Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

Our Mission:

To provide a center for contemporary art.

To recognize and serve a vital community artistic presence which is global in its outlook, challenging in its ideas, pluralistic in its concerns, and diverse in its expression. Hallwalls' twofold mission is to serve artists by supporting the creation and presentation of new work in the visual, media, performing, and literary arts, and to serve the public by making these works available to audiences. We are dedicated in particular to work by artists which challenges and extends the traditional boundaries of the various art forms, and which is critically engaged with current issues in the arts and--through the arts--in society. Finally, we believe that the right of freedom of expression for artists, and for free access to their works by interested individuals, must be protected as a fundamental and necessary condition of our mission. 

History:

Hallwalls was founded on Buffalo's West Side in late 1974 by a group of young visual artists (some of them still just students at the time) including Diane Bertolo, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack who carved an exhibition space out of the walls of the hall outside their studios in a former icehouse. From the beginning, their interest was in exhibiting new work by local artists (including, at first, their own) and providing opportunities for exchange between them and artists in other cities, by inviting visiting artists to give talks or create installations, and by organizing exchange shows with similar spaces springing up in other cities. Their focus was always interdisciplinary as well as outward looking, featuring not only visual artists, but also musicians, writers, filmmakers, and video and performance artists. Hallwalls soon established itself as an influential force for innovation within the community as well as nationally, and stretched its then minimal resources by joining forces with other cultural institutions both larger and smaller on collaborative projects.

All of these founding principles and artistic strategies continue to guide the organization today. But in the ensuing three decades, Hallwalls necessarily enlarged not only its reputation in the field, but its outreach within the community, embracing wider and more diverse publics. Hallwalls' programs grew in distinctly different directions, depending on their curators' interests and the needs of the disciplines and communities they served, always unified, however, by Hallwalls' mission to bring the newest and most challenging work in the contemporary arts to the interested public, whether in painting and sculpture, conceptual art, experimental film, video art and activism, documentary film, performance, fiction, jazz, new music, or any number of other art forms that make up Hallwalls' eclectic programming mix.