “the Matrix” ethereal siblings? The Signal Line is a 

film both on the San Francisco Bay Area and on Clairvoyance, and on how they 

are somehow related. It is a sci-fi documentary on the edge between divination 

and espionage, New Age and new tech, a film about the possibility of perceiving 

the invisible, of seeing through walls, bodies, time and space, and a film about the 

possibility of sharing these visions.

Exhibiting artist Maximilian Goldfarb will lead a tour through his exhibition Numbers Station, talk about his practice, and answer audience questions.

Maximilian Goldfarb received his BFA from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. He completed his MS in Visual Studies in 2006 at MIT. Goldfarb is a maker of unsettled objects and soundscapes. Forms of production include books, sculptural installations, site-based artworks, experimental architectures, and radio programming. His work often includes publication formats as a way of incorporating drawings and visual research processes as a distributive aspect of works.

Goldfarb has completed object, text, and media works with support from the Harpo Foundation, the Elizabeth Graham Foundation, NYSCA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Kaplan Institute, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Experimental Television Center. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in venues including, Sculpture Center, NY; Stadsgalerij, NL; Western Front, BC; White Columns, NY and The Drawing Center, NY. A recent fellow at MacDowell, several of his publications can be found at Printed Matter and Art Metropole. Goldfarb is co-author of Architectural Inventions (Laurence King Publishing), an archive of contemporary visionary architectural drawings. He is a collaborator of the Incident Report exhibition platform in Hudson, NY.

Join us to celebrate the openings of two new exhibitions, Maximilian Goldfarb: Numbers Station in our main gallery, and Lucas Cook and Natalie Hayes's exhibition Trash Strata in the BICA School Project Space.

THIS JUST IN - We’re also launching the newest issue of Cornelia Magazine, Issue 13. Get your copy hot off the press!

Join us to celebrate the opening of INTER-AFFECTION, an exhibition curated by Katie Hood Morgan and featuring works by Ryan Arthurs (Buffalo, NY), Eve Biddle (Wassaic, NY), Crystal Z. Campbell (Buffalo, NY, and Oklahoma), Paul Morgan (Los Angeles, CA), Eli Thorne (Kingston, NY), Olivia Long (Buffalo, NY), Casey Mark Schultz (Buffalo, NY), Rachel Shelton (Buffalo, NY), and Virocode (Buffalo, NY).

The curator and many of the artists will be in attendance.

Join us for the opening reception of

El Encanto de el Grito, una instalación de arte de chango4

About the exhibition

El Encanto De El Grito is a multidisciplinary art installation unveiling Puerto Rico's imperialism. Through disorienting sounds, visuals, and objects, the artist immerses viewers in an unsettling experience. The intentional discomfort mirrors the cognitive dissonance felt by those oppressed under colonial rule. This research-based and abstract approach challenges viewers to confront the lingering effects of imperialism.

As they navigate the installation's intricate layers, they grapple with the complex dynamics of power and identity, inviting a deep reflection on the history and present realities of Puerto Rico. El Encanto De El Grito aims to unsettle and provoke, fostering empathy and understanding for those impacted by imperialism in Puerto Rico.

After a long winter, at Open Essex we're opening up our outdoor spaces for art! Come by for our open-air art fair, where artists will take over our parking lot with outdoor booth spaces. We'll also have food, music, activities for kids, and all kinds of surprises. This is a great opportunity to learn about what’s going on at Essex Art Center, BICA, BICA School and with artists who live and work in our neighborhood.

• Installations and artworks for sale by JP4Hire, Sarah Fonzi, Casey Mark Schultz, Robert Rusch, Way2WavyBaby, Nando Alvarez-Perez, Alison from Earth, Shyanna Merced, Natalie Hayes & Lucas Cook, Kyla Kegler, Nick Mass, Chango, Stick Figure Guy and Emily Constantin

• Food and Bev provided by Usonia Wine and Oralia, Northern Mexican Cuisine

• All-day open rehearsal of The Frontier, a new work by Kyla Kegler

• All-day DJ set by Chango4

• A kid and adult friendly craft activity led by BICA School

Join us for the opening of H Boone: TRANS/HUMAN!

TRANS/HUMAN imagines a future where gender is untethered from the body and we are able to transform at will. H Boone creates glitched, biomorphic sculptures by augmenting 3D scans of Buffalo’s trans and gender-nonconforming community. The artist uploads bodies, modifies them digitally, then squirts them into the tangible through 3D printing. Shimmering and distorted, the digital/physical duality in these sculptures reflect the fluctuating nature of being gender nonconforming today. These works move beyond mere representation to glorify trans metamorphosis. This ongoing project reflects the artist’s desire to combine science fiction, queer world-building, and building trans community through art. 

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico, and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory dimensions, colonial contamination, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution—historical and imagined—within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its technologies. She is one half of the music duo and experimental sound outfit XUXA SANTAMARIA. Her work has been exhibited and performed internationally at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tufts University Galleries, SFMOMA, the Arizona State University Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, the Vincent Price Museum, the Wattis Institute, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Art Hub (Shanghai) and MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany). She has participated in residencies at Eyebeam, Headlands Center for the Arts, Mills College Museum, and the ASU Museum in Phoenix and composed and choreographed performances for the SF Arts Commission, Merce Cunningham Trust, and Soundwave Biennial. She is a recipient of a Creative Work Fund and has been the subject of a First Look feature in Art in America. Her work was recently featured in Aperture Magazine and forms part of the exhibition no existe un mundo posthuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

BICA School is back with another Figure Drawing night on Sunday, May 21 at 6:30! As always, some basic drawing supplies and snacks provided 🧑‍🎨

This takes place in our heated studio space in the Essex Street Art Center, with a suggested donation of $10.

