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Dyngus Day is a traditional Polish holiday that falls on the Monday after Easter; on this day, young boys are known to "slap" girls who catch their eye with pussywillows or squirt them with water guns in a courtship ritual called śmigus. Buffalo hosts the largest organized Dyngus Day celebration in the world — including Poland, where the festival has largely been forgotten. Since the mid-2000s, Buffalo's annual Dyngus Day celebration has once again been held in the traditional Polish neighborhood of Broadway-Fillmore at the grand old New York Central Terminal, a majestic old Art Deco train station that is yet another of Buffalo's architectural masterpieces that is undergoing extensive restoration. After the Dyngus Day Parade through the streets of Broadway-Fillmore opens the festivities, traditional Polish food and (even more popularly) drink are served in the old dining room, with polka bands attracting revelers to the dance floor. Celebrations are also held at St. Stanislaus, Bishop & Martyr Church (the so-called "Mother Church of Polonia"), the Adam Mickiewicz Library, and the many Polish-owned bars and taverns that continue to soldier on in the old neighborhood.
Easter Monday is the second day of Eastertide and a public holiday in more than 50 predominantly Christian countries. In Western Christianity it marks the second day of the Octave of Easter; in Eastern Christianity it marks the second day of Bright Week.
Buffalo art lovers were understandably bummed at the announcement that the Albright-Knox's main campus in the Elmwood Village would be closed for two and a half years for a major expansion project, and that the museum's permanent collection would be inaccessible during that time. But that blow was softened by the news that the fire would be kept burning with a temporary satellite gallery housed in a restored warehouse in the burgeoning Northland Corridor that would play host to a full calendar of special exhibitions and events for the duration of construction. In addition to visual arts, Albright-Knox Northland also hosts performances as well as a full range of art classes suitable for all ages and skill levels; check their website for details on those.
Artspace Buffalo is a homegrown artists' colony comprised of sixty loft apartments-cum-art studios that are home to some of the foremost emerging names in the Buffalo art community, as well as this expansive gallery space that displays works by Artspace residents and other artists from Buffalo and around the region. With a full schedule of exhibitions all year long, you never know quite what's going to be on at the Amber M. Dixon Gallery: works displayed there span a wide variety of media, from traditional formats like painting, sculpture and photography to offbeat exhibitions of collage and jewel art. There are even musical performances from time to time.
By most people's definition, what's housed in this repurposed Civil War-era convent on a residential street in the Fruit Belt is not an art gallery. Rather, Locust Street Art is best-known for offering free, professionally-taught art and photography lessons for children and adults; it's been doing so since 1959, when local art teacher Molly Bethel began giving informal painting lessons to neighborhood children in her living room. Locust Street Art has fostered the formative talents of many successful artists over the years, and has been recognized as a winner of the New York Governor's Award in 1985, as well as by the Harvard Graduate School of Education for excellence as an educational resource for economically disadvantaged communities. The best way to see the fruits of this effort are during the art shows and fundraisers Locust Street Art holds on an occasional basis, featuring the work of current students as well as other area artists.
Offering an experience that's somewhat but not completely different from the rest of Buffalo's roster of small art galleries, where the somewhat insular local scene is focused on to an almost solipsistic degree, the programming at this off-the-beaten-path exhibition space in Kaisertown comprises an interesting mix of both locally-based and nationally- and internationally-famous artists. A good example of the latter is the exhibition of Romero Britto sculptures that kicked off just a month after the gallery itself opened for business; as for the former... let's just say that if you've visited Canalside and duly fallen head over heels for Shark Girl, you'll be delighted to learn she also puts in frequent appearances in the works on display here, courtesy of Casey Riordan, her creator and Rabbit Hole part-owner.
The massive old factory building in Highland Park that was once Trico Plant #2, built in 1915 by the pioneering windshield wiper manufacturer and later used by Ford Motors to build airplanes during World War II, was reborn in 1991 as the Tri-Main Center. Intended as a mixed-use facility for offices and light industrial concerns, the building instead became an epicenter for the nascent East Side arts community, with studios, galleries, and cultural institutions snapping up a disproportionate share of the space. The prominent presence of the arts here is celebrated with Trimania, a huge biannual festival featuring live music, performances and art shows on all five floors of the building, as well as Fourth Fridays, a smaller monthly open house where studios and galleries display artists' works. The Tri-Main Center contains:
Located in Olmsted's Martin Luther King, Jr., Park, the Buffalo Museum of Science is in a lovely building built in 1929 by the prominent Buffalo architectural firm of Esenwein & Johnson. The emphasis of the Buffalo Museum of Science is on natural and physical sciences; items from its collection of more than 700,000 specimens and artifacts, encompassing almost every conceivable aspect of the anthropology, botany, entomology, mycology, paleontology, and zoology of Western New York and elsewhere, are on display in the Museum's galleries. The Buffalo Museum of Science also boasts interactive science studios and a National Geographic 3D Cinema and operates the Tifft Nature Preserve, 264 acres (105ha) of reclaimed industrial land in South Buffalo.