Common Currents

The Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo, NY), in partnership with the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve (Cleveland, OH), is very proud to present Common Currents, a joint exhibition of work by visual artists from Western New York and Northeast Ohio, exhibited in Cleveland April 11 – June 21, 2025, and now on view at the Burchfield Penney through November 2, 2025. 

Buffalo and Cleveland have much in common beyond their addresses on Lake Erie. These two once-thriving industrial cities are engaged in a 21st-century reboot with the visual arts playing a key role in this renewal. These commonalities, accentuated by their physical proximity, led Buffalo artist Gary Wolfe and Cleveland artist and AAWR board member John A Sargent III and to sketch out the beginnings of this collaborative exhibition in 2020. “We both recognized the need for artists to be seen outside of our respective cities,” says John Sargent.

Exhibition curators Kyle Butler, Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Villa Maria College in Buffalo, and Grace Chin, Executive Director of the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, reviewed hundreds of entries and made multiple in-person studio visits to assemble a roster of 23 artists whose work would comprise the final exhibition. “Within the artists’ studios, we witnessed how the past influences the ways artists negotiate the present,” says Grace Chin. “In this shared history on Lake Erie, the artists selected in each city are working from this state of transformation, where a single moment of time is unachievable in the face of impermanence.”

Themes of exploration, transformation, reinvention, and the use and impact of technology infuse the collection, expressing through a variety of media the work of both cities to move out of their shared Rust Belt pasts while also keeping mindful of how that past informs our perception and experience of the present.

Featuring the work of:

Western New York Artists

Dennis Bertram

Lydia Boddie-Rice

Chantal Calato

Frani Evedon

Bob Fleming

Robert Hirsch

Sun Young Kang

Matt Kenyon

Robert Pitts

Paris Roselli

Mizin Shin

Jeffrey Vincent

Northeast Ohio Artists

Timothy Callaghan

Nicole Condon-Shih

Susan Danko

Jen P. Harris

Chauncey Hay

Michael Hornyak

R Kauff

Mark Keffer

Sarah Paul

Katy Richards

Jean Weigl (Archived Artist)

At the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Common Currents is made possible through the generosity of an Anonymous Family Foundation; Cynthia Baird Stark and the Cameron and Jane Baird Foundation; The Margaret L. Wendt Foundation; and Shelley Drake in loving memory of Kenneth Drake.

In Cleveland, this exhibition was supported by The David Davis Art Foundation, The Galleries at Cleveland State University via an Ohio Arts Council (OAC) grant, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (CAC), and the George Gund Foundation.