More than 300 Artworks Acquired Since May 2023, Including 178 Artworks from the Marisol Bequest

Select Highlights Include Works by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Alexander Calder, Francis Celentano, Koto Ezawa, Herbert W. Franke, Rachel Jones, Ellsworth Kelly, Leroy Lamis, Zoe Leonard, Narsiso Martinez, Jordan Nassar, Alice Neel, Eamon Ore-Giron, Berni Searle, Martine Syms, and Kara Walker, Among Others

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The Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) announced the artworks it has acquired since May 2023. In total, 302 works by eighty-four artists and collectives entered the collection. The artists newly added to the museum’s collection hail from more than twenty-three countries and include both leading and emerging voices working across a broad range of creative disciplines, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance, installation and 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 the world’s most compelling and innovative artists. Continued work processing the historic bequest of Marisol’s (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) estate to the Buffalo AKG in 2016 resulted in the formal acquisition of 178 additional artworks by the artist, including drawings, prints, and photographs. Marisol: A Retrospective, a landmark exhibition of Marisol’s work, is on view at the Buffalo AKG through January 6, 2025.
 

Selected Highlights

Quiet Elegance: A Remarkable Bequest (July 26, 2024–February 24, 2025)

In 2023, an anonymous donor bequeathed to the Buffalo AKG a group of artworks by some of the most prominent artists of the mid-twentieth century. Many of these works are now on view in Quiet Elegance: A Remarkable Bequest, an exhibition in the Hemicycle Gallery of the Robert & Elisabeth Wilmers Building, including a significant painting by Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923–2005), a wall sculpture by Alexander Calder (American, 1898–1976), and three notable prints by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973).

A Foundational Commitment to Photography

In 1910, the Albright Art Gallery (as the Buffalo AKG was then known) hosted the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography, the first exhibition organized by an American museum that celebrated photography as an art form. When the expanded Buffalo AKG opened in 2023, one of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions was Through a Modernist Lens: Buffalo and the Photo-Secession, which explored the museum’s historic photography collection. The Buffalo AKG’s commitment to photography as an artistic medium has not wavered, with regular acquisitions of photographs by major artists. 

In the past year, the Buffalo AKG acquired photographs by Diane Arbus (American, 1923–1971), Edward Burtynsky (Canadian, born 1955), Sophie Calle (French, born 1953), Adam Fuss (British, born 1961), Louise Lawler (American, born 1947), and Zoe Leonard (American, born 1961). The museum acquired a suite of fifty photographs by Finnish photographer Esko Männikkö (Finnish, born 1959), one of the most significant Nordic photographers of the twentieth century. This group contains Männikkö’s pictorial poems of everyday life in Kuivaniemi, Kuhmo, Sodankylä, and other communities in the proximity of the Arctic Circle.

Electric Op (September 27, 2024–January 27, 2025)

Since its founding in 1862, the Buffalo AKG has embraced pioneering artists working in new and innovative mediums. Electric Op, the museum’s next special exhibition, draws extensively on the Buffalo AKG’s leading collection of Op art to elucidate the enduring relationship between Op art and electronic art and culture over six decades. Many recently acquired works by artists using early computing technologies figure prominently in Electric Op, including Francis Celentano (American, 1928–2016), Dmitri Cherniak (Canadian, born 1988), Charles Csuri (American, 1922–2022), Herbert W. Franke (Austrian, 1927–2022), Gary Hill (American, born 1951), Leroy Lamis (American, 1925–2010), Eva & Franco Mattes (Italian American artist collective, established 1995), and A. Michael Noll (American, born 1939).

Electric Op argues that Op art is more than just the final chapter of modernist geometric abstraction; it is also the first artistic movement of the global Information Age. It is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to the new electronic media technologies of the dawning post-industrial era. At the very moment that Op artists began making works that short-circuit our own optical systems, new video and digital technologies began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Many Op artists would turn to these as tools in the late 1960s, and many of the first video and digital artists in turn openly referred to Op art for inspiration.
 

Artists Associated with the Nordic Region

In 2021, the Buffalo AKG launched the AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative, a new transatlantic platform for artists working in or associated with Åland, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In addition to regular exhibitions and public programming, one of the goals of the Initiative is to develop North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from artists working in or associated with the Nordic region. The first exhibition of the Initiative, After the Sun—Forecasts from the North, was on view at the Buffalo AKG through August 12, 2024. 

The Buffalo AKG has recently acquired significant works by innovative Nordic artists, including four embroidery works by Britta Marakatt-Labba (Swedish, born 1951), three paintings by Sinikka Kurkinen (Finnish, born 1935), and a three-channel video installation by Sandra Mujinga (Norwegian, born 1989). Additional Nordic artists whose work the museum acquired in the last year include Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic, born Denmark, 1967), Andreas Eriksson (Swedish, born 1975), Olav Christopher Jenssen (Norwegian, born 1954), Ann Lislegaard (Norwegian and Danish, born 1962), Eggert Pétursson (Icelandic, born 1956), Torbjørn Rødland (Norwegian, born 1970), and Iiu Susiraja (Finnish, born 1975).
 

A Dedication to the Contemporary

For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has dedicated itself to celebrating the work and stewarding the careers of the world’s most innovative working artists. Many of the museum’s most significant holdings, especially in postwar American art, were acquired “while the paint was still wet”—that is, extremely close to the artwork’s date of creation. In the past year, this practice continued with the museum’s acquisition of significant new works by Lucy Dodd (American, born 1981), Eamon Ore-Giron (American, born 1973), Tu Hongtao (Chinese, born 1976), Rachel Jones (British, born 1991), Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (British-Nigerian, born 1992), Narsiso Martinez (Mexican-American, born 1977), Joiri Minaya (Dominican-United Statesian, born 1990), Jordan Nassar (American, born 1985), Mohammed Sami (Iraqi and Swedish, born 1984), and Billie Zangewa (Malawian, born 1973), among many others.

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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 more than 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 opened anew to the public. The project was 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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