Buffalo AKG

The reopening of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in the second largest city in New York state was 10 years and $230 million in the making. The most ambitious project in the museum’s 160-year history broke ground in November 2019. When museumgoers were finally able to return in June 2023, they were greeted in the lobby by a jaw-dropping canopy formed from mirrors and glass—a collaboration between Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson and German architect Sebastian Behmann, founding partners of Studio Other Spaces. For the big comeback, the museum threw its curatorial weight into exhibitions of abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, painter Stanley Whitney, and a sculptural installation by Lucas Samaras; the next blockbuster show, opening in July, is a touring retrospective on Venezuelan-American pop artist Marisol. Iconic artworks from all the names you know (Cézanne, Brancusi, O’Keeffe) plus a few you don’t but should (Sin Wai Kin, Julia Bottoms) are displayed across the now 50,000-plus-square-foot campus. In addition to a new eatery and a coffee-and-wine bar, Buffalo AKG partnered with the LEGO Foundation to create a dedicated play space for kids. The museum has reentered the scene at a particularly buzzy time for the Rust Belt city, which recently welcomed the The Richardson Hotel, an 88-room boutique property housed in a former state-run asylum on the landmarked Richardson-Olmsted Campus, and the West Side Bazaar, a newly expanded not-for-profit food hall and incubator spotlighting cuisine from Jamaica, Congo, and beyond.

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