Do not go out of the door

07.18.25 – 09.06.25
Opening Reception: Friday, July 18th, 7-10PM

Natalie Hayes, Butt outgrow the rings of days a-younger, 20204. Acrylic on canvas in denim frame, 25 x 27 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.

Do not go out of the door is the 2025 edition of our annual guest-curated summer exhibition. It is our first centered around artists who have participated in BICA School.

“Time works weirdly at home. What we experience as the present often arises from what we salvage from the past: personal objects accumulated over years and flashes of involuntary memory. Brought together by imaginations both fond and paranoid, these fragments give home the potential for safety, comfort, and care, but also for territorialism, insularity, and delusion. When aggregated and projected into the public sphere, they might push us to build caring and unified communities with the will to protect each other. On a national scale, however, we have instead seen them accelerate us towards reactionary violence and oligarchy under the guise of returning to ‘better’ days. 

The ten Buffalo-based artists in Do not go out of the door turn towards home both as a refuge from and uncanny mirror to our increasingly fraught political landscape and visions of the future. Taking its title from Tang dynasty ‘ghost talent’ Li He’s poem of the same name, this exhibition assembles the ghosts haunting wildly different imaginations, creative practices, and levels of belief in the promise of home, manifested through found objects and facsimiles, translucent glass and illusionistic painting. Placed together in an illusionistic ‘home space’ in BICA’s main gallery, these works showcase the ambiguities of homemaking and artmaking in a strange and insular city, in strange and dangerous times.” – Kit Xiong, guest-curator

Featuring works by:
Kayleah Aldrich
Helen Beckley-Forest
H Boone
Lucas Cook
Julia Dzwonkoski
Natalie Hayes
Alexa Kanarowski
Kyla Kegler
Koala Manne
Quincey Miracle
wavy

Curated by Kit Xiong

About the Curator

Kit Xiong is a speculative fiction writer and critic based in Buffalo, NY, broadly interested in transpacific placemaking, post-industrial ecologies, and science fictions in techno-capitalist development. A 2025 AICA-USA Art Critic Fellow and member of BICA School, their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in AICA Magazine, Cornelia, Sine Theta, and One Teen Story. They hold a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University.

About BICA School

BICA School is an arts collective and alternative model of secondary art education created in response to a national crisis in arts education. Affiliated with the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, its artists share a DIY ethos and a commitment to non-hierarchical decision-making. Members meet weekly to critique work, share readings, and develop ideas in a peer-led format. They frequently collaborate to present free or pay-what-you-can public events in BICA’s Garage and Lab spaces. Learn More ›

This exhibition is supported in part by the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.