Sarah Maurer

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• Posted Coming together on the East Side to Buffalo Rising
  It was encouraging to see more positive media buzz surrounding those living and working in East Side neighborhoods last week. The News ran a profile on Dan Ash and Alex Stevens, members of the Farmer Pirates cooperative who are steadily growing a local food movement. They also interviewed Mark and Janice Stevens of Wilson Street Farm on their role as urban farming pioneers. Buffalo Custom Art Studio was also featured here and on YNN after completing an eye-catching mural on a dilapidated barn on Clinton Street. Some of these up-and-coming projects are solo endeavors, but most of them are built with...
• Posted The Foundry's Creative Community Series: Buffalo Lab to Buffalo Rising
  There's a great deal of diversity in what the residents at The Foundry bring to the table. You have metalworkers, soap-makers, bicycle builders, woodworkers--so many artisans creating independently while functioning as integral parts of a bigger vision.While most of the residents adopted the collaborative approach when they joined The Foundry, the technology enthusiasts from Buffalo Lab are bringing more of the community element in with them. It's almost as if Buffalo Lab joined up as The Foundry's resident microcosm. This group is a hackerspace/makerspace, which they define as "a combination of a community workshop and a social/educational venue. It allows people...
• Posted PUSH Focuses on Small Businesses and Non-profits to Buffalo Rising
  Since its launch in January of 2012, PUSH Buffalo's community-based energy efficiency program, PUSH Green, has been working to implement Green Jobs, Green New York in the city of Buffalo. The statewide initiative aims to strengthen communities by providing funding for energy assessments, upgrades and clean energy workforce development. What began with a residential focus with PUSH Green's Friends and Neighbors program has now expanded with the recent launch of a new program geared toward small businesses and non-profits. The PUSH Green Building Retrofit Program's mission is to help provide assessments and energy efficiency upgrades to small businesses and non-profits in...
• Posted The Foundry's Creative Community Series: Nickel City Cycles to Buffalo Rising
  The variety of creative entrepreneurs planting their flags at the Foundry keeps on growing. Nestled in a corner adjacent to the resident metalworkers, you'll find Nickel City Cycles--Buffalo's only custom bicycle builders. For the past three months, partners Patrick Meszler (lead image) and Nathan Klumpp (below) have been honing their frame design and production skills. Meszler works full-time at Campus Wheelworks and has been professionally trained in fitting bikes. "I've been racing bikes and mountain bikes and wrenching since I was 14 years old, so I've been involved in the cycling world for a long time," he said.Experience has taught Meszler...
• Posted Honey Bee Festival to Buffalo Rising
  The Botanical Gardens will be hosting a festival on Saturday, April 27 to celebrate the honey bee and promote awareness of its critical role in our food systems. The Honey Bee Festival will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and will feature several opportunities to learn more about the important work of these little pollinators from the experts.For the past several years, beekeepers across North America have noticed an increase in the annual die-off of honey bees, due to a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CDC). In these situations, the adult bees are abandoning the queen bees and...
• Posted None Like You, We Care Outreach Strengthens East Side Community to Buffalo Rising
  Anyone who has met Elizabeth Triggs, founder of None Like You, We Care Outreach, will likely tell you the woman is a force to be reckoned with. Triggs has dedicated the last twenty years to improving life for members of the East Side community. And when she told me that she's been "slowing down" lately, I had a hard time believing her.Triggs started her organization back in 1992 to help members of her community get the resources they needed. "We got the idea from working with a lot of agencies and they had so much red tape--you had to wait...
• Commented on Boston Marathon Solidarity Run
  You and Who will be designing t-shirts for this event to raise additional funds for the cause. You can also get updates on the run via Twitter (#SolidarityRun)...
• Posted The Foundry's Creative Community Series: Azariah's Innocence to Buffalo Rising
  One of the newest entrepreneurs to set up shop at The Foundry is probably also its youngest resident yet. Twelve year-old Zandra Azariah Cunningham started her very own business specializing in homemade, all-natural bath and body products in early 2010. With the help of her mother and right-hand woman, Tamara Lewis-Cunningham, she has expanded her business and now has a production space to call her own at The Foundry. Zandra's business, Azariah's Innocence, sprouted when she joined the KidzBiz training program offered by the Small Business Development Center at Buffalo State College (see more). At the age of nine, she...
