By Elmer Ploetz
(Photo above: © University at Buffalo | Douglas Levere)

Buffalo and Western New York have an incredible arts and culture scene with new people and new ventures starting every day. But the inverse of that is also true: We’re at the same time in a constant state of loss. That has become increasingly apparent to this writer over the past year as we’ve lost significant people and organizations. Hence, this is the first entry in Passages, where we will note those we have lost and their contributions.

If circumstances had been different, Steve Kurtz might have spent his artistic career out of the limelight, making fascinating but decidedly non-mainstream art based around biotechnolgoy. Kurtz, who was a co-founder of the Critical Art Ensemble and a former University at Buffalo art professor, died Wednesday.

But Kurtz became a household name, at least for awhile, in 2004, when he was investigated by the FBI, accused of “bioterrorism” and eventually charged with mail fraud and wire fraud for allegedly improperly acquiring non-pathogenic bacteria for his art projects.

It was a ludicrous situation from the start. It all began when Kurtz called authorities when he woke up to find that his wife, Hope, had died overnight. When police investigated, they noticed the biological equipment and small home lab and notified the FBI. Investigators in haz-mat suits descended on their home, Kurtz was detained and he was denied access to his home, manuscripts and equipment.

It turned out that Hope Kurtz had died of a congenital heart problem. The bacteria in question was non-pathogenic, the kind used in high school science labs. But the FBI persisted, eventually filing the fraud charges because Kurtz had gone outside of standard procedures to acquire the harmless bacteria. He was using it in a project destined for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

The legal case took four years to play out, with a judge eventually throwing out even the fraud charges as insufficient to even qualify as a crime.

Meanwhile, documentarian Lynn Hershmann Leeman made a 2007 film about the situation, “Strange Culture,” with Tilda Swinton as Hope Kurtz and Thomas Jay Ryan as Steve Kurtz because Kurtz wasn’t allowed to talk about the ongoing legal case.

Here is his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now after the case was resolved (the transcript is HERE):

The Trailer for “Strange Culture:

The controversy thrust Kurtz into the public spotlight, but it also threatened to overshadow his lifetime of work. He was a co-founder of the Critical Art Ensemble, which has defined itself as a “collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. … Formed in 1987, CAE’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism.” In a University at Buffalo story on his appointment as chair of the Department of Visual Studies, he was described as “the grandfather of interventionist art.”

For Kurtz, those intersections took him to making art critiquing society through the use of science. For example, the project he was working on with Hope when she died was intended was related to genetically modified agriculture. His “artistic interventions” revolved round electronic civil disobedience and bio art — working with live tissue, bacteria, living organisms using technologies such as genetic engineering and cloning.

Independent curator and art collector Gerald Mead was one of Kurtz’s students and his graduate assistant while completing his MFA at the University at Buffalo in 2006-08. He recalled, “Steve’s critical theory courses were among the most impactful experiences during my graduate study that continue to reverberate in my own work as an artist and a curator. He had an uncanny ability to make exceedingly complex concepts and theories understandable and relatable. It should be noted that his politically engaged art, interventionist practices and cultural research had an international reach in the art world and he will be remembered for the significance and caliber of that pioneering work.”  

RELATED MEDIA: 3 Critical Art Ensemble posters, all courtesy of the Gerald Mead Collection.

In an article on biotechnology as art in ArtNews, Kurtz described his approach this way: “If you tell the average person, ‘I want to talk to you about transgenics,’ they’re going to be bored. It’s not a burning public dialogue … But if you tell them, ‘I have this crippled E. coli bacteria that’s been altered with some human DNA, and I want to give it to you,’ now you can have a discussion.” 

It’s a wildly modern approach to art that extended beyond stereotypical static conceptions of art. Kurtz also wrote widely about it, authoring or co-authoring several books.

Here is a video of the livestream from the book launch of CAE’s most recent book, “Unreality and Its Discontents: The Struggle Against Christian Nationalism,” release during the summer of 2025.

While Kurtz’s moment in the spotlight was relatively brief his lasting impact may be seen more now in displays in museums and galleries and in projects such as the Coalesce: Center for Biological Arts at UB. His influence may just be beginning.

Elmer Ploetz is editor-in-chief of The Buffalo Hive.