Creating Through the Senses

Join artist Ali Banisadr and Burchfield Scholar Nancy Weekly in the Burchfield Penney's Tower Auditorium for this exciting discussion, presented in partnership with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Burchfield Scholar, Nancy Weekly, has spent years developing and researching her theory that artist Charles E. Burchfield (American, 1893–1967) experienced synesthesia—a simultaneous blending of the senses in which sound might have a distinct taste, or colors are audible. Confirmed by art historians, synesthetes, and neuroscientists, her research has paved a new way to understand Burchfield's legacy as a painter.

American artist Ali Banisadr (born in Iran, 1976) spent his childhood during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, experiences that left a lasting imprint through memory and sound. A synesthete, Banisadr often describes hearing color and seeing sound, allowing auditory memory to become a generative force in his creative process. Rather than illustrating specific events, his paintings transform these sensory experiences into layered visual worlds.

“For both artists, synesthesia is not merely a neurological attribute but a way of perceiving that dissolves the boundaries between seeing, hearing, memory, and imagination.” - Ali Banisadr

^{Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), Autumnal Fantasy, 1916-1944; watercolor on joined paper, 39 x 54 inches; Private Collection}

For this conversation, Weekly and Banisadr will explore the ways synesthesia shapes each artist’s creative process, transforming sensory perception into visual form and expanding the possibilities of how the world can be experienced through art.

Following the talk, continue your night with the launch of Sonic Studio at the AKG, where Banisadr will spin a collection of vintage vinyl.

About Nancy Weekly
Nancy Weekly is the Burchfield Scholar for the Burchfield Penney Art Center, a museum dedicated to Charles E. Burchfield and artists from the Buffalo/Niagara region. Her exhibitions offer different perspectives on Burchfield’s work, for example, by comparison with Seneca artist, G. Peter Jemison, poet Walt Whitman, and painter Mike Glier. She has also curated exhibitions about Buffalo’s first African American architect John E. Brent, painter Jackie Felix, sculptor Christy Rupp, and photographers Marion Faller and Milton Rogovin, to name a few. She retired from teaching at the State University of New York. In 2024, she presented “Charles Burchfield’s Synesthetic Art Legacy” at the University of Oxford in England and is currently organizing Song of the Tree Cricket: Synesthesia and the Senses for presentation at the Burchfield Penney in 2028.

About Ali Banisadr
Ali Banisadr (American, born in Iran, 1976) creates expansive, intricately layered paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculptures that balance improvisation with careful orchestration. Drawing from sonic memory, mythology, history, literature, and the natural world, his work unfolds in layered, dreamlike environments where memory, perception, and the human condition intersect. Banisadr’s visual language synthesizes influences ranging from Persian miniature painting and Venetian Renaissance painting to Romanticism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. His work is held in major public collections including the British Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and LACMA. Following his first major U.S. museum survey at the Katonah Museum of Art (2025), which will travel to several institutions, Banisadr currently has a solo exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. He lives and works between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley, New York.