• Posted PUSH Blue to Buffalo Rising
  Just in time for those spring showers, PUSH Buffalo and Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper have launched a collaborative initiative to promote stormwater management, green infrastructure and green jobs creation in the West Side's Green Development Zone.The new program, PUSH Blue, will capitalize on the organization's land bank of vacant lots to address some of the more critical environmental issues caused by combined sewer overflow. Over the next two years, PUSH Blue will transform 25 different sites within the GDZ into green infrastructure.  "When PUSH started, members identified vacant lots as one of their primary areas of concern in the neighborhood," said...
• Posted Fragments: Tonight to Buffalo Rising
  Tonight, four local artists will be stepping out of the city's traditional gallery spaces and releasing their creative energy onto the walls of one of Buffalo's more industrial venues. Chuck Tingley, Max Collins, Matt Grote (a.k.a. OGRE), and Thomas Webb will be hosting "Fragments"--a collaborative exhibition of their individual work--at Hi-Temp Fabrication, located in The Cobblestone District. "I would consider what we're doing kind of like a pop-up show," Tingley said. "I would like to see more of those happening with all the spaces and artists we have." Taking the road less traveled led them to discover the space at Hi-Temp...
• Posted The Foundry's Creative Community Series: Sarah Fonzi of S&G Studios to Buffalo Rising
  If I had first met Sarah Fonzi in her street clothes, I probably never would have guessed that this petite young artist made her living as a metalworker. But last week when she gave me a tour of her new workspace at The Foundry--where she spends the majority of her waking hours--she couldn't have looked more at home."I took a course while I was in college and fell in love with it. Working with metal gives you a lot of diversity--you can create so many things with welding and casting," Fonzi said. A Buffalo native, Fonzi attended the Savannah College...
• Posted Eight Buffalo Spirits, LLC: Our First Post-Prohibition Distillery to Buffalo Rising
  Housed within a region flush with established wineries and once again home to a craft brewing industry that's gaining force every day, Buffalo certainly holds her own when it comes to satisfying local demand for beverages of the stronger persuasion. But until recently, one sector of local booze production remained untapped. That's right, friends--we're talking about liquor. Then we overheard last spring that partners Niko Georgiadis, Chad Vosseller, Jon Mirro and Thomas Jablonski had made their move, formally establishing Eight Buffalo Spirits, LLC--the first distillery to open here in Buffalo since the Prohibition Era. Now officially licensed as distillers, they're ready to...
• Posted Resurrection: Here's to four years at 464 to Buffalo Rising
  Stories of resurgence and survival seem to be the standard for life here in the Queen City. Four years ago, Marcus Wise and a handful of emerging artists started their own chapter in that history of revival, and their momentum is still running strong.This Friday, February 15, 464 Gallery will celebrate another year of life with its fourth anniversary exhibit opening: Resurrection. The evening will be a celebration of four years of enduring and inspiring change on Amherst Street and in Buffalo's ever-expanding cultural scene. It all began with a simple website and a desire to bring recognition to emerging...
• Posted A closer look at The Fargo House: A Center for Urban Imagination to Buffalo Rising
  A new type of urban revitalization is taking place inside the West Side home of Dennis Maher. The local artist and professor of architecture at the UB School of Architecture and Urban Planning has turned his home, now known as "The Fargo House," into a creative space where strategically placed found objects blur the barriers between the home and the city that surrounds it.Maher rescued the Fargo Avenue house from demolition in 2010. Since that time, he has been transforming it into a work of art, allowing his imagination to unfold across every surface of the home's interior. Maher's work...
• Posted Doin' Dilla with Deep Thinka Records to Buffalo Rising
  Deep Thinka Records is keeping the positive momentum rolling with its BEING charity fundraiser series, with a third event lined up for February 8 at Duke's Bohemian Grove Bar. After raising a mic to the legacies of the Notorious B.I.G. and the Beastie Boys' Adam "MCA" Yauch, the local producers have decided to pay homage to the late J Dilla in the next installation.The Being Beastie event held in early September pulled in close to $4,500 in donations to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of America. The cause was one that hit close to home for DTR's Damon Bodine,...
