Flashback
15 years ago
Center for the Arts marks grand opening
The Center for the Arts, with its two-story atrium lobby and vaulted skylight, is a visual focal point of UB’s North Campus. Home to four theatres, including the 1,750-seat Mainstage, the Center for the Arts also houses two art galleries, video production and sound studios, dance studios, a foundry and a screening room, along with classrooms, faculty offices and studios for sculpture, painting, etching and printmaking.
The UB departments of Art, Media Study and Theatre and Dance moved into the Center for the Arts in September 1993, despite the fact that performance and exhibition areas were not yet complete. One year later, the center’s full opening marked the first time in UB history that all of the university’s arts departments were located in close proximity, creating new possibilities for collaborative ventures by students and faculty members.
A Grand Opening Festival offering numerous dance, theater, music and literary performances ran from Oct. 28-Nov. 20, 1994, and formally introduced the spectacular new Center for the Arts to UB and all of Western New York.
Festival audiences enjoyed performances by the Canadian Brass, the Amherst Saxophone Quartet, the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. The Department of Theatre and Dance staged “The Threepenny Opera,” and the Zodiaque Dance Company performed “Monument,” a tribute to the music of Miles Davis. Tanzfabrik, the Berlin Dance Company, performed a dance theater interpretation of “The Voice in the Closet,” a book authored by the late Raymond Federman, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the UB Department of English.
Prior to the grand opening celebration, President William R. Greiner observed that the Center for the Arts held “a lot of promise for Western New York artists and cultural institutions,” and predicted that it would become “the base for fuller, more effective cooperation between UB and the community we serve.”
At 15 and counting, the Center for the Arts continues to fulfill its promise by supporting a broad spectrum of campus and community artistic endeavors.
—Kathleen Quinlivan, University Libraries
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