From 2015 to 2017, Hallwalls presented a series of eight regional group exhibitions under the over-arching rubric of Amid/In Western New York, a coy allusion to a multi-venue biennial from the previous decade called Beyond/In Western New York. Where Beyond/In was anchored by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, helming a group of galleries, museums, and curators from Buffalo to Lewiston, Amid/In was decidedly low-fidelity. Humble curators poking their noses into over 200 artists' studios and exhibiting the work of 78 artists across all media. Five years after that final group exhibition, the project was revived with Amid/In WNY 2022 and continues this year with Amid/in WNY 2023.
Fresh gig of studio visits and snap judgments. As was the case in the original project, we obeyed no theme and pursued no specific logic outside of what we found interesting, an iconoclastic collection of weird gestures and curious choices. As Hallwalls Visual Arts Curator John Massier explains:
"We've segued into Amid/In becoming an annual exhibition based not only on our ongoing interest in the artists of our local community, but the rapidly changing complexion of our community of artists. It's always a good idea to take the temperature of a given scene and while our project has never claimed to be comprehensive, we have relied on its immediacy—what does a given artist have going on RIGHT NOW?
"With some artists—Robert Harris, for example—the stockpile of work from which to select was enormous and Kyle and I landed upon 15 paintings of various scale for the exhibition. In another case, Max Goldfarb off-handedly remarked how he always wanted to do an array of sculpture/paintings/objects that ascended/descended in scale and we responded by giving him a length of wall space within which to work out that proposition. With Phyllis Thompson, it was exciting to combine some work from the late 1970s with much more recent work and an even older embroidered work by her grandmother that inspired her. With everyone else, we engaged with studio visits and then asked artists about specific works for exhibition.
"It's always satisfying for us to go 'themeless' and merely select what we love. Invariably, formal and material connections rise up as works find themselves sharing the same gallery space. At the same time, it's good to survey the scene with diverse approaches—from printmaking-inspired drawings to sculptures incorporating drywall to oddball ceramic pieces, among others—and see work that springs from highly iconoclastic and individual motivations. We really want to showcase those tendencies."
