Buffalo Humanities Festival opens with textile artist Nick Cave

Internationally acclaimed textile artist and educator Nick Cave, celebrated for his wearable and audible sculptures known as “Soundsuits,” will be the spotlight speaker at the 2025 Buffalo Humanities Festival.

A two-day event on Sept 19-20, the Buffalo Humanities Festival is presented by UB’s Humanities Institute in cooperation with Canisius University, Daemen University, SUNY Buffalo State University and the Buffalo & Erie County Public Library. The festival is made possible with support from the College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, and Office of Inclusive Excellence.

Fabrication is this year’s theme.

Cave opens the festival with a screening of his short film “Gestalt,” followed by a panel discussion with local artists and scholars at 7 p.m. Sept. 19 at Asbury Hall, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo. Events on Sept. 20 will take place at various locations in the Buffalo & Erie County Central Library, 1 Lafayette Square, Buffalo.

The festival is free, but registration is required for Cave’s spotlight talk.

“Gestalt,” part of Cave’s “Soundsuit Series,” stands out as an experimental picture, created at an open studio in one improvisational take with an existing set from an earlier production.

His Soundsuits are body masks that conceal race, gender and class. They embody social justice by creating a non-judgmental space. Cave’s film deals with those very notions of boundaries, space, brutality and power, making “Gestalt” an ideal introduction to this year’s festival and its theme, according to Andrea Pitts, associate professor of comparative literature and interim executive director of the Humanities Institute (HI).

“Cave created the first Soundsuit in response to the police beating of Rodney King in the early 1990s,” Pitts explains. “Cave has described the police violence and uprisings that followed as a moment of shock that led him to consider his relationship to space and how he existed in the world as a Black artist.”

The festival plays on opposing meanings in the term fabrication by exploring both craft and concoction in the histories of art, industry and politics.

“Throughout the festival we play with, and on, that tension,” says Christina Milletti, associate professor of English and HI’s interim director. “Fabrication is a means to make, change and transform. It also offers us a lens to think about our current historical moment and the conflict between fact and fiction, information and misinformation. How we weave stories to entertain and to teach. But how we also spin yarns and lie.”

Events on day two (Sept. 20) of the festival will feature:

• Yotam Ophir, associate professor of communication, expands on ideas of misinformation by discussing the mechanisms that make people vulnerable to misinformation and help spread that fabrication into a dominant narrative.
• Robert Caldwell, assistant professor of Indigenous studies, shares his research on how maps not only designate but alter space, particularly with respect to Native representation.
• Alissa Ujie Diamond, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, will discuss the constructiveness of space through urban landscape design, ecology and the relationship of plants’ greenery to urban architecture.
• Ariel Nereson, associate professor of theatre and dance, will host a panel on dance and meaning-making.
• Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, visiting associate professor of art, will showcase her use of reclaimed textiles in her art.

A complete festival schedule is available online.

“Our hope is that the festival shines a light on how the humanities critically examine and directly respond to crucial issues,” says Milletti. “Our goal is to share these talks and art showcases with our communities and, above all, invite a conversation about them, which is why we shape the program as an annual accessible festival, not an academic conference.”

The festival is an opportunity to bring people together to show how artists and humanists have an impact on communities, Pitts says.

“These disciplines play with the limits of imagination,” Pitts notes. “Working with artists, writers, historians and others pushes us beyond what we thought was possible.

“We learn to imagine new worlds.”