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Ttwo years ago a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, new Yorkand opened fire at a grocery store on the city’s predominantly Black East Side, killing 10 people and injuring three.
Although Tops Friendly Markets, where the racist mass shooting took place, has been rebuilt and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on May 14, 2022, Buffalo’s East Side has been changed forever.
“There’s a collective grief about what’s been done to our community,” said Julia Bottoms, a local artist. “I would say there’s also outrage, a lot of emotions: anger, outrage, disappointment, grief. We are still processing as a community.”
A few months after the shooting, Aaron Ott, the curator of public art at the Buffalo AKG Museum of Art (formerly known as the Albright-Knox Gallery), sought out a trio of local artists and creatives to commemorate the tragedy: Bottoms, with whom Ott had previously contributed to Buffalo’s Wall of Freedom, a collection of murals of civil rights leaders; writer and curator Tiffany Gaines; and Buffalo’s first Poet Laureate, Gillian Hanesworth.
The resulting exhibit, Before and After, is billed as the first of its kind to address mass gun violence and aims to help viewers “break down the corrosive systems that threaten our trust, faith and love for one another.” according to the exhibition announcement.
Not wanting to be guided by their own feelings about the tragedy in Buffalo, Bottoms, Gaines and Hanesworth instead spent 15 months reaching out to victims’ families and others in the East Side community. Through dozens of interviews and conversations, the artists gathered stories and information that shaped the exhibition, which opened earlier this year and is on display at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum until September 30. It combines poetry, prose, paintings and other artwork, all of which aim to encourage viewers to ensure that loved ones are not forgotten, while creating a space for dialogue and change.
“We wanted to learn a little more about the lives of their loved ones. What made them laugh the most? What was their favorite recipe that they would make?” Bottom said. “Only those things that make a beautiful life. The work has the idea of memory, of what is present and what is lost when someone is caught so suddenly and so tragically.”
Bottoms said she tried to translate the interviews of family members visually, conveying emotions that would be relatable to audience members who may not have known the victims. She painted portraits and still lifes, Hanesworth wrote 12 poems, and Gaines wrote an essay that is on display in the exhibition space.
“Everyone can think of their loved one and what made them laugh. Anyone can come up with a recipe or a smell that brings back the memory of that person,” Bottoms said. “Something that was important to me and the families was not to make someone monumental or a symbol of anything. It was so important to preserve that humanity and their individual stories and essence in the portraits.”
When the artists were not working with families, they were working with each other, discussing what they had learned and how to move forward in project planning.
“There was a lot more responsibility because we weren’t just telling a story that was our personal vision,” Bottoms said. “We were really trying to present this idea of shared grief. We had a huge burden to try to make sure we did justice to what we were trying to present.”
As the years passed after the massacre, the exhibit’s creators were acutely aware that the rest of the country was moving on, while East Siders and Buffalonians were left to deal with their grief largely on their own.
“There is a piece in the exhibition called Salt in the Wound. It’s this kind of fictional timeline of coverage: the idea that people are really invested when something happens, then it kind of tapers off, and then there’s a resurgence of investment around a year from the anniversary,” Bottoms said. “And then people just forget.”
For some, forgetting is impossible.
“The title of the exhibition ‘Before and Again After’ comes from this notion of [when] you have an event, you measure your own life and experience as happening both before and after that moment, that trauma,” Ott said. “But ‘again’ is this episodic and epidemic kind of aspect of American life. As if this was bound to happen again. I don’t think we realized we were breaking new ground with an exhibition.”
Red Line History
The goal of the exhibit, the artists said, is not only to address the loss and tragedy of May 14, 2022, but also to draw attention to the systemic and structural problems that allowed the shooting to happen in the first place.
Because of the red lines, Buffalo is one of the most segregated cities in the country. 2021 survey found that black buffalo had not made economic progress for more than 31 years. The city’s overt segregation, along with the underdevelopment of the East Side, structural unemployment, gentrification and limited educational opportunities are the driving forces behind inequality, the study found.
“These thinly veiled problems persist in Buffalo,” Gaines said. “And I think that was the intention of everyone involved, not just to sit around grieving the loss of the day, but to really challenge viewers to talk about some of these ongoing issues that we’re still seeing in our community.”
During the research for the exhibition, the group contacted Doug Ruffin, a Buffalo filmmaker and historian whose film Figmos PTL (“I Finally Got My Own Supermarket, Thank God”) tells the story of a black-owned grocery store that opened on Jefferson Avenue on the East Side in the 1980s . After Figmos closed in 1983, the East Side was without a grocery store until Tops Friendly Markets opened on the same street in 2003.
“There is a generation gap between this knowledge. If you were born before 1975, you might know Figmos, but if you were born after that date, it just wasn’t on your radar,” Ott said. “Jefferson was known as Black Main Street. There are a lot of businesses that have been lost, so there is a lot of history that has been lost.”
Hanesworth said she doesn’t know what it looks like to see her community thrive.
“When you look at the social and economic makeup of Buffalo’s East Side, not only does it make it difficult to thrive economically, but it’s almost like it’s designed in a way that almost convinces us that our role is just to survive,” Hanesworth said. “There are no new problems. There were no new problems after May 14th, it was just exacerbated problems.
As a poet, Hanesworth knew that words were the most accessible way to express not only her own thoughts about survival, but also those of her community members.
“There’s a poem called ‘We Were Cold’ where it’s like ‘We were hungry.’ There’s a stanza that’s like, “We screamed. Mom said, “Black people are always so loud.” We’re just trying to be seen, heard. We just want them to know we’re hungry. That we are cold. We were screaming.
“The Love That’s Here”
Buffalo has a robust arts community and cultural landscape. There are few parts of the city without murals, installations or uniquely designed buildings and homes. The arts community came forward immediately after May 14 to help with the process and begin the long journey of healing from the shooting.
“It feels almost natural for people and communities to look to the arts to navigate and process this experience that we’ve been through,” Gaines said.
The summer after the shooting, the Burchfield Penney Center for the Arts, where Gaines works as a curator, and the Buffalo Urban League collaborated to host an arts healing event on Jefferson Avenue. Other community groups and individuals have hosted similar events near Tops Market aimed at processing grief and tragedy through art.
Last month, Hanesworth hosted an open mic night at the Buffalo AKG Museum of Art, during which writers, poets and other literary artists could share their work with their community in a space once thought not for them. In addition to the panel discussion the exhibition’s creators have already held, they are planning future panel discussions, all of which aim to continue the dialogue around the tragedy while encouraging participants to work for change.
“It was an honor to be a part of this exhibit and shine a light on this community and the strength and love that is here,” Gaines said. “But also to continue to support the conversation about how we deal with white violence and racial inequality so that we make changes so that it doesn’t happen again.”
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