The founding members of Squeaky Wheel, many of whom will return for the media arts center's 20th anniversary celebration in the coming week and a half.

Twenty years ago, out of the ashes of the fabled Media Study Buffalo, rolled the Squeaky Wheel, an oasis for independent media art which—like so many of the city’s under-the-mainstream cultural assets—often draws more attention and acclaim elsewhere than it does here at home.

That’s the way it goes: Some institutions turn 20 and look institutional—a little bit jowly and overfed, celebrated beyond reason, slower-moving and cautious. Squeaky Wheel’s constituent artists and programming, by contrast, remain as vibrant, politically audacious and chronically underfunded as they were in October 1986, in the cold dark years of Reagan and his administration’s strip-mining of the National Endowment for the Arts, which was soon mimicked at the state level. In that bleak environment, Squeaky Wheel offered shelter to artists exploring new media whose work few other institutions could or would support.

Squeaky Wheel screens film and video by artists, both local and not, whose work can’t be seen anywhere else in the region. Its monthly open screening nights are a forum in which young media artists—both the astonishingly good and the nail-bitingly, um, challenging—are able to test their work on open-minded but critical audiences. Squeaky Wheel provides access to facilities and equipment that emerging artists cannot afford on their own. It offers classes in film- and video-making, as well as seminars on such practical matters as grant-writing. Buffalo’s artists and its arts scene would be immeasurably poorer without all these things.

In the coming week and a half, the Burchfield-Penney Art Center commemorates 20 years of independent media art at Squeaky Wheel with a series of screenings and presentations of work by Squeaky Wheel founders and directors, many of whom will return to Buffalo for the occasion. These include Chris Hill, Julie Zando, Tony Conrad, Brian Springer, Armin Heurich, Robert Rayler and Eric Jensen.

The celebration runs from Thursday, November 2 to Saturday, November 11 and takes place at two locations: the Burchfield-Penney Art Center, in Buffalo State’s Rockwell Hall, at 1300 Elmwood Ave (burchfield-penney.org); and at the Squeaky Wheel’s relatively new digs—their third home in 20 years—at 712 Main Street. Call 884-7172 or visit Squeaky Wheel’s Web site (squeaky.org) to learn more.

At all these events look out for Squealer XX, a special 98-page edition of Squeaky Wheel’s media arts journal edited by Elizabeth Licata. This beautiful book provides a compelling history of Squeaky Wheel and the role it plays in Buffalo’s thriving cultural scene.