An exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum brings visual art, poetry and prose together to reflect on the tragic slaying of 10 people at a Tops supermarket on May 14, 2022.
“Before and After Again,” which opens tonight in the Seymour Knox Building’s M&T Bank Gallery and is free to the public, proved to be a deeply challenging project, personally and professionally, for the three young Black women artists – painter Julia Bottoms, poet Jillian Hanesworth and writer Tiffany Gaines – and Aaron Ott, the museum’s curator of public art.
The 2,000-square-foot exhibition room has been transformed into a space of emotional, spiritual and psychic replenishment after the senseless murders committed by a delusional white supremacist armed with a semiautomatic weapon.
“It’s a disorienting exhibition as far as it’s quite beautiful but about an awful thing,” Ott said this week in the Knox Building, while sitting under the “Common Sky” mirror-and-glass canopy. “It’s unnerving, but it validates your confusion and your grief and your healing.”
The exhibition presents two five-sided totems in the center of the room with 10 large-size, dream-like portraits by Bottoms reflecting what was lost that day and what lives on. Still-life works along the walls use food to reflect comforts of family and home and produce sold at Tops. Other meanings are also conveyed, such as the recurring appearance of a red ribbon or red line in each painting to signify the racist redlining policy that began in the mid-20th century and helped segregate and impoverish the East Side.
Gaines’ prose is represented on a wall. It’s from the end of a 1,500-word essay that will appear in a book being published in April to accompany the exhibit, gently recalling each person lost.
“I tried to pull out a lesson or a commemoration of each individual and recognize the light that they lived as opposed to the loss that was felt on that day,” she said.
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