block club

By Ben Siegel Image of YA! Young Audiences Raps CD album cover. The streets of New Orleans are lined with inventors. They stroll the sidewalks and parkways, linger in bookstores and back alleys. They are scribes with horns for pens, blasting their sorrow and elation with syncopation. They create for the moment as much as [...]

By Ben Siegel Of the many patients at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Women’s and Children’s Hospital that Barbara Murak has worked with, one particular story resonates with her. It’s that of an elderly couple: a gentleman undergoing cancer treatment, and his doting wife who would sit by his side from 8 in the morning [...]

By Ben Siegel Walter Cronkite almost ruined Chattanooga, TN. In the summer of 1969, the CBS Evening News anchor declared it the “dirtiest city in America,” creating a public relations crisis. But he wasn’t wrong. Industrial plants in the iron-rich city produced an overwhelming amount of air pollution that was compounded by the city’s “inverted [...]

By Ben Siegel Photos courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery No conversation about community art is complete without mention of the biggest community gathering of art and artists Western New York has seen in recent decades: the regional art biennial known as Beyond/In Western New York. Originally held in the mid-1960s as simply, Western New York, the [...]