‘From Brooklyn to Buffalo’: Futura2000 takes center stage with mural, retrospective

The first career retrospective in the United States of the seminal New York City-based artist opened this weekend at UB Art Galleries. The exhibition, “FUTURA2000:Breaking Out,” spans the vast output of an artist who rose to prominence with aerosol can-propelled graffiti and street painting in the 1970s and ’80s, evolving into painting on canvas, sculpture, wall murals, and product design and high-end fashion.

To connect Futura2000’s new works with the old, a show created for the exhibit, “From Brooklyn to Buffalo,” features 10 works tied to Buffalo neighborhoods. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum also commissioned a mural, “Bradford Reds,” named for the brick Futura spray-painted over in Buffalo Bills’ colors on the side of Bureau, a men’s clothing store at 712 Elmwood Ave. 

“As a lifelong New Yorker, it’s so wonderful to see such an exhibition held here,” said Futura, 67, whose real name is Leonard McGurr and who goes by “Lenny.” “It’s quite an honor, I feel, because this is the first time, at least in America, that my work has been elevated to a sense of a retrospective show.”

Futura said he’s deeply grateful to UB Art Galleries and the Buffalo AKG for celebrating his work.  

“UB (Art Galleries) is a proper gallery, and although I’m not showing at the Buffalo AKG, the mural is a bridge to that higher institution, which is much better than any other mural I have painted around the world,” he said.

The exhibition was the brainchild of Robert Scalise, director of UB Art Galleries, after seeing Futura’s work on exhibit at the Eric Firestone Gallery in 2020. Firestone, a friend of Scalise’s, has collaborated on the project.

“I thought Futura’s work was amazing,” Scalise said. “Then I started uncovering the layers of Futura – an iconic, pioneering street artist who did the ‘Break Train,’ the first pure plunge into abstraction for graffiti art that until then had been letter-based.

“I looked at…