a space where it all connects

The primary colors of summer are stretched like a layer of latex over the dull material world. White, blue, green. The brassy mirror of the earth claps back at the sun, a three-note song. And then a fourth: Across the mowed field a child lifts a wooden mallet. Curly hair blowing in a stiff wind, blonde like the backs of the grass-blades, the boy stands beneath four metal disks suspended from an aluminum jungle gym. He punches with the stick in his fist–aiming for the big one, bigger than his own body–and releases a shimmering. It spreads outward–over the lawn, past a pair of practicing acrobats clipped to a sculpture of steel and blue gauze, across the turtle-shaped Tuscarora Peace Garden, until it plunges down into the loud Niagara Gorge.

“What is a natural sound?”

Sonia Clark squints against the sun. In a flowing blue jumpsuit, cropped hair dyed an earthy red, the Artpark president blends in a little with the landscape, especially here, in the shadows of the trees by the ridge. Her Moscow accent–muddied a bit by an international education, decades of travel, exposure to thousands of artists from every corner of the globe–feels at home here. She is a tree rooted to a rough cliff at the westernmost edge of New York.

“We are natural beings,” she says. “We created the technology, the distortion pedals. Who decides what is natural?”

She isn’t talking about the child and the gong, which still reverberates, but about the small wooden stage in a glade south of the sound installation, where performances from puppet shows to poetry readings to solo electric guitar take place almost daily. The informal garden setting, close to the parking lot and amid motley interactive sculpture (four upturned cement trapezoids, a house like a hollowed-out shallot), is ideal for experimental music, she says. So close to the parking lot it draws hikers, bird watchers, curious children. They might find a classical quartet in a shady glade, a masked magician stepping out from behind a sculpture, or a college student with an electric guitar and a dozen pedals weaving long, loud loops of sound.

Patrons wander in and out in the midst of these small performances; they stop for only a few minutes coming to or from a morning hike; they bring pets and kids who play, dance, even interact with the performers. This is what Artpark does best, Clark says–here, “everything is permitted.”

And there is something heady, flirty, even tipsy about all the art happening here. The acrobats are using someone else’s sculpture, installed here years before, to choreograph a site-specific performance that an unrelated dance troupe commissioned; someone else is making a film of the final product. Two summers ago, the community engagement program Artpark Bridges helped Western New Yorkers living with disabilities to share their sketches and ideas with the visual artists Rob Lynch and Matt SaGurney, who interpreted and painted these onto the lower parking lot. And this summer, a handful of UB percussion students received a stipend to come to Artpark every Sunday and, in Clark’s words, “do whatever.” Sometimes she finds them composing music. Sometimes they’re ambling, throwing a frisbee, chatting with picnickers. Sometimes she finds them playing chess.

Everything is permitted.

“Everything is permitted” might be Artpark’s credo. Its precise meaning continues to change. Today the 108 acres along the Niagara River Gorge host free ZZ Top Concerts, an annual fairy house festival, app-guided art walking tours, and a smoke dance to mark the Strawberry Moon. But a vein of uncompromising will runs deeper than the programming’s agrestal eclecticism. It begins with Buffalo’s Augustus and Peter Porter, who in 1905 purchased the American Falls at auction and became the first of many Frontier Prometheans to dream of stealing electric power from that colossal force–a cataract that indigenous tradition said to be the home of Hé-no, benevolent spirit of thunder and lightning.

The dream of renewable energy on the Niagara Frontier was like any other pursuit of power as an end in itself. Those who sought it scorned any law, right, tradition, or alternative objective that stood before their intention. In 1957, Congress allocated $800 million to create a new dam and generator complex to replace the crumbling Schoellkopf Power Stations. To accomplish this, state and federal authorities under the direction of Robert Moses seized 550 acres from the Tuscarora Reservation over the Tuscarora Nation’s protests, securing the title under eminent domain with a ruling from Earl Warren’s Supreme Court.

“Great nations, like great men, should keep their word,” Justice Black wrote in a lonely dissent. But everything is permitted in power’s name. The project proceeded, flooding a large part of the former reservation and taking fifty-two acres more as a dumping ground for uncounted cubic tons of earth and industrial debris. These acres beside the turquoise, oxygen-rich river–a site the Stauffer Chemical Company had been poisoning quietly since 1944–now became a local landmark: Lewistonites called it Spoils Pile, capital S, capital P. Few knew or cared to remember that the mounting debris and chemical waste covered a portage trail winding up from the gorge to a Hopewell burial ground that had been in continuous use for the last 2,000 years.

One of the most powerful men in Niagara County closely watched the Spoils Pile grow. Earl Brydges, a Lewiston resident and Republican operative, New York State Senator from 1949 to 1972, made frequent trips from the Frontier to Albany, driving nearly five hours east on US-20, later the I-90. The unsightly slag-heap on Lewiston’s doorstep bid him goodbye and welcomed him home. In the middle 60s, Brydges drove a group of representatives by this usual route. It was a prematurely frigid November; against the granite sky, mounded dolomite, bent iron, and broken concrete, the snowfall looked like ash. With a shiver even inside the heated, speeding sedan, one of the legislators called the site a “crematorium.”

