CEPA Gallery at 30.

Buffalo, New York's internationally renowned CEPA Gallery (Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts) is currently celebrating its 30th anniversary with the show "CEPA Gallery at Thirty," which features work from the gallery's 11 past and present directors. The idea for this exhibition was that of Jeffrey Hoone, the director of Light Work in Syracuse, NY who subsequently proposed it to current CEPA director and artist Lawrence Brose. The CEPA directors present a number of mediums in the show including film, video, installation and traditional photography.

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For the past 30 years the nonprofit, artist-run gallery has been an important center in photography and film-related arts supporting emerging artists, research and education. In a recent interview the gallery's first director, Robert Muffoletto, a graduate of the Visual Studies Workshop, recalls how it all began. "As I was building and painting [the gallery] the most interesting thing happened; people started to stop and help. Some never left ... the roots of CEPA today were a result of the efforts of many." Ever since its humble beginnings in 1974, CEPA has continued to grow and gain recognition. CEPA is also relatively unique in that all of its directors through the years have been working artists. All have had similar political and artistic ideals and remained abreast of the changes in the contemporary art community. A majority of the directors also had ties to the State University of New York at Buffalo, which gave them a close relationship with academia. The organization changed management many times, and grew each time a new artist was in charge. Now, all of these artists are returning to their roots for a look back at CEPA's rich history.

Within three years of the gallery's inception, CEPA was featuring exhibitions from such noted artists as A. D. Coleman, Robert Heineken, Les Krims, Joan Lyons, Nathan Lyons, Susan Meiselas, Roger Mertin, Cindy Sherman and many more. In fact, Sherman's first public exhibition was at CEPA. In its early days, CEPA also produced publications by John Baldesarri, Edgar Heap of Birds, Richard Prince, Carrie Mae Weems and William Wegman, among others. For the past few years while continuing its tradition of drawing numerous noteworthy exhibitions, CEPA has been focusing on education and public art projects that have strengthened its relationship with the city of Buffalo. In 1999 Art Works!, an artists-in-residence program, was established and artists such as Sylvia de Swaan, Martin Kruck, Gary Cardot and John Craig Freeman have spent time in Buffalo producing unique bodies of work.

The gallery's revolving door of directors and co-directors after Muffoletto are all contributing to the exhibition: Pierce Kamke (1977), Kevin Noble (1978), Ken Pelka (1978-80), Tom Damrauer (1979-80), Kathy High (1980), Biff Henrich (1978-82), Gary Nickard (1982-88) and Gail Nicholson (1988-92). Robert Hirsch, the tenth director of CEPA and author of Seizing the Light: A History of Photography (1999) (as well as a frequent contributor to Afterimage) served as CEPA's Director from 1993-99 and says of the gallery, "Places like CEPA exist because people have the audacity to take chances and challenge accepted practices." Brose, a film and video artist, has been at the helm since 1999, after leaving a career in academia because he found that he was entrepreneurial at heart and preferred not to work for institutions.

Brose said that he wants to make CEPA a larger, more internationally known organization, while at the same time improving its reputation locally. Brose's current priorities lie in the gallery's artist workspace and education programs as well as continuing the gallery's tradition of seeking out innovative up-and-coming artists. Currently, Brose is interested in artists working together across disciplines.

Recently, as government funds have all but evaporated, the gallery has had to become more business-minded. Finding private funds from inside the community has been challenging, but there have been several corporate donations along with a highly successful gallery auction this past spring. Most interestingly, CEPA has begun an administrative collaboration in which resources such as office personnel, office space and grant writers are shared with Big Orbit Gallery and Just Buffalo Literary Center, two other nonprofit cultural organizations in Buffalo. The result is a "win-win" situation in which all three contributors are able to share resources and ideas, and as a result reduce costs. The collaboration has just received a $150,000 implementation grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation to execute the administrative collaboration. Brose pointed out that the idea of collaboration between cultural organizations is a seemingly unprecedented strategy and he is excited about the prospects for the gallery's future.

CEPA Gallery has remained one of the top artists organizations in New York State and if the past is any indication of the future, the gallery will continue to grow and diversify.

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see

Afterimage Volume 32, no. 1 (July/August 2004) for an interview with CEPA Director Lawrence Brose.