Back to the Bayou State
The experimental trio of Ryan Bell, Tim Georger, and James Pardue have put on multiple memorable sets in our garage and around the Buffalo area over the past few years. With James Pardue headed back to his home state of Louisiana to pursue a PhD, this will likely be their last performance as a unit for an unknown period of time.
With support from Regional Headbutting Techniques, Canticle Fade, and Lihuen Sirvent.
Doors: 7pm, Start: 7:30pm
New Formations & Junk Drawer Opening
Join us for the opening of New Formations, BICA's 2026 guest-curated exhibition, organized by Toronto-based curator Yasmin Nurming-Por. The show brings together Lucas Cook, Maggy Hamel-Metsos, Liza Lacroix, Scott Rogers, Silas Rubeck, Unconditional Design, and Haena Yoo — artists who take apart what's already in front of us: church organs, car parts, gua shas, the building itself.
Meet a few of the artists and the curator, and see the gallery transformed by five new bodies of work built from material most people would call finished.
New Formations is on view through September 5.
We’ll also celebrate the opening of Nicholas Christakis: Junk Drawer in the BICA School Project Space.
Open Field Trip to The Medina Triennial
BICA School is planning a Field Trip to the Medina Triennial, and all are welcome!
Art is better experienced together — formulating an opinion and then testing it against a friend's is half the fun and how we develop our own tastes and thoughts. So we're heading to Medina on July 19th to see the Triennial, and anyone who wants to come is invited.
This isn't a tour, and there's no official program, though the Triennial is running its own tour that day at 1pm, open to anyone who wants to join.
Otherwise: wander, look, talk. Afterward, maybe we'll land at a bar or park or ice cream stand nearby to keep going — what we saw, what stuck, what we'd argue about.
We’ll start at the Triennial Hub at Noon.
BICA School Reading Group: Brecht, Threepenny Opera
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
→ Brecht, Bertolt. The Threepenny Opera. 1928.
What happens when you make crime as charming as it actually is?
Brecht's musical follows a gangster, a corrupt police chief, and a cast of thieves and sex workers through a version of Victorian London that looks suspiciously like Weimar Germany. The songs are catchy. The morals are nonexistent. That's the point. Brecht wanted audiences to enjoy the show and feel uneasy about enjoying it—a deliberate jolt meant to keep people thinking rather than just feeling. It's an early, vivid example of his theory of "epic theater," where the goal isn't to lose yourself in the story but to stay sharp enough to question it. A lively read for anyone curious about how art can entertain and unsettle at the same time, and what theater owes to the world outside the theater.
BICA School Reading Group: Kristeva, Approaching Abjection
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity. Note: Chapter 1 only — the link goes to the full book.
Why does a corpse, or spoiled milk, make us recoil before we even think about it?
Kristeva calls that reaction "the abject"—not quite an object you can name and hold at a distance, and not quite part of you either. It's what gets expelled to keep the boundary of the self intact: filth, waste, anything that blurs the line between inside and outside, self and other, life and death. She traces this further than disgust—into questions of language, religion, and art, suggesting that literature and art have long served as ways of approaching the abject safely, giving form to what otherwise threatens to undo us. Dense in places, but the opening pages are vivid and physical, grounded in concrete sensations before they get philosophical. A challenging, generative read for anyone interested in how art handles what culture would rather not look at directly.
BICA School Summer Info Session & Cookout
BICA School is an alternative school for artists, curators, writers, and generally creative people looking to learn and grow together. We meet weekly on Thursdays for reading groups or critiques. We also run the project space in BICA’s gallery, host experimental music shows, hold workshops, host artist talks, plan fieldtrips to see art together, and more. It’s all the best parts of an MFA or MA program, but run communally and without hierarchy. BICA School is open to artists of all ages (although we have another program better geared towards teens).
On August 13, we invite you to come to BICA School to meet us, learn more about what we do, and see if it might be a good fit for you!
BICA School Reading Group: David Foster Wallace & Edouard Glissant
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
Two short, very different essays this week—pair them how you like.
What does it mean to grow up fluent in irony?
