New Building, Expanded Collection And Clyfford Still Welcome Public Back To Rechristened Buffalo AKG Art Museum

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum–formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery–didn’t construct its new three-story, glass encased campus addition specifically to house its unparalleled collection of Clyfford Still paintings, although to see the stunning installation, you couldn’t blame the museum if it did.

The new building’s ground floor galleries soar, creating cavernous, open, light-infused spaces, perfect for Still’s enormous, craggy paintings. Buffalo AKG curators designed the building’s gallery dimensions, not architects, and the wisdom of that decision is immediately felt by guests to the exhibition who are made to feel small in a good way. Like visiting the mountains. Humbling. Sublime.

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All 33 of Buffalo AKG’s Still paintings appear together for the first time in over 10 years as the museum welcomes back the public following its closure since November 2019 for a nearly $200 million campus-wide renovation and construction project which saw existing museum buildings refurbished and the Shohei Shigematsu designed Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building raised. All will reopen on June 15, 2023, collectively rechristened as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Museum curators couldn’t be blamed either if they chose to keep the Still presentation permanently on view this way, it’s perfect. “Clyfford Still: A Legacy to Buffalo’s” temporality–on view through February 19, 2024–is testament to the horsepower of the institution’s other holdings and its eventual return to an ambitious special exhibitions program. Those exhibitions are on hold for now as the Buffalo AKG has been hung throughout exclusively with items from its permanent collection and two promised gifts.

Becoming Buffalo AKG

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What would become the Buffalo AKG was incorporated in 1862 as the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. At the time, there were only five other art museums in the United States: the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Brooklyn Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Harford, CT, and Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

Since its founding, the museum has dedicated itself solely to the display and acquisition of modern and contemporary art. You’ll find no Egyptian antiquities or Renaissance paintings here.

“What this museum does is traces the very long arm of Modernism,” Buffalo AKG Chief Curator Cathleen Chaffee said at a media preview in advance of the public reopening. “The heart of our collection really starts with the artists who the Impressionists were looking–the artists we might most commonly associate with Modernism–who were their inspirations, or who were the artists they were pushing back against.”

Artworks are displayed largely chronologically, offering visitors a unique opportunity to travel through time, traversing the pages of art history from Claude Monet to Deborah Roberts.

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“Going forward, our goal is to have a relatively stable chronological installation of the collection, that doesn’t sound radical, but we’ve never been able to do that before, not truly and not the way this collection deserves,” Chaffee explained. “That will be shown in parallel with anywhere from three to six special exhibitions at any given moment throughout the entire campus.”

In deference to the permanent collection, exhibition space across the museum campus was doubled during construction, but special exhibition space has remained largely the same as before.

Guests should begin their journey in the classically inspired 1905 building where an Albert Bierstadt landscape faces a Tracey Emin neon text piece, a two item summation of the institution’s span of acquisitions to this point. Bierstadt’s The Marina Piccola, Capri (1859) was the first major painting to enter the museum’s collection.

Clyfford Still and Marisol

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“We were incorporated by civic leaders and artists, and we’ve been an artist-centric institution since 1862,” Buffalo AKG Art Museum Director Janne Sirén said at the media preview. “Artists were our first curators. They were on the board of the museum. We pride ourselves in our ability to provide platforms for artists, these bravest of individuals who start each day by trying to create something new and unforeseen.”

Since inception, artist gifts have always highlighted the collection here. Bierstadt’s painting was given in 1862 in acknowledgement of the institution’s founding. One of three Anselm Keifer paintings displayed together in the new building, each a sweeping, cinematic, wall-sized, material masterpiece, was gifted.

Two gifts, however, stand out above the rest. The first being Still’s.

The museum purchased its first Clyfford Still painting in 1957. In 1959, it hosted his first survey exhibition, providing the artist an usual degree of control over the presentation to include selection of paintings on view, their arrangement and even gallery lighting. This began a close relationship between the museum and Still, who would periodically drop by unannounced during the 50s and 60s while living in New York City.

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In 1964, he gifted 31 paintings to the institution, each personally selected to represent his greatest artistic achievements, to this day one of the most staggering artist-to-institution gifts in history.

