What is
the Buffalo Infringement Festival?
The Buffalo Infringement Festival is a non-profit-driven, non-hierarchical grassroots endeavor bringing together a broad range of eclectic, independent, experimental, and controversial art of all forms. Taking place in multiple venues in various districts throughout and surrounding the downtown Buffalo area, the festival is an annual eleven-day event running from the last weekend of July through the first weekend of August.
The Infringement Festival is an interdisciplinary festival open to all critical artists.
Celebrating freedom of expression and designed as a real arts democracy, this festival is a critical response to the oppressive neoliberal worldview and all its billboard trucks, televisions, flyers, advertisements, jingles, made-for-TV wars; and the depoliticisation of people through this diversionary Spectacle.
We welcome a variety of performances and cultural resistance:
theatre groups, performers, street activism, political theatre, musicians, radical performance, visual artists, films, marginalized arts, spoken-word, puppet shows, disadvantaged groups, and anyone wishing to artistically infringe on the monoculture that creeps into every corner of our lives.
The Infringement Festival aims to emphasize both:
critical practice in the arts, and artistic practice in activism.
It also aims to provide a positive environment that encourages and nurtures critical art.
To avoid being co-opted, the Infringement Festival follows a mandate:
The festival is free for all artists and activists to participate in. The festival will never charge a registration fee and participants will keep 100% of their box office less appropriate technical fees, where applicable.
The festival is open to all critical artists and will never discriminate, set entry criteria, or censor.
The festival is run as a non-hierarchical arts democracy.
The festival will only accept ethical companies that pose no conflict of interest as sponsors, as the interests of the festival’s participants come before those of the sponsors.
The festival will encourage, although not be limited to, progressive acts that encourage discussion and oppose oppressive structures.
we Always celebrate artists!
Check out some of our volunteer-made poster designs!
Created by Joe Szczygielski
Created by Allison Church
Created by Joe Verdonselli
Created by Laurie Gilmore Selleck
Created by Unknown Artist