Wallace's essay argues that television trained a generation of American writers and readers to be endlessly self-aware, endlessly knowing, allergic to sincerity. He's writing as a novelist worried about his own toolkit—if irony is the only mode television has taught us to value, what happens to fiction that wants to mean something? Long and funny in places, sharp and a little anxious throughout, it's an early and still-relevant diagnosis of a problem many people now just call "being online."
Why should we have to fully understand someone to respect them?
Glissant pushes back on the idea that real connection requires total transparency—that we must fully grasp another person or culture in order to value them. He argues for a right to opacity instead: people and cultures can remain partly illegible to each other and still relate, still build solidarity, without one side having to dissolve into something fully knowable by the other. Short, poetic, and quietly radical—a useful counterpoint to Wallace, and to any framework that treats "understanding" as the only path to respect.
BICA School Reading Group: Schiller, Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
→ Schiller, Friedrich. Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. 1794.
Can beauty make us free?
Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution, Schiller watched a political project meant to liberate people collapse into violence, and went looking for an explanation. His answer: people weren't ready for freedom because they weren't whole—split between reason and feeling, duty and desire. Art, he argues, is what can heal that split. Aesthetic experience isn't decoration or escape; it's training ground, a way of practicing freedom in miniature before we're asked to live it for real. Written as a series of letters, the text is personal and persuasive rather than systematic. A foundational read for anyone wondering what art is actually for, and why a society that wants to change itself might need artists as much as it needs reformers.
Contemporary Communications Telethon
LIVE in BICA’s Main Gallery OR LIVEstreamed.
Was our 12 hour telethon too long for you? This telethon is 6 hours.
A wide variety of sonic audio experiences from the Buffalo area, as we raise funds for BICA School. Love what you see? We suggest a $10 donation to support our school. Come make some friends or just lurk in the chat!
Contemporary Communications 1.5 will be working out the technical side of the Livestream Process, Incorporating live video and compositing. Tune in to see Musical Acts, Faux Ads, and Video works from Buffalo Creatives. Tune in for a band or marathon the whole thing, But be sure to watch the screen, and the scene.
Open Essex 2026
Join us on Saturday, June 27 from 3–8PM for the fifth annual Open Essex — a free neighborhood carnival of contemporary art and creativity at the Essex Street Arts Complex.
sponsors:
Rivalry Projects, Usonia Wine, 19 Ideas
food:
Extra Extra Pizza
participating artists:
Seth Brauchler, Koala, Major Glitch, Issa Mars, Laney Norton, Claudia D’Auria, Emily Constantin, E.L. Hohn, Nick Mass, Skenderton, Chango, LIBBY Projects + Editions, Silas Rubeck, Adelina Metz, Lucas Cook, Kit Xiong, Three of Cups (Lauren Jane, Alex Post and Grace Hoffman), & Nicole Galuszka
music:
organized by the Lavender Room
MX Piggy, Dgi-dgi, All Maine Points, Georgie, & Cool Party
Neptune, Baczkowski/ Freeman, DJ Undersound
Neptune is a band from Boston, Massachussetts that initially began as a sculpture project. The band played its first show in a basement in late December of '94. Currently Neptune consists of three members playing home-made instruments. The music is noisy and uncombed, a concoction of busted garage and incorrect math created with bike parts, saws, old metal chairs, hobo electronics, amplified springs, metal drums with contact mics inside and other debris found in the trash. With several different members over the years, the music has evolved with the instruments, blending the traditional sounds of rock music with what sounds like mistake-day at the ball bearing factory. Jason sculpts most of the instruments out of scrap metal. Mark has taken an interest in electronics, culminating in the assembly of a small army of nifty synthesizers. Dan has mastered the fine art of building debt and breaking stuff.
$10-20 suggested cover
BICA GARAGE
doors/dj @ 7:30
music @ 8.
done by 10pm
Backyard Shenanigans: Parallel Play Date
Generator Fund Project
Backyard Shenanigans presents Parallel Play Date!! A day dedicated to nothing but Play. Let's go offline & be on DnD as we engage with the tangible again. Choose your own adventure from multiple Play areas, Zine-making & collaging, and a Beyblade Tournament! Art Exhibition by Echelon Graphic Novels and Visuals provided by Silas. Vendors, S'mores & so much more!!
