Buffalo Creative Workshop Marks a New Era of Opportunity for City’s Arts Community

(EDITOR’S NOTE – Major news for Buffalo’s creative community! Indie publisher Band of Bards has teamed up with Vivere Studios to launch the Buffalo Creative Workshop, a sprawling 3,400 square-foot collaborative space offering artists of all mediums not only a place to work, but access to professional-grade tools and resources, gallery and retail space and regular programming including seminars and performance events. As mentioned on the Band of Bards website, “this project addresses a critical need in Western New York’s creative economy: the lack of accessible, inclusive infrastructure where emerging and mid-career creatives can grow not just as individuals, but as part of a sustainable community.” An official grand opening will take place Friday from 2 to 10 p.m. at 255 Great Arrow Ave., Suite 205, in Buffalo. A formal agenda will kick off at 5 p.m., including opening remarks, a consecration ceremony, DJ Billie Page, poetry and drag performances. Tickets are free and can be obtained HERE. 1120 Press recently caught up with Band of Bards co-founder Tim Smolinski who was kind enough to show us around the Workshop and discuss the inspiration for the space and its mission.)

1120PRESS: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. This is an amazing space. Can you tell us about the vision here and how everything will work?

TIM SMOLINSKI: I'll give you two answers. One of them is the more practical one:

This is going to be a gathering place for any type of creative to come and do the work that they want to be doing at an affordable price. It's pay what you can. So literally, between pay what you can to work here and the community resources that we have, somebody can have no money, no art supplies of their own, show up and make something cool. It’s a place that will be welcoming to people from all walks of creativity. It’s not just for poets, not just for illustrators, not just for painters, not just for photographers. It’s for everybody. Everybody can come here and gather, learn from each other and grow together.

Now, for the more high-minded answer:

Kurt Vonnegut talked a lot about the disease of loneliness. And when people would ask him what’s the best thing people could do, he would always say ‘the boldest thing that young people could be doing is creating strong communities.’ So, this is my effort, and I think the rest of us — Sinclair Davis and the others from Vivere Studios — would agree. This is us doing what we can to build a strong community here.

1120: So, what are the capabilities the Workshop provides?

TS: So, as you can see, we have all this crazy-ass machinery. A lot of it stems from us being pissed off about how whenever we needed to buy merch, we we're either buying exactly what we needed and paying so much per unit that we couldn’t make money; or we we're buying at a large enough quantity to get more-favorable pricing per unit, but then we would have so much merch left over that in the grand scheme of things we we’re still losing money. So, this is us, essentially — and I’m going to use a fancy business school term here — trying to be vertically integrated. Or to put it in our terms: This is authentic DIY.

This is us not just being the publishing offices, but also the light manufacturing to make our own stuff and then also have the retail space to sell it. And in some respect, we'd be able to do distribution too. One of the things I love about the print press that Kaneka Minolta has, it can sync to our website. So, somebody could go online, buy a book, and it would go to the printer and spit it right out — basically print on demand, but at a high quality, and then it could be shipped right out to wherever it needs to go.

Another cool aspect here too is that we’re going to able to display people's work as well We’ve got all this wall space. There’s no end to the space in here

1120: How will this work on the user’s end? Let’s say a creative wants to use the space. How do they go about it?

TS: Ok, so someone waltzes in, and they see me sitting over there at the desk. They say they have some art they’d like to work on. We might ask for, say, a $10 donation for the entire day or simply ‘pay what you can.’  If you can't afford $10, no problem. Two bucks? Cool. Sit down, make something and go sell it. If you don't have the space in your home or your apartment, and you want or need access to either large or more professional-grade equipment and supplies, that’s where we come in. We've got it here.

1120: So, really, you’re not just offering space, but the Workshop is also helping creatives overcome challenges.

TS: Right. And it’s not only access to professional-grade tools to enable artists to create something of high quality. Creatives often face financial pressures, like not being able to do and produce their work at a price point that it is sustainable for them so that they're able to make enough money to keep making more art and selling it at a price that's

reasonable for their customers.

1120: Have you determined what the hours here will be?

TS: We're kicking that around right now. We're starting with Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm. We're planning on having a couple days flexed too, opening either a little bit later or earlier, depending on the feedback we get. Maybe people will want to come in earlier, or maybe people will want some specific days during the week in which they are allowed to work here later in the evening. We’ll see. So, Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. is where we’re starting, but it’s all flexible.

1120: Thank you so much for taking time from your schedule to speak with us. Given the size and range of Buffalo’s creative community, we can only imagine this is a space that’s going to generate a lot of interest. Are you at all concerned that too many people are going to respond?

TS: Well, that’s not a bad problem to have. If I have to start telling people, ‘I'm sorry, we just don't have the space or room on the calendar,’ that's a lot better problem to have than being in a situation where we’re like, ‘Man, we really need to book something’ because nobody’s interested. So far, it seems like every single creative I speak with, regardless of their medium, they’re all saying the same thing: We want this. There’s a need.

(Learn more about the Buffalo Creative Workshop HERE)