For three years, a bright pink float called Camp Everything made its way through Buffalo’s cultural events, bringing puppets, performers, costumes, and a fantastical summer camp to the city’s Pride Festival and other community gatherings. Now, the project has found a new home inside the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Created by Buffalo artist Adam Weekley, Camp Everything is a multimedia installation inspired by his memories of 1980s summer camps, children’s television, horror, and the possibilities of imagination. The project premiered at the Buffalo Pride Festival in 2022 and continued making appearances through 2024.
The title Camp Everything works on several levels. It refers to the summer camp setting, but also the theatrical idea of “camp” – exaggeration, humor, artifice, and willingness to embrace the unexpected.
“There was a lot of symbolism in the work that I made,” said Weekley, adding “I think some stuff’s a little esoteric, but you get it pretty quickly.”
For Weekley, the project began with a desire to create something for young people at Pride.
“The most moving part of Pride, the years before I designed Camp Everything, was going and seeing groups of young people with their parents marching, which was not something I grew up seeing, he said. “I found that really moving. And I was also seeing that the audience for the parade was changing into families, to include a much wider portion of the population.”
His inspiration came from the children’s television and popular culture that shaped his childhood. “I immediately found myself gravitating to live-action children’s television shows I’d grown up on – anything by Jim Henson…All of the Sid and Marty Krofft stuff was terrifying but also made an impression on me…I grew up without access to galleries and museums, so for me, the art that made an early impression on me was mostly through television and comic books. Another thing I think about from the late ’70s and early ’80s was the amount of media around the idea of “camp” – whether it was a horror movie, like Friday the 13th, or a children’s program, there were all these versions of stories set in camps.”
Those influences helped Weekley develop a colorful and theatrical world filled with characters, costumes, puppets, and imagined creatures.
The Burchfield Penney initially approached Weekley to design a float that would give the museum a presence in the Pride parade. The idea grew into a larger collaborative project involving Torn Space Theater, performers, choreographers, fabricators, assistants, students, and others. “I got to do this project that was unlike anything I had ever done, maybe unlike anything I’ll ever do again, who knows. And it was really nice to have a kind of support system, both financial and logistical, behind me. This is my vision that I got to realize, but I had all of this help.”
At the Burchfield Penney, elements of the original float have been recontextualized as an immersive installation, alongside new work created specifically for the exhibition. “I immediately knew that I wanted that whole piece from the back of the float to be installed as if it were the set for a play that you would see in a theater camp,” said Weekley. “There’s the painted backdrop, which was based on a lot of paint-by-number images of forests that I was looking at.”
Two new series of drawings, Campfire and Scavenger Hunt, further expand the world of Camp Everything. “I kept them tied to this idea of the camp. One series is a series of five large-scale drawings that are called the ‘Campfire Series.’ They’re all invented stories, images that are based on invented ghost stories or stories you might tell around a campfire. So in those drawings, there’s a little bit of everything.”
The museum setting also allowed Weekley to rethink how the project could be experienced. “At the Burchfield, I had this unique opportunity to have much more control over things like lighting and setting,” he said, adding, “They put the installations in a space at the museum called ‘the project room’ that’s usually used for projection. It’s painted black. I’d never installed work in a space like that, but that was another thing that helped me go, ‘Okay, it needs to look like a stage at a theater camp, like a black box theater.’ Now, I want everything I do to be in those spaces, because the amount of drama you get from the lighting is so different.”
For Weekley, the exhibition is more than silliness or nostalgia. He hopes visitors spend time with the work and discover what lies beneath its bright colors and playful surface. “The feedback I’ve gotten from folks has been that it’s such a happy place to be, but also kind of like a reflective place…There is a silliness to it [but] I don’t think it’s just silly…You might be looking at something and thinking it’s very silly or quite cute. And then with a little more time with it, you start to understand that there’s something else underneath. I would love for anybody who goes in there to see it to hopefully have a smile on their face.”
Camp Everything is on view until October 26, 2026. More information can be found here.