Gilbane Building Company joins Buffalo AKG Art Museum for Celebratory Ribbon-Cutting
Buffalo, NY – June 14, 2023 – Gilbane Building Company joined the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) to for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the start of the museum’s summer opening season. The event marked the first opportunity for the public to visit the museum’s renewed and vastly expanded campus designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. Gilbane served as the project’s construction manager and general contractor.
The culmination of a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, and three-and-half years of construction, the new Buffalo AKG comprises more than 50,000 square feet of prime exhibition space, five state-of-the-art studio classrooms, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Town Square, and more than half an acre of new public green space situated above an underground parking garage. Designed with substantial input from communities throughout Western New York and the museum’s leadership, the renewed and expanded campus is ensconced within the city’s beloved Frederick Law Olmsted–designed Delaware Park. With the addition of three new points of entry positioned throughout the campus, the museum’s architectural presence now reflects and advances its mission to radically increase the accessibility of its facilities and engage all members of its community with an inclusive, interactive, and porous campus.
“It’s been an extraordinary honor for Gilbane to build the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum,” said Keith Leal, Vice President and Upstate New York Business Leader, Gilbane Building Company. “This exquisite museum is truly a masterpiece and will captivate visitors from all over the world. We are incredibly grateful for our partnership with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum team, OMA, Cooper Robertson, Arc Building Partners, our subcontractor partners and the trades workers. This transformational project is the result of tremendous collaboration and dedication and will make Buffalo proud.”
Following the celebration and a special preview day on June 13 dedicated to the museum’s community partners, educators, and members, the entire new campus will be open to the public free of admission from June 15 through June 18, 2023. Beginning June 19, 2023, the public will be able to visit the museum’s renovated Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building, Seymour H. Knox Building, and the new Ralph Wilson Town Square, featuring Common Sky, a new, monumental site-specific artwork by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces. On the campus’s north side, the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, a new work of signature architecture by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, will open to the public on July 20, 2023.
The New Buffalo AKG Campus, Inaugural Exhibitions & New Artist
Commissions Driven to expand its accessibility and engagement with its local and global communities, in November 2019, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (as it was known since its previous expansion in 1962) broke ground on the most significant campus expansion and development project in the museum’s 161-year history. Now, on June 12, 2023, the museum reopens as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
On the north side of the campus is the Gundlach Building—a work of signature architecture designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, which adds more than 30,000 square feet of exhibition space. Featuring a translucent glass curtain wall, the Gundlach Building furthers the museum’s mission of accessibility and initiates a dialogue with the surrounding community, inverting the traditional model of the art museum as an opaque facility and creating tremendous porosity between interior and exterior.
Galleries are located on all three floors of the Gundlach Building. Ranging from the intimate Ronnen Glass Box Theater on the ground floor, to the enclosed Sculpture Terrace on the second, to the expansive 7,530-square-foot gallery on the third, the Gundlach Building offers artists and curators a broad range of highly flexible exhibition spaces to present contemporary and modern art of all scales and media. Visitors can enter the Gundlach Building both from the ground level and from the subsurface parking garage. The staircase from the parking garage to the ground level will be adorned with Others Will Know, an innovative site-specific artwork by Swedish artist Miriam Bäckström. The immersive woven tapestry was designed using 3-D mapping and virtual reality technologies to create the illusion of depth, transparency, and multi-dimensionality.
The inaugural exhibition on the first floor of the Gundlach Building is Clyfford Still: A Legacy for Buffalo— a presentation of the museum’s entire collection of thirty-three works by Clyfford Still, alongside an installation of works by artists influenced by or in dialogue with Still’s work, including Joe Bradley, Georg Baselitz, Richard Diebenkorn, and Ida Ekblad. To inaugurate the new building’s Glass Box Theater, the museum will present the immersive audio-visual installation Lap-See Lam: Dreamers’ Quay, marking the artist’s first North American museum exhibition.
