Case Study – Art and Creativity Flow Against the Current: Hudson River Towns RebornThe Past Is Future
Case Study – Buffalo Artists and Art RebornCase Study – Staying Wild, Staying Healthy: Conservation and Recreation

Buffalo achieved some significant art cachet with its century-old classically designed art museum, the Albright Art Gallery, named after a generous local industrialist.  One of only two buildings constructed for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition with the intention that they be permanent, it was not even completed on time for the fair.  Instead, it opened late, in 1905, as an art museum with a solid classical collection, given by industrialists of that era in Buffalo.

Its traditional collection was markedly enhanced in 1962.  Another local industrialist – a discerning collector as well – Seymour Knox offered the Gallery a stunning collection of Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada and Pop works along with sufficient funds to house the work.  The result was an architecturally important addition by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.  Thus was born the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.  This catapulted Buffalo to the forefront of contemporary art of that time.

Awareness of a need to grow and expand, for a new contemporary world, resulted in yet another major enhancement.  Added in 2023, the next expansion, with the help of yet another local industrialist Jeffrey Gundlach, enlisted Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA and its senior partner Shohei Shigematsu for their first-ever art museum design in America.  A new name, expanded collections, expanded reputation: the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

Almost two decades earlier, there was a growing frustration that the artists of Buffalo and Western New York had never received the acknowledgement owed them, in terms of being collected and preserved and exhibited.  The very state university graduate art education program (an outgrowth of a teacher training college - the State Normal and Training School) that produced Cindy Sherman and held the extensive collected works of Charles Burchfield deserved a proper home.  Not to be outdone by the great stone-and-glass presence across the broad avenue, the Burchfield Penney recruited Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates for, as it turned out, his final commission.  A stunning statement, a bold counterpoint to what had long stood on the other side of the street, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center opened in 2008.

Urban pioneers is a term I have applied to artists who settle into dicier inner-city locations, in search of affordable studio space and sometimes, despite the risks, more authentic life among ordinary people.  This phenomenon has played out both within and between cities all over the world.  When Manhattan downtown priced itself out of existence for artists, they moved to Brooklyn.  When Brooklyn moved upscale and unaffordable, they moved to Detroit and Philadelphia…and now, it seemed, Buffalo.

But now, the art seemed to have escaped to the streets, civilizing the streets and buildings, reassuring its inhabitants that the city was alive again and safe.  Some of these bold displays result from a formal Public Art Initiative under the umbrella of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and others stem from neighborhood initiatives.  The Museum’s program alone is one of the first in the nation of this type begun by a major art museum.  They alone have supported 60 public art installations.  But the total count of public art displays throughout the city now approaches 300, a remarkable statement embracing the arts in and for the city, with no end in sight.

At the very least, Buffalo has become a city of murals, extending from downtown through the Arts District, then along the river that leads toward Niagara Falls, all over the northern residential zone and even halfway out to the airport.  An impressively dense map when one looks at it.

With the widest array of subject, from exuberant floral displays to famous musicians painted large, philosophic expressions, wild and at times psychedelic abstracts, even images of the buffalo.  After which, in truth, the city is not named.  The city’s name Buffalo is in fact a bastardized pronunciation of the French name Beau Fleuve describing the Niagara River flowing from Lake Erie over Niagara Falls and on into Lake Ontario.  So much for legend.  Those are facts!

As massive as these murals are, some with huge figures looking down on ordinary pedestrians and café dwellers, they bring a sense of humanity to their locales.  They say that the streets are safe, the neighborhood is safe, the city is safe.  Some of this may be illusory but studies around the world where street murals have appeared tend to support these contentions.  Buffalo has so many mural-guardians, perhaps the largest number on a per-capita basis of any American city and growing, that their benefits cannot be overlooked.

No way to keep it secret any longer, art is alive in Buffalo, invigorating a city and a spirit, bringing dynamism back to the western end of Upstate.