For its opening cabaret of the 2018/19 season, Buffalo's popular Science & Art Cabaret offers the event HOT SPOTS, in which five distinguished speakers address the theme of toxicity and the landscape. PLEASE NOTE: for scheduling reasons, the Hot Spots cabaret will not be held in the Ninth Ward, its home base, but will be presented in Hallwalls' cinema space in Babeville, 341 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY. As always, admission is free. 

As is the usual modus operandi for the Cabaret, a diverse and distinguished group of participants have been invited to address the evening's theme from various vantage points, include physics, environmental activism, artists' responses, local battles against corporate polluters, and even a still-buried time capsule meant to be revealed in the year 2000.  

As cabaret co-organizer John Massier explains, 

“After eight years and dozens of cabarets, it’s surprising we have not yet dealt with the issue of toxicity and the landscape so it’s great to be addressing it from such diverse directions. Toxicity is an extremely localized phenomenon in Western New York—we are the home of Love Canal and the location of Roswell Park—the nation's largest cancer institute—in Buffalo is no coincidence. At the same time, we have the decades-old tale of Antfarm’s art piece the Citizen’s Time Capsulein Lewiston and the story of why it remains buried so many years after it was intended to be unearthed.”

Jennie Lamensdorf
Hot Mess! Artists Scrutinize Nuclear Industry

Sal Rappaccio
How many bananas is a transatlantic flight?

Michael Beam
Nothing to see Here…Move Along… (Ant Farm's Citizens Time Capsule 1975 AD - 2000 AD)

Adele Henderson
The Stink! Again! Really?

Adam Rome
Elixir of Life, Rays of Death

Jennie Lamensdorf is Director and Curator of Time Equities Inc. Art-in-Buildings. Her work focuses on expanding audiences for the art of our time by bringing challenging and engaging work to non-traditional exhibition spaces. Her most recent project, Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape, opens at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries in September 2018. In 2017, Lamensdorf curated five exhibitions, including Art/Work: An Exploration of Labor, at Love Apple Farm in upstate New York, with works by Andrea Arrubla, Aram Han Sifuentes, Ben Thorp Brown, Frances Goodman, Jean Shin, Joiri Minaya, Michael Mandiberg, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Paul Anthony Smith, and Rodrigo Valenzuela, among others.            

In 2016, Lamensdorf co-founded Forward Union, a coalition-building initiative connecting social justice organizations with artists and creative communities. Lamensdorf is a Board Member of Art Omi in Ghent, NY and a member of the NurtureArt Advisory Board in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Sal Rappaccio is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Physics Department at the University at Buffalo.             With a BA in Physics from Boston University, a PhD from Harvard University, and Postdoctoral Research at Johns Hopkins University, Rappaccio explains his area of research as an interest in "searching for solutions to the vast discrepancy between the mass of the Higgs boson and the Planck scale, also known as the hierarchy problem. To explore the energy regime of interest, the Large Hadron Collider collides protons at 13 TeV, producing heavier particles such as the Higgs boson, the top quark, and the W and Z bosons. Many models that solve the hierarchy result in particles with large Lorentz boosts, culminating in massive hadronically decaying particles (boosted jets). I am also interested in the details of the strong nuclear force, quantum chromodynamics, in particular within sprays of particles produced by QCD called “jets,” and the production of the heaviest known particle, the top quark."            

Rappaccio is the recipient of the CMS LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher award in 2015 and, as part of the CMS Collaboration, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize from the European Physical Society in 2013.  

An award winning artist, author, curator, educator and public speaker, Michael J. Beam holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1998) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California University of Pennsylvania (1992). He has been presented with public and private acquisition awards, commendations and critical reviews from The River Front Times, St. Louis, MO; Art Voice, Buffalo, NY and Dugent Publishers, Miami, FL. Beam has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions across the Midwest and East coast. During his tenure in Western New York, Beam has participated in many exhibitions and contributed numerous works to important non-profit regional arts fundraisers.            

The artist’s work can be found in public and private collections in Austin, TX; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, CA; Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, PA; St. Louis, MO; New York, NY and Washington D.C. His work also resides in private collections across the Buffalo/Niagara, NY region. His comprehensive studio website is forthcoming.            

Michael Beam is currently the Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University and resides in Buffalo, NY.   

Adele Henderson received her BFA degree from the University at Nebraska Lincoln and her MFA from Arizona State University.  She teaches Print Media at the University at Buffalo Department of Art, serves on the Board of Directors of Western NY Book Arts Center, and is a co-founder of the Clean Air Coalition.  Her artwork has been exhibited in over 160 solo and group exhibitions across the US and abroad. Major awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  Her prints and works on paper are in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, National Museum Of American Art, New York Public Library and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, among others.  

Adam Ward Rome is an American environmental historianand Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. His research interests include environmental activism, business and the environment, sustainability, and the metropolitan environment. In his book Bulldozer in the Countryside, he examines how the post-World War II residential construction boom and its resulting urban sprawl contributed to the rise of the modern environmental movement.Rome graduated from Yale University summa cum laude, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. From 2002 - 2005 he edited Environmental History.He is the recipient of the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer Award, 2014; the Lewis Mumford Prize, given by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, for the best book on American planning history, 2003; and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given the Organization of American Historians, for the best first book on any topic in American history, 2002  

HOT SPOTS is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape at UB Art Galleries Sept7 through Dec 8, 2018.