FROM THE EDITOR This month Buffalo Spree accepts an award for outstanding arts support from a business from the Arts Council of Buffalo and Erie County. We look forward to attending the awards luncheon on March 14, and hope to see many of you there When it comes to the arts, Buffalo Spree is very serious about providing thoughtful, informative, and entertaining coverage. We are very proud of the talent that we bring to this endeavor, and it seem appropriate to talk about some of our arts writers in light of this honor—because it is largely due to their efforts. First, our visual art critic and essayist Bruce Adams has won national honors for Buffalo Spree: a bronze award from the City and Regional Magazine Association in 2005. This means that his writing was judged higher than music, art, film, dance, or theater critics in Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and other CRMA markets (CRMA judges all arts coverage together in one category). Adams has also won state-wide awards for his achievements as a Tonawanda High School teacher, and was recently honored with a one-man show at University at Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery. The Albright-Knox purchased one of Adam’s paintings from that show. For music and theater, we have team coverage. Darwin McPherson, Ron Ehmke, Heather Violanti, and Anthony Chase all write about Western New York and Southern Ontario theater for us. Some of Ehmke’s writings for Spree are currently used in college courses in Oregon; his experience as a performer, curator, and writer are incredibly valuable to the magazine. McPherson currently covers theater for Spree on AM Buffalo as well as writes a regular column on the incredibly diverse local theater scene. We’ll be relying on him even more as we go to ten issues per year. We congratulate Heather Violanti on her recently-announced Brinley-Hardy playwriting fellowship and feel proud that she writes on theater as well as other topics for us. Finally, Anthony Chase, whose sophisticated views on both the national and local theater scene can be heard on WBFO as well as read in Artvoice, also finds time to contribute to Spree and enriches our coverage greatly. Our music writers Bruce Eaton, Phil Nyhuis, Joe Sweeney, and Christopher Schobert cover classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, and everything in between. Nyhuis is a jazz musician, Eaton formed one of the area’s earliest new wave band in the seventies, and both have published books. Sweeney and Schobert also contribute to the Buffalo News, and are music geeks of the highest order. Classical cellist Jeff Levine also finds time to cover that genre for Spree. This isn’t everyone who has written on the arts for Spree and I apologize for those I have left out. But by having ten people providing regular coverage, I think we are demonstrating an appropriate commitment to the arts in a region where it contributes such a large portion of our quality of life. We thank the Arts Council for this honor and vow to continue going the extra mile in our arts coverage. Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top