Water, Grain, Steel: Industry and the Erie Canal

Black and white lithograph by Ida Adler depicting a partially constructed or demolished building framed by a white picket fence and angled support beams. Stylized urban architecture rises behind the site, including arched windows, geometric rooftops, and simplified high-rise buildings. A shadow from a streetlamp or post stretches across the foreground. Created in 1937, the print reflects WPA-era interest in urban labor and modernist abstraction.

Ida Abelman, Street Patterns, 1937. Lithograph on paper, 15 3.4 x 11 1/2 inches. 

Dates

September 12, 2025–February 28, 2026

Location

Related Programs

Description

Timed to coincide with the bicentennial of the Erie Canal’s completion, Water, Grain, Steel brings together works from UB Art Galleries Collection alongside those by regional artists to explore the Canal’s enduring impact on Buffalo and the surrounding region. The exhibition reflects on the Canal not only as an engine of commerce and industry, but also as a site of labor, land displacement, environmental consequence, and cultural memory.

Spanning historic and contemporary perspectives, the exhibition includes work that examines the Canal’s role in shaping Buffalo’s steel and grain industries; the environmental health of Lake Erie and connected waterways; and land and water rights viewed through Indigenous lenses. WPA-era prints and early twentieth-century landscapes sit in conversation with contemporary works that reframe this legacy for the present day. Featured artists include Charles Burchfield, Mildred C. Green, and Martha Visser’t Hooft, alongside Jay Carrier, Tim Frerichs, and Milton Rogovin, among others.

Water, Grain, Steel invites visitors to consider the complex and evolving functions of the Erie Canal—past, present, and future.

Loans for the exhibition are generously provided by Meibohm Fine Arts, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Black Rock Arts. Many of the works from the UB Art Galleries Collection were donated by, and are cared for with support from, the Harry G. Meyer and the Howard L. Meyer Trust.