Thursday, May 29, 2025 – Today the Buffalo AKG announced that the museum’s Public Art Initiative will begin a new mural on Hertel Avenue by artist Ola Volo (Canadian, born 1989). Volo will be producing the most immersive mural that the AKG’s Public Art Initiative has ever commissioned. The work will span three neighboring buildings along Hertel Avenue, with the Monocle at 1235 Hertel as the central anchor. Her imagery will spill over onto the adjacent buildings, creating an enveloping, immersive, and mesmerizing experience. 

Volo is a Canadian mural artist and illustrator originally from Kazakhstan with a distinctive style drawn from folklore, multiculturalism, and female identity. Her intricate works bring animals, people, architecture, and nature together to articulate diverse stories rich with symbolism and elaborate forms. Volo creates complex narratives that foreground the subtleties of human nature while celebrating the little surprises of everyday life.

Volo’s work is female forward, celebrating strength, beauty, resilience, wisdom, and empowerment. For this installation, she will be working with an all-female group of assistants, including regional artists Julia Bottoms, Cassandra Ott, and Laura Valkwitch. Volo’s selection of these artists reflects her commitment to elevating opportunities for and visibility of women artists everywhere. 

In addition to her work with local artists, Volo has embarked on local collaborations with both Mirabo Press and Red Disk. For her collaboration with Mirabo Press, Volo is using imagery drawn from her early sketches and concepts for this mural project to create a unique run of monoprints that include hand-drawn and unique motifs on each print. For her work with Red Disk, Volo experimented with repeat patterns also based on early renderings of the birds included in the mural design. 

Volo is renowned for her intricate storytelling through vibrant colors and bold lines. For this commission, Volo merges the avian symbols of the peacock and the heron with her rich cultural heritage, also portraying a woman adorned in a tapestry of feathers connected to a magical garden of flowers and birds. 

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