Light Work is pleased to announce our newest exhibition, Artist Work: CEPA Gallery at Thirty.

This exhibition pays tribute to the directors and co-directors who have made the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA) in Buffalo, NY, a respected venue for artists for over thirty years.

CEPA is one of the few alternative spaces that has always had a working artist as its director. Like many other alternative art spaces across the country, CEPA was formed in the early 1970s by a small group of artists with common goals. By combining activism with an entrepreneurial spirit, similar groups of like-minded artists sprang up all over the country to create an alternative to existing cultural institutions by placing the entire decision- making structure of the group in the hands of artists.

As a culture, the artists we have come to respect and admire are the ones who can interpret and describe with clarity their particular moment in history no matter where those questions lead or how far out of our comfort zone they take us. For the past thirty years CEPA has been led by artists with that same commitment and resolve. They have been visionaries, cultural workers, role models, rule breakers, deal makers, and agents of change — confirming that artists will always find innovative ways to work, and when artists run an organization, they truly do make a difference.

The artists on exhibition, in order of their involvement with CEPA Gallery, are Robert Muffoletto, Pierce Kamke, Kevin Noble, Ken Pelka, Tom Damrauer, Kathy High, Biff Henrich, Gary Nickard, Gail Nicholson, Robert Hirsch and Lawrence Brose.

Two other exhibitions are also on view at Light Work. Sketches from the Roof of the World by Stephen Mahan features Diana plastic camera portraits of Tibet's ancient past as it is confronted with modern reality. Newhouse Photography Annual, showcases work by nineteen undergraduate students majoring in photojournalism and illustration photography at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

Exhibition details