“He saw this city and this museum as a place that was a torchbearer for abstraction as he saw it–something that had to do with freedom, that had to do with personal expression and endless possibilities,” Chaffee explained.

The backbone of Buffalo AKG’s permanent collection is abstract art.

The second gift came from Pop artist Marisol who bequeathed her estate to the institution upon her death in 2016. Buffalo AKG was the first museum to acquire Marisol’s work and was rewarded for this foresight by the artist with receipt of over 100 sculptures and 150 works on paper, plus thousands of photographs and slides.

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Moving forward, two galleries across the museum will be permanently dedicated to Still and Marisol following a touring retrospective of her work organized by Buffalo AKG.

Old Favorites

Challenging the Still exhibition for aesthetic supremacy is a gallery space in the 1905 building highlighting the Abstract Expressionists. Here, Jackson Pollock’s mind-boggling Convergence (1952)–a whopper at 13-feet across and as good as you’ll ever see from him–is joined by Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, an enormous Louise Nevelson installation and a 20-foot-long by 9-feet-high Robert Rauschenberg painting incorporating cardboard, wood and metal on canvas.

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If you’ve ever wanted to know what $1 billion in artwork in one room looks like, here you go.

For an ultimate exercise in slow looking, try finding the matchstick stuck to the canvas in Convergence.

A gem on a far subtler scale, roughly 1/100th the size of the Pollock and sooty, not spectacular, in color, is Honoré Daumier’s Laundress on the Quai d’Anjou (1860), a study for his famed The Laundress in the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It can be found just inside the 1905 building’s entryway to the galleries. Hung salon style alongside other smaller works from the period, Daumier perfectly captures the heartbreaking fate of the 19^th century French working poor, today’s working poor.

Regard the woman’s hunched back. Notice the meat on her forearms, muscle acquired through the repetitive twisting and hauling of laundry. Her body is heavy, like a draft animal.

She holds onto the hand of her child who can be no more than 4-years-old, helping pull her or his little legs up the steep stairs she climbs. In the child’s other hand, a wooden laundry paddle. It’s “follow mom to work day,” as it will be for the next 20 years, until mom’s body gives out, until the sentence is handed down to the child’s children.

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Dreams don’t exist here, only work.

No one’s dancing the can-can. No one’s going to college. No one’s counting down to holiday or retirement, there’s only one countdown for the working poor, and between that day and today is work. The child’s destiny was fixed from conception.

The painting is as good as art gets and hangs adjacent to another study, this one by Rosa Bonheur for her dramatic and enormous The Horse Fair, also counted among the crown jewels at The Met.

New Favorites

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Concurrent with all the construction, Buffalo AKG has spent the last four years aggressively acquiring artworks, more than 500 in total since closing. Many of these pieces can be seen on the third floor of the new building, the final pages–for now–of this stroll through Modern art history.

Floor mounted figurative works from Nick Cave and Simone Leigh stand out.

In keeping with its artist-centric spirit, three new site-specific works installed across campus feature prominently. Miriam Bäckström’s Others Will Know, a combination of traditional tapestry weaving, photography and virtual reality technology, leads visitors from underground parking into the new building’s lobby. An Afro-futurist glass mosaic by Firelei Báez spans one wall of the new Cornelia restaurant on-site. The eatery is named after Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton, Buffalo native, painter and director of the museum from 1910 through 1924, the first woman to serve as director of a major art museum in America.

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Most noticeable, however, is Common Sky, a kaleidoscopic canopy of geometric glass and mirrors covering a previously open courtyard sited between the 1905 building and a 1962 expansion. Unusable much of the year due to Buffalo’s harsh winter climate, Common Sky, a creation of Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann, now creates a year-round “public square” accessible without admission.

The entire campus will be open to the public free of admission from June 15 through June 18, 2023. Beginning June 19, 2023, the public will be able to visit the museum’s renovated Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building, Seymour H. Knox Building, and the new Ralph Wilson Town Square, featuring Common Sky.

The new Gundlach Building will go off view on the 19th for completion of finishing touches with a public reopening for good on July 20, 2023.