The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) announced more than 500 artworks it has acquired since November 2019, when the museum embarked on the most extensive and comprehensive campus development and expansion project in the museum’s 161-year history. As the museum oversaw the renovation of its historic buildings and the construction of a new work of signature architecture designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu with Cooper Robertson, the Buffalo AKG continued its long history of acquiring significant works by living artists from around the world.

In total, 518 works by 182 artists and collectives entered the collection, many of which will be on view when the Buffalo AKG opens to the public on June 12, 2023. The artists newly added to the museum’s collection hail from more than 30 different countries and include leading figures working across a broad range of creative disciplines, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance, installation and the frontiers of digital technologies. The Buffalo AKG’s recent acquisitions reflect the museum’s identity and legacy as an artist-centric institution, one guided by its foundational commitment to nurturing the practices and collecting the works of living artists. Continued work processing the historic bequest of Marisol’s estate to the Buffalo AKG in 2016 resulted in the formal acquisition of 213 additional artworks by the artist, including drawings, sculptures, prints, and photographs.

“The acquisitions the Buffalo AKG has made since closing for construction in November 2019 bear witness to this museum’s dynamism and eagerness to consistently punch above its weight,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director. “Even as the museum has been engaged in a $230 million capital campaign to fund the most significant expansion in its history, it has continued to steward and expand one of the most remarkable collections of modern and contemporary art anywhere in the world. When the Buffalo AKG opens in June, visitors will be able to experience for themselves the fruits of the truly visionary work of the artists we work with, the curatorial team, and the Art Committee of the Board of Directors.”

“I am deeply proud of the works the Buffalo AKG has added to the collection over the past few tumultuous years,” said Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator. “We have continued to build and steward a truly unique, challenging, and inspiring collection of modern and contemporary art, from the ongoing processioning and accessioning of works from Marisol’s landmark bequest, to an impressive range of historic and contemporary works engaging with new technologies, to bold contributions by new voices.”

Selected Highlights

Yoan Capote (Cuban, born 1977), Muro de Mar (Seawall), 2018, concrete, nails, fishhooks on plywood panel with metal structure

Yoan Capote is among the most visible Cuban artists of his generation in the international arena. First presented in the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, Muro de Mar (Seawall), 2018, depicts a vast seascape composed of fishhooks across seven panels spanning more than thirty-five feet. The cloudscapes above the horizon are the aleatory product of discoloration in the work’s concrete substructure. Muro de Mar takes on two prominent themes in contemporary Cuban art of the last thirty years: architectural dilapidation and the omnipresence of the sea. The work evokes both the Malecón, an eight-kilometer seawall that runs along Havana’s coastline, and the dangerous sea that stands between Cuba and Florida, a treacherous expanse that, since 1960, has claimed the lives of more than 80,000 Cubans who attempted to cross it. Muro de Mar is Capote’s most ambitious work of its kind, one that seamlessly combines his sculptural and painterly practices in a single monumental installation layered with meaning.

Suzanne Jackson (American, born 1944), Bilali’s Dream, 2002, acrylic and acrylic medium, bogus paper, tulle, stretcher bars, mixed paper, and hardware (double-sided)

In her five-decade career, Suzanne Jackson has worked across genres and mediums, including drawing, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, poetry, dance, theater, and costume design. Bilali’s Dream, 2002, is a masterpiece of Jackson’s work in recent decades, in which she has moved away from the figuration that had characterized her work from the 1970s through the 1990s and toward abstraction and threedimensionality. Remarking on this change in her practice, Jackson recently observed, “When I was a figurative painter, they were saying, ‘Oh, you’re not an abstract painter and therefore you’re not relevant.’ And when my work gets more abstract, they’re saying, ‘Well, you’re not figurative.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I really don’t care, I have to do what I have to do.’”