The Gundlach Building is physically connected to the Wilmers and Knox Buildings through the John J. Albright Bridge. The Albright Bridge takes visitors from the second floor of the Gundlach Building to the main floor of the Wilmers Building through a unique, circuitous path that was designed to protect a grove of historic oak trees, ensure a slope compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and facilitate the transport of artworks from one end of the campus to the other.
A masterpiece of neoclassical architecture, the creation of the Buffalo AKG involved extensive updates and improvements to the Wilmers Building, including the installation of an entirely new roof, a thorough cleaning of its marble façade, the replacement of cracked marble with red oak flooring, and the recreation of the historic staircase that originally adorned the building’s west façade. Presented in the Wilmers Building’s Hemicycle Gallery is the special exhibition Through a Modernist Lens: Buffalo and the Photo-Secession, which explores the Buffalo AKG’s significant historic photography collection, which originated in 1910—the landmark year when the museum hosted the groundbreaking International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography, the first show organized by an American museum that aimed to elevate photography’s stature from a purely scientific or documentary pursuit to a visual form of artistic expression.
On view throughout the rest of the Wilmers Building, as well as the second and third floors of the Gundlach Building, is a major installation of the museum’s world-renowned collection of modern and contemporary art organized by the Curatorial Department, led by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, and Holly Hughes, the Buffalo AKG’s Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection. The installation includes more than 400 artworks—dating from the second half of the eighteenth century to the present—installed chronologically in order to present the evolution of Western modern art and international contemporary art over the last two centuries.
Encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and video and time-based media, the inaugural collection installation underscores the power of the Buffalo AKG’s new campus to dynamically present a broad spectrum of modern and contemporary art across media and scales. The presentation culminates on the Gundlach Building’s monumental third floor that will be dedicated to showcasing major highlights of the museum’s recent acquisitions, including works by Nick Cave, Jeffrey Gibson, Arthur Jafa, Anselm Kiefer, Simone Leigh, and Teresa Margolles, among many others.
Substantial improvements were also made to the museum’s existing Seymour H. Knox Building, designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1962. The building’s original open-air and largely inaccessible interior courtyard has been covered with a site-specific artwork, Common Sky, by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces. The sculpture is a canopy of glass and mirrors that transforms the space into the 6,000-square-foot Ralph Wilson Town Square—the centerpiece of the museum’s community engagement and outreach activities. Free of admission charges year-round, the Knox Building features the 2,000-square-foot M&T Bank Gallery, five state-of-the-art studio classrooms, the 350-seat Stanford and Judith Lipsey Auditorium, and a new restaurant, Cornelia, adorned with a new site-specific commission by artist Firelei Báez, a thirty-foot-long glass mosaic, Chorus of the Deep (something ephemeral and beautifully whole, when seen from the edge of one’s vision, too full when taken head on), 2023. To open the new M&T Bank Gallery, the museum has organized Looking Back: Lucas Samaras’s Mirrored Room, which will focus on the artist’s Room No. 2, 1966, popularly known as the Mirrored Room, one of the most beloved works in the museum’s collection. Alongside Samaras’s iconic work, which was recently conserved, the museum will showcase archival and community-generated photographs of visitors experiencing the work over the decades and a custom-built photo booth for visitors to record testimonials.
About the Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the AlbrightKnox 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 summer 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 is 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.
About Gilbane Building Company
Gilbane Building Company provides a full slate of construction and facilities-related services – from pre-construction planning and integrated consulting capabilities to comprehensive construction management, close-out and facility management services – for clients across various markets. A family business founded in 1870, Gilbane has active participation from the 4th, 5th and 6th generations of the Gilbane family.
Since 1949, Gilbane has delivered construction services in New York State for clients across multiple market sectors, including commercial office, multi-unit and high-rise residential, cultural, education, healthcare, public sector, science and technology, and mission critical. For more information, visit www.gilbaneco.com.