This year’s First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival will include outdoor performances by the nerve-wracking STREB Extreme Action Company, a rare appearance by comedian Patton Oswalt, a breakdancing and hip-hop competition, and a world-premiere show by the creators of last year’s “Cabinet of Wonders.” The 10-day festival, celebrating its fifth year, will feature 500-plus performances — […]
Art
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The history behind Brighton’s ‘No Draft’ graffiti
While Defacer Eraser, Rochester’s graffiti removal operation, buffs walls soon after they’re marked up, graffiti tends to stick around on trains and other railroad property. Railroads choose to invest in structural maintenance rather than cosmetic considerations. And this is why, for 35 years, the well-known “NO DRAFT” graffiti, accompanied by a peace sign and the […]
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Eastman exhibit celebrates centennial of National Parks
A century ago, the United States created the National Park Service to preserve some of the continent’s most breathtaking wild spaces. Over time, the wilderness has also become a tourist playground. In celebration of this anniversary, the George Eastman Museum is hosting “Photography and America’s National Parks,” an exhibition of images and materials that explore […]
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Print Club show digs into archive for inspiration
In the tradition of creating artwork “after” existent artwork, the Print Club of Rochester’s 85th anniversary members’ juried exhibition, “Echoes of the Past,” presented participating artists with the opportunity to create a new work in response to prints collected in the club’s archives. The resultant show of 30 prints is currently on display in RIT’s […]
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Two exhibits include paintings of evolving identity
The first time I spied one of Shane Durgee’s paintings was during a punk show at the old Smugtown Mushrooms location near the Public Market. Pushing a narrow path between rooms, drink it hand, I looked up at the wall to see an oddly familiar element from my childhood: embedded in a riot of swirling […]
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Oxford Gallery hosts pantheon of myths
One of humanity’s defining qualities is our power of abstraction. We reflect on the past and fret over the future, and make up stories to help us understand natural phenomena and human behavior. Some of these stories fade into history as scientific explanations take their places, while others become religions. Oxford Gallery’s annual themed show […]
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Photos of time-eaten spaces at MAG
If you maintain a home or property, you know that taking care of the space is an uphill battle. Left alone, order returns to chaos. Photographer Robert Polidori is known for capturing entropy’s progress on man-made structures when, for various reasons, maintenance on those environments has ceased. The Memorial Art Gallery’s current show, “Chronophagia” — […]
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RoCo to present public art project
During the last Super Bowl, an appeal to consider domestic water usage appeared as a halftime commercial from Colgate, in which a man kept the faucet running while he brushed his teeth. All the while, different hands reached in and out of the sink, filling cups, rinsing vegetables, and bringing hands full of the priceless […]
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FUA Krew’s RANGE has first solo show
You can usually tell when a graffiti artist has a gallery show by the names dropped all over the block. Following the Saturday night opening of Victor “RANGE” Zarate’s solo show at AXOM Gallery, monikers in colorful calligraphy were scribbled and scrawled on the city’s surfaces up and down Anderson Avenue — consider it a […]
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RIT exhibits master photocomposer
Polish artist Ryszard Horowitz was creating visions of fantastical realities through photography since before the age of Photoshop. He is recognized as a pioneer of special effects photography who developed boundary-stretching analog techniques and was early to incorporate digital technology into his work. An exhibition of Horowitz’s images currently fills RIT’s University Gallery, and showcases […]
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Paintings glimpse the divine in the mundane
As we move through life, we learn many of the same lessons everyone else has to learn, but the way those lessons reach us, and why they stick, varies widely from person to person. One of my personal favorite lessons is the power and freedom that comes through individual interpretation, which struck me during Kathy […]
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Breathing cityscapes fill AXOM Gallery
I come away from some shows with a song mysteriously buzzing at my brain, implanted by associations with the imagery. While immersing in the gritty, dream-like urban realms of Isaac Payne’s “Rose-Colored Glasses,” currently on view at AXOM Gallery, my inner antenna picked Black Star’s “Respiration” out of the ether. Payne’s recent mixed-media paintings on […]