Bilali’s Dream, 2002, is composed of paper, sheer dyed fabric, and sketches that evoke Jackson’s professional practice as a theater costume and set designer. According to the artist, the work began with an accident: she left a figurative drawing of a face in a stack of papers in the attic of her Savannah, Georgia studio and humidity caused the drawing to bleed an abstracted, ghost-like figure into adjacent pages. The painting, which is also a carefully constructed screen and palimpsest, hangs freely within the space in which it is installed, and its distinct recto and verso may alternately be installed as primary and at different distances from the wall, thereby offering viewers a multitude of ways to engage with the work.

The title of Bilali’s Dream, 2002, is drawn from Bilal Muhammad, a character in Julie Dash’s landmark 1991 film Daughters of the Dust. Jackson has said that Bilal represents for her the diversity of the enslaved people brought to America and the layered histories of the South.

Sin Wai Kin (Canadian, born 1991), It’s Always You, 2021, 4K dual-channel video installation with signed posters and life-sized cut outs

Multimedia performance artist Sin Wai Kin produces complex narrative fictions that explore their own journey through the construction and presentation of gender identity and performance in relation to normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Interested in drag culture from their teenage years in Toronto, the artist’s move to London in 2009 was liberatory. 

In It’s Always You, 2021, Sin constructs a boyband and performs each of the band’s characters against a greenscreen environment to mesmerizing effect. The synthesized score with a heartbeat plays in the background as the four characters dance and sway, each taking the lead solo for the slow, infinitely looped lyrics: “It’s always you. You’re the one in me. You tell my different sides, my multiplicity. I see my selves in you, reflected back at me. It’s always you. You show me I’m many.” The sociocultural context of boybands, where individual members are marketed for their different identities, and distinct fandoms form around each member of the group, serves as a backdrop for the more universal message of the work: that gender is performance, contextually staged in relation to the social sphere.

Carolyn Lazard (French, Haitian, and American, born 1987), Pain Scale, 2019, vinyl; Cinema 1, Cinema 2, 2020, fire; Red, 2021, two-channel video installation

Carolyn Lazard is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York and Philadelphia. In their videos, readymade sculptures, performances, writings, and other works, Lazard combines references to art history and academic theory with allusions to pop culture and the artist’s personal experiences. In March 2023, the Buffalo AKG acquired three of Lazard’s iconic works, enabling the museum to present the breadth of the artist’s practice at this key moment in their career.

In their work, Lazard examines how our interior lives are shaped by the social institutions that define health, accessibility, and the distinction between public and private life, from doctors’ offices to insurance companies. More than drawing attention to these dynamics, Lazard celebrates what they call the “radical possibilities of incapacity.” As a disabled artist who lives with multiple autoimmune diseases, Lazard creates works that explore the structures of power and meaning through which disability is constructed as anathema to the capitalist imperative of productivity.

Patrick Martinez (American, born 1991), Promised Land, 2022

Patrick Martinez’s multidisciplinary works engage closely with the language of painting while paying homage to the vernacular of Los Angeles, especially the immigrant- and minority-dense neighborhoods where he lives and works. As an Indigenous Filipino and Mexican artist, Martinez’s paintings evoke the city’s changing sociopolitical landscape, demographics, economy, and cultural upheavals.

Promised Land, 2022, belongs to a new series of works that responds to the community centers, schools, liquor stores, and corner markets that punctuate East Los Angeles. The artwork also incorporates references to Martinez’s personal narrative, especially his mother’s immigration from the Philippines to the United States. The monumental scale of the painting is a demonstration of the breadth and energy Martinez brings to his work. His use of neon lights, vinyl signage, ceramic roses, and archival photographs connect Promised Land to the artist’s broader practice.