The scenic drive was a classic exercise in vote-counting. In 1964, Brydges helped create the Niagara Frontier Performing Arts Center, a 2,400-seat theatre on the edge of the gorge (downwind from what was still an active industrial dumping site). The legislator had at first envisioned an unambitious schedule of summer historic pageants, a complement to the Shaw Festival across the river. The end-product was dramatically out of proportion to Brydges’s original intention, more closely resembling the performing arts center in Saratoga.

For nearly another decade, Brydges, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and the Republican majority directed public funds to the Frontier, designating 108 despoiled riverfront acres for the broad purpose of “public art.” This idea, Clark says today, became a “runaway train.” Historical pageants led to Shakespeare plays, which led to ballet, modern theatre, and youth performances. In 1974, “Artpark” opened with an artist’s residency program, funding visual artists from around the country and the world to live and create art on the still-toxic site. An almost-canceled opening season for the theatre drew 50,000 visitors to hear Gordon Lightfoot and Van Cliburn. During the day, tourists and locals alike drove through the slowly greening Spoils Pile and ogled like zoo-goers over artists living and working in a structure called the ArtEl, a partially roofed boardwalk with appendaged studios and living quarters. Beginning in 1976, a year after Brydges’s death, a project to sustainably reclaim the Spoils Pile would dump 3,000 truckloads of earth and compost over the waste, with bulldozers shaping it to catch and sustain vegetation, expanding the usable acreage for more artists and visitors.

According to an Artforum feature that year, some visitors complained of the “dullness” of watching artists at work. So the site’s administrators began a process of balancing a commitment to the avant-garde with concessions to the preferences of a comparatively parochial patronage: They added more arts-and-crafts, daytime performers, all-ages theatre troupes, a playground, and, of course, performances by popular folk, rock, and pop bands–all free.

The sculptor George Trakas built a metal trestle-structure that indifferent local spear-fishers used to reach the teeming river. The musician Laurie Anderson used a complex rig of amplifiers and walkie-talkies to attempt a call-and-response violin performance across the 700-foot cataract. (The gorge was a resonant bowl; the music, louder than expected and cross-reverberating endlessly, “really rocked your boat,” Anderson remembered.) Gene Davis illuminated an entire parking lot–white, green, blue, and yellow stripes covering 43,000 square feet. Few visiting families realized their station wagons were covering what was then the world’s largest painting. And the collective Ant Farm acquired a tail-finned 1968 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, filled it with contemporary artifacts (thirty suitcases holding, among other things, a Buffalo Bills pennant, a Playboy, cigarettes, liquor, beauty products, toys, personal diaries, and a four-by-six of Mao Zedong) and buried it under eight feet of earth. A sacred natural site shaped at the start of the century by the reckless permissions of the industrial and political classes became, by the late 70s, a state-funded play-ground where every imaginable artistic and recreational activity was happening all at once.

The Vista Cruiser still sleeps deep in the hill between Artpark’s Main Stage and Amphitheatre. In 2018, two Buffalo State professors–Lisa Marie Anselmi, an archeologist, and Kevin Williams, an astro-geologist–confirmed it, using radar to detect the Oldsmobile’s perimeter. If the windshield still holds under its layered encasement–a frame of cement, tar, used tires, eight feet of earth, and now a Coors Light-branded VIP pavilion–then every night when Artpark hosts a concert, a container of air from 1975 vibrates with the music, with 20,000 feet tapping and dancing, with the methodical setting up and tearing down of canvas chairs. 

This summer the Cruiser grooved to Jack White, Khruangbin, Trombone Shorty, and CVRCHES–and to older acts like Elvis Costello, Buddy Guy, and Earth, Wind & Fire, a band whose records might be in the capsule. Visitors, now in the second or even third generation of Western New Yorkers attending free summer concerts here, might not know that they’re also oblique participants in an avant-garde art experiment running for nearly half a century.

This kind of integration–a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert with an eccentric “architectural performance” project, all on a site of historic and spiritual importance and exceptional natural beauty–is what Artpark does best and what makes it unique among both public parks and art venues, two labels that feel far too small to apply to this place. Certainly integration, collision, and happy accidents are fundamental to Sonia Clark’s vision as president.

The beauty of Artpark is in the “totality,” she says–“a space where it all connects, concerts, trails, art, transformed nature.”

Clark came to Artpark in 2015, after a 20-year career in arts management and production that included a world tour with Meredith Monk, supporting major opera and philharmonic companies, producing her own shows at festivals in the U.S. and Europe, and bringing a troupe of 40 Russian clowns to Burning Man. She brings both a global frame of reference and a hard-earned savvy to Artpark’s artistic direction and to the management of relationships with patrons, politicians, sponsors, neighbors, artists, and indigenous communities, all of whom make unique and sometimes conflicting claims on the land and what happens here. 

