This week, artist and entrepreneur Edreys Wajed – well known as the painter of the Freedom Wall mural in Buffalo – will serve as a keynote speaker of EMERGENCE, a new initiative to celebrate early-career artists in western New York led by Daemen.
Edreys Wajed
Wajed’s speech will take place Thursday, April 7, at 5:30 p.m. at the Tower Gallery in the Haberman Gacioch Center for the Visual and Performing Arts on campus. Attendance is free and open to the public.
“Edreys Wajed is a sort of Renaissance figure,” said Bob Waterhouse, chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Daemen. “He’s a hip-hop performer, visual artist, playwright, jewelry designer and arts educator. Were the words ‘artist as entrepreneur’ to appear in a cultural dictionary, there would be an image of Edreys.”
Daemen’s Leadership and Entrepreneurship in the Arts Program is sponsoring the event, as well as the three exhibitions of artwork and other happenings that comprise EMERGENCE: A Celebration of the Emerging Artist.
The keynote coincides with the kickoff of the second exhibition (EMERGENCE 2), on display in the Tower Gallery. Artists featured include Alicia Malik, Cameron Garrity, Dylan England, Erin Kearney, Kari Achatz, Krista Mezzadri, and Lucas Santos.
Designed to highlight the accomplishments of artists from Western New York in the first ten years of their professional careers, EMERGENCE celebrates the next generation of visual, performing and other artists through a series of panel discussions, presentations, workshops, and exhibits.