Drawing will end around 9, then we’ll hang up our drawings and talk about them!

It’s Porchfest, BICA School style! Come by for music, art, booze, fun, squirts, food, and more!

Poster: JP4Hire

Join us to celebrate the opening of Kelsey Sucena: Paralytic States (2023)!

Sucena will give a reading at 8:30

About the exhibition:

BICA School is pleased to present Paralytic States (2023), the first solo exhibition by artist and educator Kelsey Sucena, in the BICA School Project Space, curated by Nando Alvarez-Perez. Kelsey Sucena (she/they) is a trans* photographer, writer, editor, and former Park Ranger working at the intersection of photography and text. Her work is centered on the United States as a site for post-capitalist, queer, and critical reflection. Situating her own trans*feminine identity in negotiation with America’s physical, political, historical, and cultural landscapes, her practice documents her personal struggle with self-identification through periods of political upheaval.

First published as an experimental small-run postal exhibition in 2020, Paralytic States (2020) acted as a timely and intimate response to the presidential election cycle. It received attention as an honorable mention in the 2020 Essay Press book contest and as a finalist for the Lucie Foundation Photobook Prize in 2021. Here, Paralytic States is reconfigured and re-presented for the first time for public exhibition. 

Paralytic States straddles the space between memoir and manifesto, utilizing a queer/closeted epistemology to consider questions of community, country, and identity. Taken together, the photographs and essays work in concert to produce an intertextual dialogue that is both intimate and political, riffing off of the long history of road trip photography and trans* memoir in order to complicate both genres. What emerges from that conversation is an uncertain document of the last few years.

Printed onto the surface of flags, this iteration of Paralytic States combines a selection of images with text in a kind of alternative publication. In conversation with both Pride and Gadsden flags, the dramatic composition captures the odd intersection of identity and ideology that flags are so often deployed to convey. Activated through a performative slideshow, the result is both political in scale, and personal in effect. 

Beyond her practice, Kelsey is also a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University, Managing Editor of Photocaptionist, and a freelance writer/editor with various contributions to 10x10 Photobooks, Float Photo Magazine, Rocket Science, Aperture, Fifth Wheel Press, Strange Fire Collective, Humble Arts Foundation, From Here On Out, and Queer.Archive.Work. She is also a former Visual Information Specialist with the National Park Service on Fire Island. She received her MFA from Image Text Ithaca in 2020. Kelsey recently accepted a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University. 

Join us for the opening reception of Sofía Córdova’s exhibition at BICA!

BICA School is back with another Figure Drawing night on Sunday, March 12th at 6:30! As always, some basic drawing supplies and snacks provided 🧑‍🎨

This takes place in our heated studio space in the Essex Street Art Center, with a suggested donation of $10.

Drawing will end around 9, then we’ll hang up our drawings and talk about them!

RISO RISO is an exhibition featuring prints from Buffalo’s first risograph printer. In collaboration with @bica_school, artist and printmaker Robert Rusch @robbie_roughneck is introducing risography to the Buffalo art scene, making a new medium accessible for printed matter such as print editions, posters, zines, and artist books.
The risograph is a digital screen printing technology that has gained popularity in the art world due to its bold fluorescent colors. The exhibition, RISO RISO, will feature works from local and national artists.

The opening will be on March 24th, 7 PM at the BICA School Space, 30 Essex St., Buffalo, NY

Participating artists:

Annie Klein
Arthur Renteria
Balst-off
Casey Mark
Chango
D. Sloan
Dena Springer
Gabriella Victoria
H Boone
Hannah Lin
Honey Henry
Joshua Nasca
Julia Dzwonkoski
Julian Montague
Karle Norman
Kwade Baker
Kyla Kegler
Lucas Cook
Mark Citerone
Nando Alvarez-Perez
Natalie Hayes
Nick Mass
Olivia Long
Otto Holly
Paul Knopf
Rachel Shelton
Robert Rusch
slutkitten
Spencer Cheek
W.T. Joshua
wavy
Yewon Kwon
Zach Nosbisch

BICA School is back with another Figure Drawing night on Sunday, March 12th at 6:30! As always, some basic drawing supplies and snacks provided 🧑‍🎨

This takes place in our heated studio space in the Essex Street Art Center, with a suggested donation of $10.

Drawing will end around 9, then we’ll hang up our drawings and talk about them!

BICA School presents an evening of poetry Sunday, March 5th from 6:00-8:00pm at the BICA School Lab (30 Essex Street) hosted by Charlie Finan aka c m taylor @fine_carma

$10 suggested donation to attend as an audience member/absolutely 100% FREE if you read
(proceeds go to BICA School)

Sign-up is first-come, first-serve at the event, or you can DM @bica_school to sign up early!

Please open with at least one poem by another writer and read for no more than 10 minutes total.

BICA School presents Figure Drawing!

Any and all skill levels, some supplies provided, or bring your own. Donate at the door.

Join us for the opening reception of TJ Shin’s exhibition The Vegetarian: The Swamp, the Swarm & the Cross and Fragments of Larry Bell, an exhibition presented by BICA School.