Opening of Buffalo AKG Art Museum a stunning accomplishment

With the renamed and reimagined Buffalo AKG Art Museum reopening Monday, they are now a thing of the past.

Roughly 430 works of art will be on exhibit in galleries that can accommodate almost anything an artist or curator can conjure, three times the amount previously on view.

A loading dock, freight elevators and a bridge can now transport artwork throughout the museum.

And that marble floor? It has been replaced by more durable red oak.

Creating new spaces to meet the museum’s needs in the 21st century, and pursuing new approaches to broaden and diversify its audience are all part of the museum’s $195 million expansion, restoration and renovation that began in January 2020, two months after the museum temporarily closed.

Museum Director Janne Sirén’s enthusiasm for the additional art that can be exhibited was evident late last week, as he gave a Buffalo News reporter an early tour of the buildings and grounds.

“The amazing Elaine de Kooning, no one has seen that work, ‘Scrimmage,’ “ Sirén said about the abstract and figurative artist’s 1953 work. “Or Ellsworth Kelly’s such an important work, ‘New York, NY,’ from 1957, acquired in 1959,” he said, gesturing to another. “That’s Ellsworth when he was back from Paris, becoming Ellsworth.”

The transformative museum project, steered by Sirén, a former paratrooper in the Finnish special forces who took the museum’s helm 10 years ago, is a stunning accomplishment. It adds to the prestige the museum has long brought to Buffalo and Western New York, and boosts the Buffalo AKG’s global reputation as one of the great repositories of modern and contemporary art.

The big addition is the three-story, translucent Jeffrey M. Gundlach Building, a glass-and-marble structure named for the Amherst native whose $65 million contribution paid for one-third of the project. It was designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, with 13 galleries of different sizes and shapes, and a sculpture terrace that wraps around the second floor.

The gleaming, E.B. Green-designed 1905 building, a major beneficiary of the changes, now looks as pristine as when it opened more than a century ago. The grand stairs and front lawn, removed in 1962, have returned, with parking now underground.

But the biggest change to what was known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery can be seen in the campus’ last addition – the Gordon Bunshaft-designed building that opened in 1962, now the Seymour H. Knox Building.

The Knox Building’s gateway is a 6,000-square-foot gathering space, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square. It’s topped by “Common Sky” – a kaleidoscopic canopy that for many will elicit a state of childlike wonder when entering. The sculptural work – created by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces – with a twisty funnel off to one side, was designed with Buffalo’s turbulent winters in mind.

For the first time, a part of the museum building is also free and open to the public.

Visitors can now go to the Knox Building to get a cup of coffee and a pastry from Cornelia, the cafe named for Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton, who in 1910 became the first woman to direct an art museum when she was named to lead the then-John J. Albright Museum. Or, they may want to sit with friends, read a book or work from their laptop.

They can also look at art in the 2,000-square-foot M&T Gallery Room, where “The Mirror Room” – an audience favorite that has been painstakingly conserved – is back. The space includes a custom-made photo booth, allowing images to appear on a screen and be emailed. Or stroll Shop AKG, featuring the newly published “Collection Handbook.”

The Knox Building also offers the child-friendly Creative Commons, the LEGO Foundation’s first involvement with an art museum, and four well-equipped studios and classrooms located under the restored museum auditorium.

Fittingly, the Knox Building is accessible from two entrances, to the west from Elmwood Avenue, and the east from Delaware Park. The building, like the rest of the campus, complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, with ramps replacing steps, and elevators that have been made more accommodating. There is a family room, a nursing room for mothers and an all-gender bathroom.

Extensive renovations have also been made “back of the house,” with new offices, a docent lounge and other amenities for employees and volunteers that followed a major plumbing overhaul.

The architectural features of the 1905 building – inexplicably named for Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers and not John J. Albright, who paid for its construction, and whose name adorned the building from the start – have been beautifully restored, along with a new roof in seafoam green to resemble the previous patina copper.

The interior has also been restored, represented by small sunbursts adorned with gold leaf high in the Sculpture Court that was long obscured by white paint.

It is on the second floor, where those noisy marble slabs were, that the museum’s weighty collection begins.

The entry room makes its own statement with Albert Bierstadt’s “Capri,” the first major work to enter the collection that was given by the artist in 1863, one year after the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy incorporated, along with Adolph Gottlieb’s “Dialogue I,” from 1960 and Rashid Johnson’s 2015 work, “Falling Man.”

“We are a contemporary museum, and we are collecting the art of our time, as we were with the Bierstadt and the Gottlieb and now the Johnson,” Sirén said. “They are all markers of the moment.”

For the first time in anyone’s recollection, the art is arranged in chronological order.

The paintings begin with works from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s, before pivoting to Realism, the Impressionists and into the first decades of the 20th century and Modernism.

Knox, an heir to the Woolworth fortune, and Director Gordon Smith changed the course of the museum between 1955 and 1958 by acquiring – before much of a market existed for them – paintings by Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, and sculptors David Smith and David Hare. Many of them are now on display.

Pop art takes center stage next, including “100 Soup Cans,” the first Andy Warhol to enter an American museum collection.

The 1970s and beyond continue across the new, curved bridge, named for Albright, on Level 2 of the Gundlach Building.

The largest gallery space, on the third floor, spans some 7,530 square feet, lending itself to works of enormous scale and weight such as Arthur Jafa’s “Big Wheel III,” featuring a 10,000-pound tire that sits on a structural column on the third floor. Anselm Kieffer’s “Milky Way,” in which molten lead was poured onto the canvas, hangs on the wall with a weight of more than 1,000 pounds.

The tallest gallery space is on the first floor at 38 feet tall, a height slightly greater than Fenway Park’s Green Monster.

All of Clyfford Still’s 33 works owned by the museum can be found. So can a representation of the 504 works of art acquired since the museum shut down in November 2019.

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum is now a 21st-century, state-of-the-art museum, the biggest cultural achievement Buffalo has seen in many decades, and the latest expression of a city that has seen its share of significant advancements this century, even as there is still much to do.