Steel—The Art of Experience and Impressions

Buffalo State College graduate students in Museum Studies and their instructor have organized an exhibition of works from the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s collection to convey artistic impressions of the history of steelmaking in Lackawanna, south of Buffalo. The exhibition, Steel—The Art of Experience and Impressions is presented in tandem with the Community Gallery exhibition, A Community of Steel, which is presented by the Steel Plant Museum of WNY and the Monroe Fordham History Center.

Adjunct lecturer Nancy Weekly and her class in “MST 622/Researching and Presenting Museum Collections,” welcomed the challenge to work with documentary photography and interpretive paintings and drawings to provide different perspectives on the steel-making industry and its effect on the lives of people who worked in the steel mills as well as the lakeside landscape it occupied. Weekly is also Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator of the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College. Her class of nine graduate students includes Emily Busch, Maggie Carignan, Meegan Conrad, Christine Grotke, Megan Hahin, Erin Hicks, Danielle Matthews, Naomi Reden, and Kathleen Slade. They divided into teams to select original materials from the museum’s collection, interpret the works, and create exhibition designs. Collaboratively they will combine ideas for a final presentation. The exhibition will include works by Patricia Layman Bazelon, Robert N. Blair, Don Burns, Sherwin Greenberg, Steve Mangione, Milton Rogovin, and Louis Vastola.