So the rest of the country applauded us this year. Again.

We don’t get to say that very often, but when it comes to the arts Buffalo consistently outranks similar cities in national polls rating arts and cultural destinations in the USA. In case you hadn’t heard, 2009 marks the second year that AmericanStyle magazine ranked our city among the Top 25 Arts Destinations, and gave us the number one spot among mid-sized cities, referring to Buffalo as a “rising giant” in 2008.

Peter Fowler

Now, with all due respect and with full awareness of the pot/kettle dynamic at work here, we hadn’t really heard much about AmericanStyle magazine before Buffalo’s illustrious mention within its pages. So to stoke the fire, here we must add that Buffalo also made the New York Times’ Travel List of 44 Places to Go in 2009, and while 44 is a whole lot more than 25, and we weren’t number one, this was an international list ranking Buffalo among exotic destinations from Iceland to Brazil. The article also noted the newly opened Burchfield-Penney Art Center as a point of particular interest.

Of course, the internationally renowned Albright-Knox Art Gallery has much to do with Buffalo’s status in the art world, as does the new Artspace Lofts project, as well as the aforementioned Burchfield-Penney. But from grassroots galleries like College Street Gallery (College and Allen) and Big Orbit (in the Essex Street Arts Complex), to so-called “stealth” galleries like Gateway Gallery (on Elmwood in Allentown) and Nobody’s Gallery (Elmwood and Forest), the local arts scene thrives without the grandiosity involved in making a special outing to one of the mammoth institutions that get written about in national newspapers.

This is not to say that the local arts scene doesn’t struggle. Artists and arts organizations in Buffalo struggle enormously—more, it seems, with each passing year. The theater community has been especially hard hit, as has funding for arts programs in the schools and for public art in general. Dance companies and studios like ALT Theater (Pierce-Arrow building) and Gallery 464 (on Amherst Street), poetry and spoken word venues such as Rust Belt and Talking Leaves bookstores, small theaters for film and performance like Hallwalls and Squeaky Wheel—it’s a not-so-small small miracle that their programs remain free or affordable, and that they continue to produce despite the lack of governmental and municipal support.

This is a tremendous civic issue, and one which this newspaper is devoted to drawing attention to—as anyone who looks at Artvoice surely knows. But the Best of Buffalo poll is (well, mostly) about positivity. So congratulations to all nominees, and thank you for all you do—all you stuggle to do—to make this city a more interesting and beautiful place, whether or not what you do puts us on any kind of national “map.”

—k. o’day

Best of Buffalo 2009 Nominations Mysteries of Buffalo • The Way We Eat • The Way We Drink Where We Shop • Our Kind of Music • These are Our People Our Culture, Great and Small • This is Our Town And the Winners Are...