• Posted A Gift of Renewable Energy, From Buffalo to Haiti to Buffalo Rising
  One of Buffalo's non-profit organizations recently made life much brighter for many schoolchildren and villagers living on a small island off the coast of Haiti. The Solar Liberty Foundation donated and installed a 4-kilowatt solar power system on the roof of the Grace School and Orphanage, located in the village of Grann Plaine, Île-à-Vache, Haiti. For the residents of Grann Plaine, this contribution was life changing. Before the system was installed, the school, orphanage and surrounding village did not have any source of power whatsoever. With this new sustainable power source, students, teachers and villagers will now have access to lighting,...
• Posted Party at The Vault to Benefit The Senase Project to Buffalo Rising
  While we usually focus on the people doing positive things here in our city, we have to give some recognition to our local visionaries who are helping others rise in places around the globe.In the fall of 2010, Williamsville native Chris Toone and several other college students participated in a semester at sea program, traveling to 37 different countries and learning about their cultures. One of those countries was Ghana. Toone had contacted their guide, Fred Benneh, via Facebook and had asked him to show them the real side of Ghana. Benneh took the group of seven students through the...
• Posted Artfarms: Progress Update & Call For Creative Minds to Buffalo Rising
  With the year winding down, many of us here in the Queen City begin to slow our pace and prepare to settle in for winter. For the organizers of Artfarms, however, there is plenty of work to be done between now and the coming spring. In order to get the project off and running, they could use a little help from a handful of local design-savvy individuals. Earlier this year, BR sat down with Artfarms director David Lagé to get the details on his plan to breathe a little creative life into the city's East Side (see here). His goal is...
• Posted Rich Products Makes Hometown Investment to Buffalo Rising
  Earlier this week, Rich Products announced that it plans to invest $18.5 million in an expansion project at its Niagara Street headquarters that will bring major improvements to its customer innovation center and could potentially lead to future growth in our region. According to CEO William Gisel, the state-of-the-art upgrades will make the customer innovation center here in Buffalo the focal point for Rich's customers from around the world. This facility is a site dedicated to collaboration between Rich and its clients from various restaurants and food companies who are working on product development. Gisel says the upgrades will incorporate culinary...
• Posted Nickel City Firing Line Finale to Buffalo Rising
  Food lovers and fans of the Food Network series "Chopped" will have one more opportunity to check out the live, local version produced by Feed Your Soul. The third and final competition in the Nickel City Firing Line series will take place this Sunday, Dec. 2 at Artisan Kitchens & Baths. Chefs Teddy Bryant of Lloyd Taco Truck and D.J. Cook of Sample restaurant will face-off in the kitchen before a live audience to see who will be chosen the Firing Line Champion.If you missed out on the first two rounds of the series, you can check out video highlights...
• Posted Friends and Neighbors for Sustainability to Buffalo Rising
  PUSH Green, a community-based energy efficiency program funded by PUSH Buffalo and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is working full-steam ahead on expanding its Friends and Neighbors program throughout the city. This program encourages homeowners to band together with others in their neighborhood in seeking energy efficient upgrades, thus creating a community-wide movement towards sustainable housing.  "We designed PUSH Green Friends and Neighbors because we wanted to tackle the big issues that energy efficiency could, such as lowering energy burdens, creating jobs and reducing our carbon footprint," said Kate Howard, program manager at PUSH Green. "We...
• Posted ArtForms: Local Artists Join Fight Against Cancer to Buffalo Rising
  In a city flush with active and talented artists, there's plenty of opportunity to build upon our thriving cultural scene to do some good. Queen City Prints is doing just that, joining forces with The American Cancer Society and MassMutual once again in presenting their second annual ArtForms event, which will be hosted at the Buffalo Arts Studio on Friday, November 9. "When I started Queen City Prints just over a year ago, one of my main goals was to do something positive, not only for the artists, but the area," said owner Chris Reilley. "I feel it is important to give...
• Posted "Queen City: A Rustbelt Serenade" Premieres Next Month to Buffalo Rising
  I recently sat down with local filmmaker Peter McGennis at his office on Elmwood Avenue and he let me preview a few clips from his latest feature film, "Queen City"--a musical tribute to the hometown that has become his muse. As he played some tracks from the score he composed for the film--thirteen original songs in all, a labor of love spanning three years of dedication--a smile slowly crept across my face as note after bluesy note hit my ears and my spirit simultaneously, absolutely dripping with soul. It was just so very...Buffalo. The second in a series of Buffalo-based films,...
