Weego

Location: 1503 Hertel Avenue (Get Directions)

Albright-Knox Public Art Page

This mural celebrates nostalgia for cartoons, video games, and other imaginative preoccupations of youth. Its title, weego, comes from a pseudonym that the Buffalo-based artist Chuck Tingley and his painting partner, Cincinnati-based artist Matt Grote (a.k.a. OGRE), developed for their collaborative projects.

The imagery of this hot-air balloon fleet was inspired by the classic Nintendo, arcade, and puzzle-based board games of the artists’ childhoods. Tingley and Grote were particularly interested in how these play-based scenarios offered opportunities to escape to an alternate world, taking you away to a space that is more imaginative and immersive. As adults, they retrospectively realized the value of the childlike wonder spurred by these games and playing together. Their design is an attempt to reclaim humor, whimsy, and fun as having the same power to transform our everyday lives that great art does.

About Chuck Tingley

Chuck Tingley (American, born 1983) is a Buffalo-based artist primarily focused on figurative drawing, painting, and murals. Tingley layers design and abstraction with nostalgia to arrive at a unique, open-ended, and inclusive narrative, rendering his subject matter dynamic and emotional. The artist hopes that his work connects spiritually and psychologically with his viewers in a way that allows them to plumb their own passions and to build unique stories based on their individual sensations and perceptions. In 2017, Tingley participated in the celebrated Freedom Wall mural installation alongside fellow Buffalo natives John Baker, Julia Bottoms, and Edreys Wajed.