Buffalo’s New AKG Museum Makeover: Pluses and Minuses

A gorgeous building, but ‘transparency’ and ‘belonging’ are pricey abstractions.

I have a soft spot for Buffalo, and not because of its football-crazy, beer-loving people, nice as they are, or its brassy industrial vibe, like Brooklyn but with igloos. I like Buffalo for its stately Arts and Crafts neighborhoods, its splendid park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and its pilgrimage-worthy art museum. People here joke that “everything’s just 15 minutes away,” but this is more fact than fiction. The city’s very easy to navigate, micro and macro. At its mighty industrial peak, Buffalo, a rail and shipping hub, was accessible to tens of millions, among them honeymooners.

Buffalo’s art museum, once called the Albright-Knox Art Gallery but now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, opened a year ago after a four-year construction project. Costing about $200 million for a brand-new building and the overhaul of its two old buildings, the project is the priciest campaign for a New York cultural organization west of the Hudson. My last visit was a few weeks before the museum closed in 2019.

Do I like what they’ve done? Yes and no.

Shohei Shigematsu, who’s one of the partners in OMA, the firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, designed the new building along with Cooper Robertson, a New York firm. It’s a three-story circle veiled in glass, so, on the sunny day I visited, it sparkled. I gasped, though, when I drove past the museum campus. The new building is so big, it dwarfs the 1905 neoclassical building, intended originally for the fine-arts pavilion of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. When the Albright-Knox got its first addition, in 1962, the museum removed the front steps of the neoclassical building and plunked an ugly parking lot in front. It also moved the entrance, to route it through the addition, a sign of an egomaniac for an architect. Now, parking is underground, and the front steps to the 1905 building are restored. The façade and the grounds are lovely. It took a bit to adjust to the new building’s scale.

Alas, the restored steps are steps to nowhere. Now, we enter through the Shigematsu building, named after the donor — the bond king Jeffrey Gundlach — whose $65 million gift made the project possible. Both the interior and exterior of the 1905 building have been lovingly restored. Galleries in old museums such as the MFA in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox are both gracious and stately. Everything on the walls looks good. Visitors feel an uplift, knowing they’re in a temple to art. Today, though, directors, senior staff, and trustees cry about “transparency,” “belonging,” and warm and fuzzy welcomes. Goodness, it’s an art museum, not a petting zoo.

The AKG opened in 1862, making it one of America’s first art museums. Albright and Knox, both WASPy donors and very dead white men, no longer relate. The “G” is for Gundlach. “Buffalo AKG” is snappy, though they’re calling it a museum now. It was originally called a gallery. There’s a difference but it’s suggestive rather than definitive.

A gallery tends to display for the enjoyment and edification of visitors — it’s not a research institution. Art galleries tend to rotate art while museums tend to leave things where they are. A gallery, historically, defines the AKG, which, as civic museums go, has a small, even boutique collection and has never been on the research treadmill. The branders probably thought that “gallery” suggested to some not-in-the-know souls that things were for sale.

My dollops of grouse aside, the new building is beautiful. The museum wanted a visual transformation, and that’s what it got, along with 30,000 square feet of new gallery space. It’s very challenging to add to a neoclassical building unless the additfion is recessive and deferential. Classical style brings with it so much history and tradition, and it’s so assertive and logical that it’s impossible to go mano a mano with it. The AKG instead built a lone wolf of a building, stunning indeed but upstaging the grand old man.

I wouldn’t call it discordant. Italian cities reimagined during the Renaissance often have a main church and a round or octagonal baptistery as well as whatever flotsam and jetsam were built later. The new AKG is a success in that it feels like part of an even bigger campus. SUNY Buffalo’s campus starts across the street. The Burchfield Penney Art Center is across the street, too. It’s dedicated to the work of the unique watercolorist Charles Burchfield and living and dead artists from western New York. Delaware Park, the jewel in the crown of Buffalo’s 1870s park complex, is in back of the 1905 building.

There are now three floors of new gallery space in the Gundlach building. The top floor is exhibiting an enchanting, high-spirited survey of the career of Marisol Escobar (1930–2016), the Venezuelan-American sculptor best known as Marisol. I’ll write about it next week, since I haven’t read the catalogue yet.

On the first floor is a compact visitor-services desk, and, yes, I did feel warmly welcomed. Filling the first-floor galleries is After the Sun: Forecasts from the North, a show that seemed promising since all the art is done by Scandinavian artists. The director of the AKG is Finnish, and I’m intrigued by Scandinavian art, which isn’t derivative but very much its own thing.