BICA School Reading Group: Hauser, prehistoric Art
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you've read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We'll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there's no pressure to be an expert—bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
→ Hauser, Arnold. "Prehistoric Times." In The Social History of Art, Volume 1. London: Routledge, 1951.
What did art do before there were museums, markets, or audiences?
Hauser opens his sweeping history of art and society at the very beginning—art's earliest known forms, made by hunting and gathering peoples with no concept of "art" as a separate category at all. He argues that art here wasn't decoration or self-expression; it was practical, even magical, tied directly to survival, ritual, and the rhythms of group life. A hunter painting an animal on a cave wall wasn't making a picture—he was trying to act on the world. This chapter sets up the question Hauser carries through the whole book: how does art's purpose, audience, and meaning shift as societies themselves change? A foundational read for anyone curious about why we think of art the way we do now—and how recent that thinking actually is.
ABRASH PRESENTS: BLIND DUOS VOL. 1
ABRASH PRESENTS: BLIND DUOS VOL. 1
first time duos from:
Steve Baczkowski / Ryan Bell
Lihuen Sirvent / Safie Falto
with support from:
Auxcab
Saturday, June 13th
BICA Garage
8PM
$10 PWYC
It Should Be Possible Opening
it should be possible opening
a group exhibition featuring teen artists involved with Arts for Something
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Eliza Niemi with radiocalisthenics & Georgie
Eliza Niemi with radiocalisthenics & Georgie
Arts for Something, June
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Workshops take place the first Saturday of every month, October through June (skipping January), from 12–3 PM.
Open Studio Hours added April 18 & May 16th
Bring your work for the zine or exhibition to this workshop in our lab, or to the gallery during any of BICA’s gallery hours in starting May 1st, (W12-5, Th12-7, F12-5, S12-5).
BICA School Reading Group: Ranciere
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert— bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
Who gets to be seen — and what does art have to do with it?
This essay takes the form of an interview, which makes it one of the more approachable entry points into Rancière's thinking. He's working through a deceptively simple question: how did photography and film come to be recognized as arts? His answer turns the usual story on its head — it wasn't the technology that made them art. It was a prior shift in who and what was considered worthy of being seen at all. Anonymous people, ordinary objects, everyday life: once these became legitimate subjects, the camera could follow. A short, generative read for anyone thinking about what contemporary art is for and who it's made with in mind.
Process opening reception
Process opening reception
3rd Annual Sketchbook Exhibition
Sunday, May 24th, 1-5pm
at The Crucible
BICA School Reading Group: Anne Carson
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert— bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
→ Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
A novel in verse about a red-winged monster who wants to be an artist.
Anne Carson retells the myth of Geryon — a winged red creature slain by Herakles — as a coming-of-age story set in the contemporary world. Geryon grows up, falls in love, takes photographs, and tries to figure out what he is. Carson moves between lyric poetry, essay, and narrative without announcing the transitions. The result is a book that feels like several things at once: a love story, a mythology, an autobiography, a meditation on color and memory and what it means to make something. Come having read as much or as little as you can.
Arts for Something, May: OPEN STUDIO
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Workshops take place the first Saturday of every month, October through June (skipping January), from 12–2 PM.
Open Studio Hours added April 18 & May 16th
Bring your work for the zine or exhibition to this open studio in our lab, or to the gallery during any of BICA’s gallery hours in starting May 1st, (W12-5, Th12-7, F12-5, S12-5).
Generator Funded: Backyard Shenanigans
Generator Funded project Backyard Shenanigans by Desiree and Aly.
Fantasyland: Truth & Desire with Bebe D’lure
Sounds presented by imissedmimi
First event in a series of community based events
Arts for Something, May
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Workshops take place the first Saturday of every month, October through June (skipping January), from 12–3 PM.
Open Studio Hours added April 18 & May 16th
Bring your work for the zine or exhibition to this workshop in our lab, or to the gallery during any of BICA’s gallery hours in starting May 1st, (W12-5, Th12-7, F12-5, S12-5).
Architectural Storytelling: Relief Sculpture and Plaster
Led by Quincey and H
A relief sculpture is a piece of art where the forms emerge from a two-dimensional, flat background. Designed to be viewed primarily from the front, these sculptures blend painting’s composition with sculpture’s depth. Relief sculpture is commonly seen in architecture, where it serves to communicate stories and teachings to the general populace. In this workshop, we will learn how to create relief sculpture in plaster using clay press molds and found objects.
