Today the Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced that Andrea Alvarez has been promoted to Curator in recognition of her exceptional contributions to the Buffalo AKG and her accomplishments within the Curatorial Department. Her practice centers rigorous research, care for artists and audiences, and a commitment to expanding the narratives and perspectives represented in the museum’s exhibitions and programs. Currently, she is the inhouse curator for One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama, one of the museum’s most ambitious and widely-visited exhibitions, and she is in final preparations for the forthcoming major traveling exhibition and catalogue Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way, which will further demonstrate her curatorial vision, advocacy for artists, and scholarly leadership on a wide and national stage. Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way opens at the Buffalo AKG on March 6, 2026. 

Alvarez joined the museum as a NYSCA Curatorial Fellow in July 2017 and was subsequently promoted to Curatorial Assistant in June of 2018, Assistant Curator in March of 2021, and Associate Curator two years later. Over the course of her tenure at the AKG, she has curated or cocurated numerous exhibitions and projects that have played a formative role in shaping the museum’s artistic and intellectual direction. 

Her curatorial projects include her work for the opening of the Buffalo AKG in June of 2023, where she served as curator in charge of the Firelei Báez mosaic mural commission in Cornelia while also curating Looking Back: Lucas Samaras’s Mirrored Room, the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s M&T Bank Gallery. In 2022, with Assistant Curator, Special Projects Zack Boehler, she organized Sarah Braman: Finding Room at Graycliff Estate, and in 2021 she organized Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration at Albright-Knox Northland, a satellite space the museum operated while it was closed for construction. Earlier projects include her first AKG permanent collection exhibition, The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing (2018), and her co-curation of the AKG’s presentation of the Brooklyn Museum–organized exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85. 

Alvarez received her PhD from the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020, where she previously earned her master’s degree. She received her bachelor’s degree in Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary. Her curatorial focus is on contemporary art, with a particular interest in the work of Latinx and Latin American artists. 

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