I discovered that After the Sun is about the “looming climate catastrophe” and read in the introduction that “artists who confront the climate crisis often reference science and data.” “Fake science” and “stack-the-deck data” are closer to the truth, but artists mean well, so I gave it a whirl. It’s life-threateningly dreadful. After looking at the first work of art in the gallery, I understood why so many young people today are suicidal. Other than masochists, sadists, depressives, and fantasists, no one will enjoy it. Working-class people from Buffalo know the climate canard will kill their economy. And the AKG is supposed to be radically welcoming?

The Earth is 4 billion years old, the climate’s always changing, the “looming climate catastrophe” is a mammoth corporate fraud, and when the AKG hires a meteorologist curator, I’ll take its climate-art shows more seriously. That said, the Swede Sara Vide-Ericson’s painting from 2024, Soul Fracking, was gorgeous.

The second floor of the new building displays the most contemporary works in the permanent collection. In 2007, the museum — planning to focus entirely on modern and contemporary art — notoriously sold about $20 million in art, some ancient, a rare Chinese bronze, and a sculpture of Shiva. Tweaking a museum’s mission happens.

If the trustees vote for it, the sale is public, the money goes to buy more art, and there’s no donor restriction if the art came as a gift, we can quibble with the wisdom of the sale but not its ethics.

I walked through the second-floor galleries, looking at art from the past 20 years or so. The AKG has a very fine collection with one or two indisputable masterpieces by most of the big enchiladas among European and American artists since, say, Courbet and going through to the 1970s. Over the past 20 or so years, it has collected bleeding-edge, big, and brutal. I saw very little that I’d call beautiful. There’s a magical Mark Bradford painting from 2007. But Jeff Wall’s Boys Cutting through a Hedge, from 2003; Rage, a Glenn Ligon black painting from 2002; Junk, a 2003 Tony Oursler talking sculpture crying “I’m a monster”; and Robert Gober’s Inverted Sink, from 1985 — all are harsh rather than poetic or enigmatic

Now, the AKG owns 10,000 works of art. Fewer than 500 are on display in the galleries. I’m not saying the art on view is bad. What I’m saying is that it’s a cold, hard New York aesthetic. Buffalo, of course, is in New York, but it is 400 miles from my house in ye olde Vermont and feels sometimes as if it’s in the Midwest.

A bridge connects the new building with the 1905 building from the second floor, soothingly sloping to the first floor of the old neoclassical pile. The galleries are serene and accommodating, so Pollock’s Convergence, from 1952, one of his biggest and most neon pictures, has a happy home. Gorky’s Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, from 1944, is there. Synchrony in Orange, a ten-footer by Morgan Russell from around 1914, lives in the old building’s courtyard with a Giacometti bronze next to it.

From its acquisitions starting in the 1950s, big and bold is the museum’s house style. Rothko, Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Warhol, Hans Hoffman, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, and many others come more or less in XL sizes. It’s not boastful. But it’s not human-scale, either. The size of the art makes the experience still feel formal. White walls and International Style furniture make the galleries feel very Manhattan.

Chronologically, the galleries are backward, starting from the new things in the Gundlach building, through to the end of the trail in the 1905 building — you have to go through the newer works before you get to the paintings by Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne, Thomas Lawrence, Gainsborough, and a 1782 portrait by Jacques-Louis David. The first-time visitor wanting to cover the museum is directed where to go. Architecturally, there’s not much of a license to explore, much less lose yourself.

What to do with the 1962 addition on the other side of the original, neoclassical building? The biggest and most elegant feature — among many elegant aspects of the new AKG — is covering what was once its open courtyard. Buffalo is in a tundra belt, which isn’t news, so the courtyard was useless for many months of the year. It’s now covered by a dazzling ceiling designed by Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic-Danish artist, and Sebastian Behmann, a German architect. The ceiling is sculpture. Walking under it, I felt as if I was inside a diamond, in a good way.

The space is called the Town Square. It’s a big party hall with gallery space, and admission is free. To access the rest of the museum, the AKG charges $22 a head, with modest discounts for children and the elderly and no charge the first Friday of each month. Add $12 for parking and the visit gets expensive.

The initial plan for the new AKG, developed in 2015 and 2016, would have placed the addition on top of the 1962 building, essentially demolishing it. The public rebelled. Gordon Bunshaft, its architect, was a Modernist superstar architect and born and raised in Buffalo. The new AKG’s architects were chased back to the drawing board and ended up placing the new building on the other side of the campus.

The locals seem very happy with it and, after losing their art museum during years of construction, are delighted to have it back. They’re understandably proud of its many beautiful, dynamic features. Aside from the $200 million construction cost, the AKG raised $35 million in new endowment funds to run the vastly expanded museum. That’s a boatload of money, but the museum did it. It’s been open for barely a year, and I’m told attendance is strong, though this is not a good measure, since people will come once to see the new building. What brings them back is a good exhibition program, civic pride, and the energy from Buffalo’s robust arts culture.