OWN LEGENDARY ART

OWN LEGENDARY ART

Consider adding artwork by the groundbreaking artist Lawrence Brose to your collection. Each of the prints currently on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s exhibition CAGE: A Filmic Circus on Metaphors on Vision can be yours. View the collection HERE.

Proceeds support our archives and the Lawrence Brose Legacy Fund. If you would like more information about our archives and our plans for the future, please contact our Archivist, Rachel Nicolosi at rachel@cepagallery.org.

Lawrence Brose (1951 – 2025) was an acclaimed experimental film artist, imagemaker, and curator whose work explored themes of sexuality, AIDS, and the relationship between sound, music, and film. Since 1981, Brose created over thirty films, with screenings held at over a hundred international film festivals, museums, art galleries, and cinematheques in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Of his work, he is best known for the critically-acclaimed films Hyacinth Fire (1989), De Profundis (1997), and the FILM for MUSIC for FILM series (1990). One of his earliest films, An Individual Desires Solution (1986), is regarded by many as one of the earliest experimental and personal films to emerge from the AIDS epidemic, and was included in the Art AIDS America exhibition curated by Johnathan D. Katz, originating at the Tacoma Art Museum, then later traveling to the Zuckerman Museum of Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Alphawood Gallery.

A key figure in the landscape of Buffalo arts and education organizations, Brose taught at the University at Buffalo as assistant professor in the Department of Visual Studies and headed the photography program for two years in the mid-2010s, but called his work with CEPA Gallery – the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts – his “true vocation.” Brose spent twenty-five years working with CEPA Gallery: first joining in the late 1980s as CEPA’s film curator and publications director, then as CEPA’s artistic director, with an eventual jump to executive director. Under his tenure, CEPA grew from a small presenting venue into a major center for the photographic arts, with his work winning multiple awards from many foundations, including the 2001 New York State Governor’s Arts Award, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Brose’s filmic work is featured in collections at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, the New York University Collection, and the San Francisco Public Library, while his photographic work is held in collections at the Burchfield-Penny Art Center of Buffalo, NY, the Jon Gartenburg Collection of Digital Prints, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, as well as several private collections, including the Fern and Joel Levin Collection and the Brock Goldman Collection.