Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Listen for a moment before you go inside. Traffic hums along Elmwood Avenue. Wind moves through the old trees of Delaware Park. Ahead of you, white marble columns stand in the open air, cool and pale in almost any weather. And just beyond them, newer glass catches the sky and throws it back at you. This is the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. It is a place where three very different buildings, from three very different eras, now stand together.

The story begins long before any of these walls. In 1862, while the American Civil War was still being fought, a group of Buffalo citizens founded the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. That makes this institution one of the oldest public art organisations in the United States. For decades, it had no proper home. It showed works in rented rooms and borrowed spaces. Buffalo was growing fast on grain, steel, and shipping, and its leaders wanted culture to match their wealth.

That ambition found a patron in John J. Albright, a businessman who made his fortune in industry. He paid for a permanent building, and the architect Edward Brodhead Green designed it. Green chose the language of ancient Greece. Think of temples, porches, rows of columns, and clean white stone. The plan was to finish the building in time for the Pan-American Exposition, the great world's fair that Buffalo hosted in 1901. It did not happen. Construction ran late, and the building finally opened in 1905.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The fair itself is gone. Almost all of its buildings were temporary, made of plaster and wood, and they were taken down after the crowds left. This marble building is one of the few lasting structures connected to that moment in Buffalo's history. So when you stand at these columns, you are standing beside a survivor of the city's most confident year.

Look closely at the porches on the sides of the old building. You will find female figures standing in place of columns. Architects call these caryatids. The idea comes from the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis in Athens, where stone women hold up the roof. Here they carry the same quiet weight. They give the building a human scale. It feels less like a fortress of art and more like a temple that welcomes you in.

Now jump forward to 1962. The museum had outgrown its marble shell, and a new patron stepped in. Seymour H. Knox Jr. came from a family that had built its fortune in retail. He was also a serious collector of modern art. He funded an addition designed by Gordon Bunshaft of the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Bunshaft was a leading figure in American modernism. His addition was dark, low, and geometric. It looked nothing like the Greek temple next door, and that was the point.

For about sixty years, the institution carried the names of both men. It was the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Then came a long closure and a major transformation. In 2023 the museum reopened with a new building and a new name. The letters A, K, and G stand for Albright, Knox, and Gundlach. That last name belongs to Jeffrey E. Gundlach, a Buffalo-born investor whose gift helped make the expansion possible.

The new Gundlach Building was designed by the international firm OMA, with the architect Shohei Shigematsu leading the project. Instead of copying either older style, it adds a third voice. Glass and light are its main materials. Walk around it slowly. Notice how the surfaces change as clouds pass and as the hours go by. From some angles the building almost disappears into the park. From others it shines like a lantern.

The expansion also changed the old modernist courtyard. That space is now covered by a canopy of glass and mirrored panels. It was created by Studio Other Spaces, the practice of the artist Olafur Eliasson and the architect Sebastian Behmann. The work is called Common Sky. Stand underneath and look up. The canopy breaks the daylight into shifting patterns. It turns an outdoor courtyard into a covered public room, which matters a great deal in a city that knows long, snowy winters.

So what is inside? The collection is especially strong in modern and contemporary art, and that strength goes back to the Knox years and earlier. Seymour Knox and the museum's curators bought work by living artists, sometimes before the wider world agreed it was important. That habit gave Buffalo a reputation. Artists and critics knew this was a city that took new art seriously. Galleries rotate their displays, so what you see today may differ from what a friend saw last year.

Among the works long associated with this collection is Paul Gauguin's painting The Yellow Christ, from 1889, with its flat bright fields of colour. There is also Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Monkey, from 1938. And there is Jackson Pollock's Convergence, a large canvas of dripped and flung paint from 1952. Here is a second surprise. In the 1960s, the painter Clyfford Still gave a large group of his own works to this museum. Still rarely trusted institutions, so that gift was an unusual act of faith.

When you are ready for a break, step back outside and look at the setting. The museum sits at the edge of Delaware Park. The park was designed in the nineteenth century by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the same partnership behind Central Park in New York. Olmsted imagined Buffalo as a city of connected parks and wide parkways. The museum feels like part of that plan. Art inside, landscape outside, and very little wall between the two.

That is perhaps the best way to understand this place. It is not one building with additions. It is a conversation between three ideas about what a museum should be. The first is a marble temple, built in the hope of a world's fair. The second is a dark modernist box from a confident century. The third is a building of glass and open public space for today. Each one argues with the others, politely, across a few metres of stone.

Before you leave, turn around once more. Let your eyes travel from the white columns, to the dark modern lines, to the glass and the bright canopy. Listen to the park again, the wind and the distant traffic. People are crossing the plaza, some with coffee, some with children, some simply passing through. Buffalo built this place for itself, again and again, over more than a century. Today, for a little while, it belongs to you as well.