The Buffalo AKG Art Museum has announced a landmark exhibition that will respond to the tragic slaying of ten members of Buffalo’s Black community on May 14, 2022. Before and After Again will feature new paintings, poetry, and prose by artists Julia Bottoms, Tiffany Gaines and Jillian Hanesworth, who previously served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Buffalo and was recently nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the “Choose Love” video with the Buffalo Bills. The exhibition will be on view free of admission charges in the Buffalo AKG’s M&T Bank Gallery from March 8 to September 30, 2024.

Since the May 14 racist mass shooting at the Tops Friendly Markets in the city’s East Side, which brought national attention to the active forces of racism and segregation that continue to plague Western New York, Bottoms, Gaines, and Hanesworth have engaged in intimate, profound dialogue with members of Buffalo’s Black community, including the families directly affected by the tragedy, to consider the humanity and resilience of this community in the face of systemic racism. The resulting artworks that will comprise the exhibition include portraiture, symbolically charged still life painting, a series of fourteen new poems, and written testaments to communal healing.