We’re in Springville, New York, a forty-minute drive from the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, standing in a communal artspace with the muralist Mandi Caskey, aka Miss Birdie. 

A year ago, artist Monet Kifner completed work on the side of Lace & Day, a Franklin Street business specializing in lingerie. An artist who grew up and and now lives and works in Buffalo, Kifner has been forging a career in graphic design and illustration with clients all over the world.

"Cameras don't make things beautiful; they don't make things at all. They're simply extensions of our fixations, magnifiers of our desires, pointed at things we find beautiful. The result: a photograph."

"In August of 2022, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul signed Senate Bill S117A into law, which requires museums to display prominent signage disclosing any objects on view that were looted, sold under duress, or confiscated by the Nazi regime in Europe. I felt a sense of relief with each verification, but I also began to notice 'close calls'—artworks that changed hands at an opportune moment and were spared from Nazi interference as a result, while the previous owners suffered in the months and years to follow."

Long before the Buffalo AKG Art Museum opened to the public, some of the first people we wanted to see it were poets. Specifically, we wanted the amazingly talented wordsmiths at Just Buffalo Literary Center to tell us what they imagined for the new museum.

Similar to Central African lore nkisi (plural minkisi), Vanessa german's "power figures" are formed from aggregations of the everyday and the symbolic: shells, bottles, keys, stuffed fabric pouches, string, beads, rhinestones. The empowered objects of her figures’ compositions heal, protect, and ward off evil. Their declarative stances and materials imbue the sculptures with complexity, beauty, and magic.

In December 2022, after the conclusion of the groundbreaking online exhibition, Peer to Peer, the Buffalo AKG acquired tokenized editions of all sixteen artworks, creating the first major collection of NFTs for an art museum in the United States. 

Phyllis Thompson is one of the leading matriarchs of artmaking in the region, earning wide respect in our community among colleagues, educators, makers, and appreciators alike. Thompson is soft-spoken and not a self-promoter by nature, preferring the studio environment to the bustle of art-world events. Luckily, the Buffalo AKG has no qualms about championing the work of incredible artists. Public Art Curator Aaron Ott discusses recent works of Thompson's that have been acquired by the museum.

Meet Gerald C. Mead, an artist in the Buffalo AKG collection, a collector of work by Western New York's finest artists, and a pillar of the Buffalo art scene.