Buffalo, NY – Today the Albright-Knox’s Public Art Initiative announced an artist residency in Springville, New York, for Bryan Metzdorf (American, born 1982) at the Springville Center for the Arts.

Bryan Metzdorf is an artist and commercial designer currently living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has conceived and executed immersive, experimental retail and commercial spaces for well-known brands across the country, including working as a Senior Display Artist for Urban Outfitters, where he was charged with designing and prototyping the aesthetic language of the retailer from floor to ceiling. As an artist, Metzdorf’s practice shares roots with his professional work but results in dynamic abstract geometric compositions that range beyond pure design aesthetics. He is heavily inspired by built environments around him, often breaking large structures down into smaller forms, which he then recontextualizes into new compositions resulting in his collages, illustrations, and paintings. 

With the Albright-Knox’s continued efforts to extend its reach beyond the City of Buffalo and bring public art into the greater Western New York community, the Public Art Initiative has developed an opportunity that presents an ideal collaboration with the Springville Center for the Arts (SCA). SCA is based in a series of buildings in the heart of Springville and has worked diligently on reinvigorating the town’s Main Street through creative opportunities and programming. SCA owns and operates a gallery and theatre in a former church, a workspace and children’s program in a former storefront, and recently revitalized an abandoned building into an arts café to help generate funding for future programs. 

In an effort to continue programming during the uncertainty of 2020, SCA and the Public Art Initiative have developed a partnership and residency program concept. SCA will provide Metzdorf with housing, workspace, and supporting staff; it hopes to engage schoolchildren and host an open-air artist talk; and it will produce a small public mural in Springville as a result of the residency in September 2020. Albright-Knox staff will help in the execution of the mural and facilitate the artist talk. The three-week residency and partnership will allow the Public Art Initiative to engage a new and vital audience in Erie County, form a new partnership with a community program, and produce work in a location whose distance from Buffalo had previously posed logistical production issues.

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The Albright-Knox’s Public Art Initiative is an innovative partnership between the museum and the County of Erie established in 2013 to enhance our shared sense of place and cultural identity in the urban and suburban landscapes of Western New York. The City of Buffalo joined the partnership in 2014. The goal of the initiative is to create spaces of dialogue where diverse communities have the ability to socially engage with, actively respond to, and cooperatively produce great public art that is capable of empowering individuals, creating stronger neighborhoods, and establishing Western New York as a critical cultural center.

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