“We use the term ‘artist’ loosely because of the connotations that follow that label,” said Aimee Buyea. “We actually like to use the word ‘participant.’”

Buyea is one of the co-creators of Not the Usual Suspects, a monthly attic art show hosted by Buyea and several of her fellow University at Buffalo students, who helped conceive and plan the event on the third floor of the house they share. (“As in, not the usual suspects in the art scene, get it?” Buyea explains.)

The next and last show of the semester is Friday, May 4, but not everyone knows about it, and it isn’t well publicized off-line. Fliers on Facebook, an online inter-school/region social networking community much like MySpace, show up fairly often in inboxes inviting people to the event.

Since the shows began, in last November of last year, their popularity has mushroomed. “We don’t have to do so much real-life, on-the-street promotion,” Buyea said. “The internet and just plain old buzz takes care of marketing for us.”

While they used to scramble about to get participants, Buyea and her roommates now receive plenty of requests to participate.

Some equipment for the shows comes from UB, where Buyea is a video artist and Media Studies major. Some of the faculty is supportive, she says, though none have been to a show yet.

“Again, it supports the idea we are fighting about amateur vs. professional space, and hopefully the ability to function in both,” she explained. Buyea and her fellow organizers created NTUS because they saw a need for an open and unassuming place for inexperienced artists and even “hobbyists” to exhibit their work in a non-elitist and non-critical environment.

“We felt we didn’t fully belong to their community,” she said of the art establishment at UB and around Buffalo. “We were outsiders, so instead of being apathetic and not supporting the local art scene, we created our own community.”

The original idea was to host an art show in a more formal public space, but to see if the idea would work, they used their attic as a test space. As it turned out, the attic setting became the embodiment of the soul of the show—unassuming, nonjudgmental and without hierarchy.

Not the Usual Suspects, as Buyea and company describe it, strives to provide a supportive and comfortable space for people to exhibit their creations.

Buffalo, as most know, isn’t short of art spaces. One of the more accepting galleries in the area is the College Street Art Gallery in Allentown. Michael Mulley, a photographer and the owner, has been providing affordable space for artists from schools around the area for almost a decade.

For a fee ranging from $75 to $100 per week, artists can rent out the space for a week or two at a time. Through the summer, Mulley might have two or even four or five artists display their work in a month at his gallery. Many are art students from Buffalo State College exhibiting work; some come from elsewhere.

When an artist wants to present at College Street, Mulley gives them some hoops to jump through, such as proposals and written explanations of their art. However, not every student wants to have an art show out in the real world, he said.

“Certain people want to go out on their own,” Mulley said.

Some of the best painters in Buffalo are short order cooks, he noted. “I think those are the best kind.”

At Buffalo State, a campus group known as the Visual Arts Board, is responsible for running a student gallery space, Gallery 234. The Visual Arts Board organizes trips to galleries and museums around the state, as well as the Art Walk on May 4, in Allentown. Because it is a student-run space, Gallery 234 affords an artist complete control over his or her show.

According to Tony Coppola and Christine LaBrake, the group’s president and vice president, respectively, there isn’t much of an art scene on Buffalo State’s campus. And the faculty, though helpful and encouraging, does not get as involved as some on the Visual Arts Board would like.

Although collaboration between art collectives, such as Buffalo State’s Visual Arts Board and Not the Usual Suspects, isn’t being pursued by either party, neither has it been ruled out. There is a clear interest and enthusiasm for what is happening, especially among individual artists; Not the Usual Suspects draws more people each month, to the point that the organizers are leery about giving out the show’s address in a newspaper. Which is too bad, because, Buyea explained, “You can only really understand the mission and energy of the show by attending.”