Three exhibitions opening at the Burchfield Penney Art Center highlight diverse artists whose works and legacies continue to inspire others. All three open on Nov. 8 and will be on view through March 2025.
“We have so many great artists from our region to celebrate,” Tullis Johnson, senior curator and manager of exhibitions and collections, says of the new exhibitions. “We have a living artist who was a schoolteacher who did drawings and paintings of buildings on a very large scale. We have an artist who has passed who was a person of color and an incredible community organizer. And a great artist, who has also been a professor, who brings [the works of Charles E.] Burchfield into another type of contemporary context.”
Tracing Threads Through Time: The Artwork of William C. Maggio, reveals different stages in the artistic career of the lifelong Western New York artist, teacher and musician. Maggio’s early art includes drawings and representational work. His mid-career pieces are more fragmented and integrate elements retrieved from advertising billboards. More recently, Maggio has moved toward further abstraction and monochromatic paintings.
“The title of that exhibition, ‘Tracing Threads Through Time,’ is meant to express the profound effect that he had on the countless number of students that passed through his classroom,” says Johnson, a student of Maggio himself.
Wilhelmina Godfrey (1914-1994), City Playground, 1949-50; wax emulsion and oil on board, 44 x 38 inches; Burchfield Penney Art Center, Gift of Carol Wing, 1994
Wilhelmina Godfrey: I am what I am is a retrospective exploring five decades of work by the late Buffalo artist, educator and organizer. Godfrey (1914-1994) co-founded the Langston Hughes Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, which opened in Buffalo in 1971.
“Throughout Godfrey’s prolific career, she worked in painting, printmaking and weaving and moved between the three mediums,” notes exhibition curator Tiffany Gaines. “She also resisted limiting assumptions of what it meant to be a Black artist in the 60s and 70s, wanting the freedom to explore her own aesthetic interests in abstraction while connecting her work to her cultural heritage as she saw fit.”
Art and archival material in the exhibition were located over a three-year research period. Many have not been shown since Godfrey’s death.
“Her prolific, yet often overlooked, career reminds us of the precarious nature of whose legacies are remembered in history, particularly for historically marginalized communities,” says Gaines.
Details of Fox Listening by Mike Glier and Light Coming into a Woods by Charles E. Burchfield.
A Grammar of Animacy: Charles E. Burchfield & Mike Glier is part of an ongoing series exploring the connections between living artists and Burchfield (1893-1967). Glier has studied Burchfield’s art for decades and was named artist-in-residence at the Burchfield Penney in 2022. Much of Glier’s own work explores the relationships between humans and the living world.
“Mike Glier and I worked together to choose artworks with related themes, like ‘Waveforms’ and ‘Trees Sharing Information,’ that are exhibited in groupings—Burchfield next to Glier—for visitors to consider for themselves,” explains Buchfield Scholar Nancy Weekly, curator of the exhibition. “Both artists use an abstract visual language, derived from plein-air observation, to share their multisensory experiences in nature that can convey sounds, scents, and tactile senses.”
Admission information is available at burchfieldpenney.org, and visitors can see these and other exhibitions for free from 5:30-8 p.m. on the second Friday of every month thanks to M&T Bank Second Fridays.
