Even amid the concrete, asphalt, glass, and metal of the city, one can get a glimpse of the sacred. Born in Scotland, Robert Montgomery makes text-based art that takes over familiar-seeming surfaces with poetry. Made in lights or on billboards, his work creates a break in the noise of constant commercial advertising in the places where we might expect to find just that. The work has been previously shown in Seattle as part of the Seattle Art Fair in 2016 and at the Oklahoma Contemporary museum (December 2020–April 2021). It reads:

SQUARES AND SQUARES OF FLAME WITH MEMORY

INSIDE THEM REMEMBERING THE MAP UNDER THE 

FLOOD WATER/TWIST UP THE HEARTSONGS OF THE 

DEAD INTO EMPTY STADIUMS AND ALL THE STARS

PULLED DOWN NOW FOR REAL

Opposite the artwork is the Just Buffalo Literary Center and the Western New York Book Arts Center, while down the block is the Central Library of Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system. Joining these literary institutions, the work asks what we expect of cities as places where meaning, value, and culture are made. “My basic apprehension of cities is that they are magical sculptures that we live in,” the London-based Montgomery has said. Montgomery’s work creates the cracks where, if we let it, the magic can get in.