“There’s been a belief that all art should be free,” Clark explains. “That’s built into this community… And it had better be Lynyrd Skynyrd,” she adds in parentheses. The state still supports Artpark, but not with the level of funding that established this community expectation nearly fifty years ago.

So Clark works to balance Artpark’s beauty, its pre-colonial history, its legacy as a home of the avant-garde, the interests of its current audience, and the interests of future audiences. State funding, corporate sponsorships, concessions, and individual donations keep the major summer concerts free. Ticketed events allow for a balanced seasonal lineup. And the rest of the calendar is crowded with events and activities like pottery and wine nights, guided gorge walks, outdoor community painting afternoons; a gamelan performance in the Emerald Grove; the Squonk Opera (a rock-opera group featuring massive puppet hands); the annual Fairy House Festival; the Strawberry Moon Festival; and a jazz composers workshop.

Some of these events have vanishingly niche appeal.

“Sometimes it’s just me and my dog and thirty-five composers,” Clark says. Artpark exists to serve artists as much as audiences. “We have to give artists permission to fail,” she says–and drawing a crowd isn’t always a priority.

But on many occasions, Clark has paired experimental artists with popular bands, cross-pollinating audiences and surprising visitors with art they wouldn’t otherwise have encountered. 

Last year, she brought Plasticiens Volants, a world-renowned street theatre troupe established 46 years ago in Toulouse, France, known for their massive, hand-painted inflatable creations and pageants on esoteric subjects. She paired the group with The Machine, a Pink Floyd cover band. Booked to open for Plasticiens Volants, the band had so much fun that they asked to play another set afterward. Most visitors came for The Machine, but were delighted by the unexpected, unimagined performance of towering inflatables. The most common feedback about the main event that week was “what a great intermission!”

All the better for Clark. She sees it as her job to orchestrate “happy accidents” like these. Now Plasticiens Volants has a rooted fanbase in Western New York; the group returned this year with a performance that immersed audiences in the mind of Leonardo DaVinci–not a halftime act.

There have been plenty of happy accidents over the past three years of managing an arts nonprofit and event space through a vexing and unpredictable pandemic. Clark and the Artpark team early on saw the pandemic and the cascading cancellations of gigs and tours as a challenge to “break Artpark assumptions.” Most obviously, local residents, desperate to be outdoors, rediscovered Artpark as a park. At the same time, Clark pushed into new areas of programming, forced to find acts and events that could accommodate outdoor, distanced crowds.  An early success was Alarm Will Sound’s performance of John Luther Adams’s 10,000 Birds, composed for distanced musicians and a freely moving audience. The lot art project through Artpark Bridges followed. Then Artpark debuted “Sonic Trails,” a series of site-reactive audio experiences accessible through an app and mapped to Artpark’s miles of trails, winding through woods, glens, fields, and rocky riverbanks. 

Only 9,867 people visited Artpark in 2020 for some 87 performances, almost all reimagined for distanced audiences. All numbers have rebounded and in some places exceeded prepandemic benchmarks: In 2022, 148,067 people attended Artpark for 271 events featuring 967 artists and their teams. Now touring acts have returned to pack the Main Stage and the Amphitheatre, patrons masked or unmasked at their preference. Concessions sales boomed and earned revenue set an all-time record. But Artpark won’t be what it was in 2019, any more than it can be what it was in 1975. Clark and the team are still leaning into the challenge to break assumptions, still feeling “the freedom to do things differently.”

Artpark hired its first Indigenous Arts Producer, Michelle-Elise Burnett, who is building connections and expanding programming to reconnect with the site’s indigenous history and share access and stewardship with these original communities. 

Sonic Trails has continued and expanded to include site-specific recordings by the Kronos Quartet, Rhiannon Giddens, and Yo-Yo Ma.

Fruitful collisions are happening on an ever-grander scale. This year’s Fairy House Festival brought not only families with small children, but cirque-lovers, cosplayers, and steampunks. “Crosswalk,” a one-night fashion show from the experimental theatre company Torn Space, took place on a fully restored “Niagara 1979,” Gene Davis’s lot painting, and featured the Kakekalanicks indigenous arts consulting group, nine local fashion designers, two bands, and a live cricket match by a team of Bengali immigrants.

Artpark is rediscovering and making accessible some of its earliest experimental art history, too. There are plans to restore Omega, a dizzying metal platform over the gorge that opened in 1980. And someday, Clark says, Artpark will unearth and unlock the Ant Farm Oldsmobile. 

Now that they’ve located the car, she explains, they still have to complete an environmental health study on the potential impact of disturbing the site. This underscores just how much has changed in forty-seven years: Artpark’s earliest resident artists recounted working around neon rainbows of chemical runoff whenever it rained. 

But Clark is committed to carrying Ant Farm’s vision to its belated conclusion–carefully.

“It will happen.” 

She says it with a confidence that only makes sense here, at Artpark. In a place where everything is permitted, much will be created, displaced, disbanded, forgotten, transformed–but nothing is ever really lost.

in print discover issue twenty four