Buffalo AKG Art Museum

The museum was founded in the late nineteenth century, when Buffalo was a booming industrial and shipping city at the western end of the Erie Canal and the eastern end of the Great Lakes. Its first grand building was raised as a fine-arts pavilion around the time Buffalo hosted a great world's fair, and it opened soon after as a permanent home for art.

Later gifts and endowments, from families whose names the museum has carried, funded expansions and, above all, a habit of buying new and challenging art early. That willingness to collect the present rather than only the safely past is what gave a mid-size city one of the country's great modern collections. This is the homeland of the Seneca of the Haudenosaunee, whose country the city was built upon.

The strength of the museum is the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It holds significant works of impressionism and post-impressionism, but it is most celebrated for its abstract expressionists, pop artists, and the movements that followed, gathered when they were fresh and often controversial.

That forward-looking eye continues, and the galleries mix established masters with the newest contemporary work, so a visit spans more than a century of restless change in art. The collection's depth means the museum can show the arc of modern art in a way few institutions its size can match.

The original gallery is a dignified white Greek-temple design from the early twentieth century, columns and marble in the classical manner, a building meant to give art a temple of its own. A mid-century addition brought a modernist wing, and a recent major expansion added a dramatic new building of glass, light, and open volume.

The pairing of solemn old stone and luminous new glass is part of the experience, a visible conversation between the museum's founding era and its present. Landscaped grounds and outdoor sculpture knit the buildings together across the campus.

The museum sits on the edge of Delaware Park, part of the park-and-parkway system that Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, laid out across Buffalo. A visit pairs naturally with a walk around the park lake and down the leafy Elmwood strip of shops and cafes.

Buffalo rewards the architecture-minded traveler, with a Frank Lloyd Wright house complex, a Louis Sullivan skyscraper downtown, and grand grain elevators along the waterfront all within reach. Summer and fall are the pleasantest seasons for combining the museum with walks around the city, while its galleries make a warm refuge in Buffalo's long, snowy winters.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.