The Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, which opened July 12 to considerable fanfare for a week before closing to complete remaining work, will reopen Thursday.
This will mark the first time the paying public can visit all three buildings, including the restored and renovated 1905 Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers building and 1962 Seymour H. Knox Building.
The new 82-space underground parking garage also will open Thursday.
Museum officials had hoped to reopen the Gundlach Building on July 20, but finishing touches needed throughout the building – as well as work on the John J. Albright Bridge and the curved sliding glass doors in the basement – required two additional weeks.
“This moment represents the culmination of years of hard work by hundreds of people,” said Janne Sirén, museum director. “With the opening of the Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, the John J. Albright Bridge and the underground parking garage, visitors will be able to enjoy the entirety of the new museum campus in its full glory with more than 400 artworks on view.
“Looking at this project now, I can only say that what’s difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer,” he said.
The $195 million expansion, restoration and renovation of the museum, formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery – which began in January 2020, two months after the museum shut down – has added substantially more gallery space and broadened access by offering free admission to the Knox Building. The whole campus is now also ADA-compliant.
The transformed campus includes the return of the grand stairway in front of the Wilmers Building and a lawn on museum grounds where a surface parking lot had been, reversing changes made in 1962.
When the three-story, glass-and-marble Gundlach Building reopens, it will be with works on the first floor’s double-height gallery by artists influenced by Clyfford Still, an early innovator of…
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