Anthony McCall (British and American, born 1946), Split Second (Mirror), 2018, horizontal, single projection; media player, QuickTime movie file, digital projector, haze machine, mirror

Anthony McCall’s immersive solid-light installations transcend the familiar boundaries between sculpture, cinema, and drawing to create unforgettable interactive experiences. In these works, McCall projects line drawings based on circles and straight lines that expand, contract, and develop over time. Projecting these two-dimensional drawings through a thin mist produces massive, three-dimensional conical enclosures and flat planes that slowly shift in relation to one another in space. In Split Second (Mirror), 2018, a large mirror interrupts a beam of light halfway along its length, reversing the direction of the light cone and projecting its footprint back onto the wall that conceals the project. The mirror also reflects back the entire split cone, presenting a mirror image of it. The two volumetric cones face different directions and rotate seamlessly in real space.

The newly acquired artwork was featured in Anthony McCall: Dark Rooms, Solid Light, the artist’s first solo North American museum exhibition, and the final exhibition on the Buffalo AKG’s main campus prior to its closure for construction. 

Acquisitions of Digital Artworks from Peer to Peer

In November 2022, the Buffalo AKG opened Peer to Peer, a groundbreaking online exhibition and the first survey organized by an American museum of the leading artists engaged with blockchain technologies. Organized by Buffalo AKG Curator and digital art scholar Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, the exhibition staged exchanges between these artists and their historical peers in the Buffalo AKG’s collection. Featuring thirteen artists from North America, Europe, Central America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa, Peer to Peer continued the museum’s 160-year commitment to defining artistic movements as they emerge, while also considering the role museums play in a decentralized art world.

In December 2022, after the conclusion of the exhibition, 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. The participating artists were LaTurbo Avedon, Mitchell F. Chan, Entangled Others (Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick), Simon Denny, Amir H. Fallah, Sarah Friend, Auriea Harvey, Rhea Myers, Osinachi, Casey Reas, Anne Spalter, Itzel Yard (also known as Ix Shells), and Sarah Zucker.

Acquisitions of Early Computer Works

In March 2023, the Buffalo AKG acquired three portfolios and eight individual works of early computer art. The works—each made by artists new to the Buffalo AKG collection, with the exception of Ken Knowlton—represent a broad cross-section of the field of early computer art from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Taken together, these acquisitions help cement the Buffalo AKG’s status as one of the most significant public collections of digital art held by a modern art museum, comparable only to the specialized collections of media art museums such as the ZKM Karlsruhe.

The portfolios acquired are Cybernetic Serendipity, 1968-1971; Art Ex Machina, 1972; and L’Artiste et l’ordinateur (The Artist and the Computer), 1979. The individual works are by Vera Molnár (the “mother” of digital art), Waldemar Cordeiro, Colette and Charles Bangert, Joan Truckenbrod, Harold Cohen (the world’s first AI artist), David Em, and Mark Wilson.

Acquisitions from the Marisol Bequest

Upon her death in 2016, Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930-2016), one of the most prominent yet least understood artists of her generation, bequeathed her entire estate to the Buffalo AKG. Spanning her nearly sixty-year career, the bequest includes more than 100 sculptures and studies, hundreds of works on paper, thousands of photographs and slides, and the artist’s papers. As a result, the Buffalo AKG now holds the world’s most significant collection of Marisol’s work. The relationship between the Buffalo AKG and Marisol began in 1962 when, with the purchase of The Generals, 1961-62, the museum became the first institution to acquire her work. The acquisition of Baby Girl, 1963, followed soon thereafter.

Continued processing of the bequest has resulted in the formal acquisition of 213 additional artworks by Marisol into the museum’s collection. Among these acquisitions are several major sculptural works, including The Fishman, 1973; Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe with Dogs, 1977; and ABCDEFG & Hi, 1961–1962. In December 2022, the Buffalo AKG announced Marisol: A Retrospective, curated by Cathleen Chaffee, the most significant touring retrospective of the artist’s work to date. The retrospective will travel to museums across North America, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 7, 2023–January 21, 2024); the Toledo Museum of Art (March–June 2024); the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (July 2024–January 2025); and the Dallas Museum of Art (2025).

About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright- Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the United States. For 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved, and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art. In June 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG will open to the public for the first time. The project is funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.

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