Last weekend was a good time to be out and about in Buffalo. We visited the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is the renamed, updated, and expanded Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Albright-Knox was always a favorite place of ours, and the museum got some good news back in the 2010’s at some point: a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Gundlach gave the museum a big pile of money, which led to the museum’s expansion. A whole new building was erected, new art was collected (the museum’s primary mission is modern art), and last year the newly re-done Buffalo AKG Art Museum was finally re-opened. (The COVID pandemic had a predictable effect on the project, that is to say, delaying it a few years.)
As one of her Christmas gifts, I bought The Wife a membership (for both of us, actually), and this past weekend we finally made it to the Buffalo AKG. And yes, it is amazing. It was always a wonderful museum, but the new addition and reorganization of the galleries makes it feel like something from a different city entirely.
The next morning–Sunday morning–I ventured down to Canalside in Buffalo, mainly choosing that destination because the weather had been warm and rainy all weekend, so my usual hiking haunts were likely to be unpleasantly muddy.
Most of us don’t become enough of a tourist where we live!