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You don’t have to buy the idea of Buffalo as a tourist center—or even a creative haven for young people—to be intrigued by the story of the Buffalo AKG. The city’s world-class art museum has now completed a $230 million expansion designed by a Japanese architect, which has been substantially funded by a Los Angeles “bond king” and overseen by a Finnish director, who just happens to be the great-grandson of that nation’s most famous artist. Meanwhile, the Buffalo AKG is opening a retrospective of Marisol, a Venezuelan Pop artist who was once as famous as Andy Warhol before she fell into obscurity and eventually bequeathed her entire estate to the museum upon her death in 2016.
Director Janne Siren was hired in 2013 to execute a strategic plan for the museum that had actually been drawn up a decade earlier, not long after the Buffalo AKG had lines around the block for a major exhibition of Monets from the Musée Marmottan, in Paris. Back then, Siren precociously argued for his institution’s place in the city’s cultural life, as supported by the city’s elite but deeply engaged in the community. It didn’t hurt that Buffalo AKG was already home to seminal works of art by Frida Kahlo, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Jasper Johns, Larry Poons, and Robert Motherwell. The museum was essential, Siren said, because “we live in the most visual of centuries.”
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