Spring Openings: Emma Safir & Isabelle Janssen
Join us for the opening of two new exhibitions!
In the main gallery, Emma Safir: Passionate Wretch, whose paintings tarry at the boundaries of privacy and presentation, interiority and reflection, temptation and rejection. Safir photographs textures—fences, blinds, water, leaves, fabric—and then physically works against them. Printed onto gauzy, semi-transparent fabrics, Safir smocks, beads, or upholsters the images over sculptural forms, burying them beneath layers of accumulated handiwork until they function less as pictures than as surfaces: pressured, adorned, and only partially visible. She calls the results paintings. Taking its title from an excerpt by William Blake, Passionate Wretch brings together two new bodies of work by Safir.
In the project space, Isabelle Janssen: Gitmo Baby is an accumulation of personal archival materials digitized into a 2000’s Geocities homepage. By logging on to the domain, the viewer is able to explore this narrative performance of web-self within the artists’ fictionalized childhood bedroom, bringing the voyeurism of online social spaces into question and bending the rules of socially acceptable oversharing.
Artist Led Walkthrough with Emma Safir
Emma Safir makes paintings using fabric manipulation, lens-based media, smocking, rasterization, upholstery, and digitization. Her paintings function as screen simulations, proxies, and portals. Safir holds a BFA in Printmaking from RISD and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale. She has had solo exhibitions at HESSE FLATOW, Blade Study, Baxter St at CCNY, SHIN HAUS at Shin Gallery, and Bunker Projects, and has participated in group exhibitions at HESSE FLATOW, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Charles Moffett, Jack Barrett, and Lyles & King, among others. She lives and works in New York City.
As part of BICA School’s regular Thursday night meetings, but open to all Safir will walk us through her exhibition Passionate Wretch and her practice more broadly as a special preview to her opening on Friday.
Landowner, Uniform (Opr), Auxcab, Anthill Kids
Landowner (Western Massachusetts)
with local support
Uniform (Opr)
Auxcab
Anthill Kids
7:30 doors
Arts for Something, April: OPEN STUDIO
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Workshops take place the first Saturday of every month, October through June (skipping January), from 12–3 PM.
Open Studio Hours added April 18 & May 16th
Bring your work for the zine or exhibition to this open studio in our lab, or to the gallery during any of BICA’s gallery hours in starting May 1st, (W12-5, Th12-7, F12-5, S12-5).
The Lowliest One, Wild Gone Girls, & HappyGroupppp
The Lowliest One, Wild Gone Girls, & HappyGroupppp
Latest offering of gloom, doom, sustained incoherence and sparse moments of bliss… Like everyday life but louder.
The Lowliest One (Kingston) is back on tour with their creaky Lynchian bar band feel smeared with greasy bass synth, drum machines and pedal steel courtesy of Zoots Houston.
Local support from A/V club dweebs, WGG, and brand-spankin’ new happygroupppp lineup.
BUFFALO, APRIL 17
7:30PM Doors // 8PM Music
$10 door
BICA School Reading Group: Rosalind Krauss
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert— bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
What does photography have to do with Surrealism — and what does Surrealism have to do with us?
Rosalind Krauss argues that photography isn't just a medium Surrealists happened to use — it's structurally central to what Surrealism was doing. The uncanny, the double, the sense that reality has slipped slightly out of joint: Krauss finds these not in subject matter but in the photograph itself. A sharp and rewarding essay for anyone who has ever felt that a picture was showing them something they couldn't quite name.
Wylie Something, The Knife Kickers, & Kitchen
Wylie Something, The Knife Kickers, & Kitchen
Wylie Something, The Knife Kickers, & Kitchen
April 12th, 2026
$10
7PM Doors // 8PM Music
Devon Logel Album Release with Shane Meyer, & Jacob King
a little, but not a lot
an album by devon logel
Featuring performances by Shane Meyer Jacob King and Devon Logel
Saturday, April 4th
6PM DOORS 7PM MUSIC
$10 Suggested cover PWYC
Arts for Something, April
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Workshops take place the first Saturday of every month, October through June (skipping January), from 12–3 PM.