• Posted ELAB Creative Conversation Puts Spotlight On Artistic Diversity to Buffalo Rising
  This weekend, the members of Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo (ELAB) will be taking things beyond the visual realm with their second annual Creative Conversation event: Emergence. Having gotten their feet wet last year with Urban Alchemy, the group will be moving in a new direction at this year's event, focusing on the diversity of the city's growing flock of emerging artists. "A big goal of mine was to open things up to all disciplines of art: theater, music, performance, poetry, spoken word, etc.--not just visual artists," said Rich Tomasello of ELAB. "I tried to include as many emerging artists...
• Posted Let Them Eat Cupcakes! to Buffalo Rising
  On November 4, three of Buffalo's cupcake gurus will face off in the Artisan Kitchens and Baths kitchen showroom to see who will take home the title in Feed Your Soul's latest baking and decorating competition: The Nickel City Cupcake Challenge. "In Buffalo, cupcakes have really taken off in the last few years," said Christa Glennie Seychew, owner of Feed Your Soul. "There are so many independent bakeries who are choosing to specialize in this sweet treat that we thought it would be fun to showcase them."Justina Adams of The Buffalo Cakery, Genevieve Perryman of Cupcake Orchard, and Kelly Audette of...
• Posted PUSHing Forward to Buffalo Rising
  To say it was a busy summer in PUSH Buffalo's Green Development Zone would be an understatement. Projects of every size were launched, including the opening of their 14th Street community garden, construction of a state-of-the-art rain garden on Chenango Street, and completion of major renovations on two formerly vacant, Victorian-era style buildings at 460 and 398 Massachusetts Ave. Renovations at their third property, located at 397 Massachusetts Ave. (lead image) are slated for completion within the coming weeks. And on top of all of the things taking shape within the neighborhood, PUSH is also breaking ground in the greater...
• Posted Hispanic Heritage Month Kicks Off Friday to Buffalo Rising
  In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson initiated the observation of Hispanic Heritage Week to recognize the contributions of the Hispanic-American community and to inspire cultural awareness. A decade later, President Ronald Reagan expanded the observance to span an entire month, with celebrations beginning on Sept. 15--the anniversary of independence of five Latin American countries. In 1821, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua all declared their independence. The anniversaries for Mexican and Chilean independence also follow within days (Sept. 16 and 18). Here in Western New York, the tradition of celebrating this historic month continues. The Hispanic Heritage Council of WNY...
• Posted U.S. Brig Niagara to visit Canalside to Buffalo Rising
  Navy week is upon us here in Buffalo, and the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation and Buffalo Place, Inc. will be welcoming the U.S. Brig Niagara to Canalside as part of the naval celebration and to also commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812. The Brig Niagara is a reproduction of the relief flagship of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry that was part of a fleet of nine small ships that defeated a British squadron of six in the Battle of Lake Erie on Sept. 10, 1813. This 198-foot long vessel was launched in 1988 and finished in 1990. The ship...
• Posted ELAB Creative Conversation: Call for Work to Buffalo Rising
  Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo (ELAB) will be hosting their second annual Creative Conversation on Saturday, October 13 at the Buffalo Arts Studio. This event is ELAB's biggest function of the year and will support the organization's mission to bring exposure to emerging artists in the city, while providing an evening of entertainment for guests. "This year's theme of 'Emergence' is twofold. It not only acknowledges the emergence of ELAB, but it also references the up-and-coming emerging artist scene in the city of Buffalo," said Rich Tomasello of ELAB. "We would like all art forms to be recognized and given...
• Posted Sold Out - American Grain: Bringing New Life to Silo City to Buffalo Rising
  M&M Productions and Torn Space Theater's "American Grain," has officially sold out. The event will bring the talent of local contemporary artists to a unique performance venue--the haunting Marine A complex grain elevator located in the heart of Silo City, and those lucky enough to purchase tickets early on are in for a treat. "One of the great iconic buildings in a city filled with them, Marine A, is taking on new life as a venue for the performing arts," said Mark Goldman of M&M Productions. "The idea emerged from my notion of integrating Buffalo's rich architectural tradition with its rich...