arts & sciences: dr. fransisco hernandez ilizaliturri
Buffalo Art Movement–“BAM!” as its comic book-inspired logo shouts–occupies a second story suite in the historic Pierce Arrow complex, just south of Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York. When I visited the gallery in June of this year, I was surprised by its contrast to the rather dull industrial complex-turned-office building stairwells and hallways that led me to it.
The walls of the lobby, which might be the kind of nondescript reception area you’d expect at a corporate office if not for its decor, are lined with original paintings, large canvases, mostly portraits, a few landscapes and colorful abstracts.
These are pieces from the personal collection of Buffalo Art Movement founder Dr. Francisco J. Hernandez-Ilizaliturri.
Dr. Hernandez-Ilizaliturri, best known as Paco, has filled not only the entryway’s walls but also those of his office with the artwork he’s amassed over the last two decades–and he tells me this is just a fraction of it.
It was the problem of space for his ever-growing collection that first planted the idea for Buffalo Art Movement in Paco’s mind. During a conversation with an artist friend, he mentioned that he was looking for somewhere to store what he didn’t have room to display. The ensuing conversation about the need for spaces where creators, collectors, and the general public could come together around the arts led to a question, posed to Paco: “Why don’t you open a gallery?”
He left that meeting with an idea, and it wasn’t long before he’d turned it into a reality.
“I partnered with a friend, we found the location, and it took us six months to put it all together,” he says. “Our first show was in December 2020.”
With the opening of Buffalo Art Movement, Paco added “Founder” to an already long list of titles. He’s 25 years into an accomplished medical career at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center–not so far down the road from Buffalo Art Movement–where he serves as Chief of the Lymphoma Section, Head of the Lymphoma Translational Research Lab, and Professor of Medicine.
Paco grew up in Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, where as a child he loved fashion and art and collected books. He was born into a family of physicians, and found himself torn after graduating from high school between his love of all things creative and his interest in pursuing medicine.
He decided to attend medical school at the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, where he thrived in the program’s problem-based learning framework, which gave him the opportunity to exercise his creative instincts within the context of medicine.
“When I started studying medicine, I enjoyed it so much,” he says. “I looked at the creative side of medicine, understanding how the body works and how it doesn’t, and going beyond what you see in the textbooks.”
In the free time he found or made as full-time medical student, Paco also pursued his interest in the arts, studying art history. He was particularly inspired by movements of the 20th century, the way art has always responded to, marked, and influenced cultural change around the world.
He graduated from Tecnologico de Monterrey in 1995 with a medical degree and a deepened appreciation for the arts. In the late 1990s, he moved to Buffalo, where he completed his residency at the University at Buffalo and then a medical oncology fellowship at Roswell Park, where he’s been ever since.
It was during those early years after medical school that Paco began to build his art collection.
Paco is committed to creating a community space at Buffalo Art Movement, where aspiring creators and established artists can develop and share their work, and a space that invites serious collectors and casual newcomers alike to engage with the arts.
The gallery’s main showroom is a huge, echoing industrial space, all polished concrete floors, brick walls painted white, exposed pipes and ducts, the summer afternoon’s bright natural light pouring in from high windows.
As Paco leads me around the gallery, he introduces the three artists participating in the May and June 2022 exhibition: Julia Bottoms, Max Collins, and Fritz Proctor. He speaks not only about each artist’s work, but also about their connections to Buffalo – Bottoms and Collins are both currently based in Buffalo, and Proctor studied at the University at Buffalo before moving to Boston, where he’s based today.
This is another key component of the Buffalo Art Movement mission–to maintain an emphasis on diverse artists with a connection to Western New York. The gallery shows two to three artists at a time, artists who were born or raised in the region, studied at a local university, or are currently living and working in the area.
The artists are given full creative control over their exhibitions; they are invited to curate their own shows, the only restraints imposed by the physical space available.
Paco believes in creative freedom as the means by which an artist can develop and evolve their approach. He is of the opinion that what makes “good art” isn’t the monetary value a piece or an artist’s name has earned from any elite group of collectors and appraisers–it’s about how an artist grows into the style for which they’re known.
He hopes to cultivate this artistic development in local artists who haven’t yet reached the parts of their careers where they’re showing in solo exhibitions, working full time in their studios, and being selected for residencies.
“We have a small section of the gallery that we call ‘BAM! Lab,’” he tells me, leading me away from the main gallery space and into a series of smaller rooms. “It’s basically an experimental lab where we pick someone who’s just starting to do art or just coming out of their MFA and they have something that is really unique.”
As Paco describes past, current, and future projects of the gallery, all the ways he’s acting on his commitment to the local art community and to making art accessible for all–2023 shows, performances, lectures, book readings, interactive classes–I wonder what it’s like for him to balance what seem like two separate lives.
He is, after all, both the founder and face of Buffalo Art Movement and a full-time oncologist at Roswell Park.
He gushes about the gallery’s staff and explains that his friends in Buffalo’s art community have never hesitated to lend a hand.
“They have allowed me to focus my time at the hospital,” he says. “My primary passion and work is cancer–I wouldn’t change that.”
Still, for Paco, medicine and the arts, though separate in so many ways, do share common threads.
In the same way that an artist is driven by their passion for what they do, Paco is driven by passion in every aspect of his work as an oncologist, from his lymphoma research to the mentoring he offers his medical students to the daily care he provides to patients.
It’s not hard to imagine that Paco’s BAM! Lab concept, where artists can develop their styles through creative expression, might be inspired by research laboratories like the Lymphoma Translational Research Lab that Paco heads at Roswell Park, where he and his team take a creative approach to developing new treatments for patients facing rare cancers.
And just as there is no one way to approach a blank canvas, there’s no singular approach to patient care or cancer treatment.