Open Studio Hours added April 18 & May 16th
Clothing as Character: Costuming for Performance
Led by E.L.
Explore the possibilities of what clothing can do and tell in art works. Costumes are an integral tool in spectacle art, protest movements, and public art practice, as well as in disciplines like theatre, dance, and fine and performance art. We'll learn about some of the ways people use clothing as part of their personal arts practice, and then experiment with hands-on exercises using recycled materials, thrifted items and movement before working on our own costume renderings.
BICA School Reading Group: National Poetry Month
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert—just bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
→ Ashbery, John. "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking Press, 1975.
→ Yau, John. "Further Adventures in Monochrome." In Further Adventures in Monochrome. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2012.
For National Poetry Month, we're reading two poets thinking through what images can and can't do.
John Ashbery's Pulitzer Prize-winning poem takes its starting point from a 1524 painting by Parmigianino — a self-portrait rendered in a convex mirror, distorted world and all. Yau's poem moves through the monochrome as a site of obsession and quiet strangeness. Together they make for an unexpected conversation about color, surface, and what we're really looking at when we look at art.
Optional reading:
→ "John Ashbery 101." Poetry Foundation.
→ "Further Adventures in the Monochrome: A Conversation with John Yau." Los Angeles Review of Books.
Zodiac Rebirth
Zodiac Rebirth | Saturday, March 21st 2026 | 6PM
Zodiac Rebirth | Saturday, March 21st 2026 | 6PM
Live modern creative jazz as the sun sets, DJ dance party while the moon glows.
$10 (PWYC) | All proceeds benefit @jfmfofwny
RSVP at zodiac-rebirth.xyz
(oh, and this is my 30th birthday party)
Flyer by @gabriela_zappi
Website by @romannumerals
BICA School Reading Group: Adorno
BICA School Lab | 30 Essex Street
Open to All | Free to Join | No Registration Required
Join us at BICA School for a casual, come-as-you-are reading group that welcomes everyone—whether you’ve read the text cover to cover or just want to hear what others have to say. We’ll explore critical and curious texts together in a space that values open conversation, listening, and learning.
Read ahead if you can, but there’s no pressure to be an expert—just bring your thoughts, questions, and curiosity.
What happens to art when we lock it in a museum?
In this short and layered essay, Theodor Adorno takes on two of the 20th century’s major thinkers—Paul Valéry and Marcel Proust—and their opposing takes on what museums do to art. Is the museum a mausoleum? A memory palace? A space for spiritual preservation or cultural disintegration?
This final winter session invites reflection on the role of museums in modern life and the ways institutions shape our encounters with art. Bring your thoughts, critiques, or questions about that one painting you keep visiting—or avoiding.
Arts for Something, March
Hosted at BICA in collaboration with BICA School and Civic Arts (a project by teaching artist Robin Lee Jordan), Arts for Something! is an interdisciplinary program for young and emerging artists (ages 14–19) exploring the intersection of art and civic engagement.
Over the course of the series, participants will build creative skills—like screen-printing, zine-making, sewing, literary arts, and specialized visual arts—while learning how these tools can be used to support civic initiatives such as social justice, activism, and local community needs.
Young artists who commit to all eight sessions (with up to two excused absences) will have the opportunity to create and present a civic arts–inspired project in any medium. These projects will be featured in a collaborative zine and shared during a final exhibition and celebration in June.
Workshops take place the first Saturday of every month, October through May (skipping January), from 12–2 PM.
Community Crochet Collage
Led by wavy
Filet crochet is a style of crochet that creates an image using pixels. The open stitches represent non-filled in pixels, while the closed stiches make up the image. We will start by deciding on a word together, with each artist responsible for making one letter of the word. Then we will use graph paper to make a pattern for the design of the letter we are responsible for. After we have our individual patterns, each artist will filet crochet a small piece of the tapestry. One by one as each artist finishes their letter, we will sew the pieces together to create a tapestry with our chosen word. Skills each artist will take away from this workshop will include how to make and follow a pattern using graph paper, how to foundation chain, how to create open and closed stiches with double crochet and chaining, and how to sew pieces together (creatively or technically).