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creating a leadership-level director of community engagement position. To provide art for those who might not be inclined to visit, an “art truck” has been commissioned, transporting art beyond the gallery walls to support the museum’s Public Art Initiative.

The abiding problem with the Bunshaft courtyard was simply being located in one of the snowiest cities in the United States. It was splendid in theory—and in the summer months—but given the museum’s decades of difficulty in actually using it as a space for hanging art and gathering, OMA’s solution to cap it is pragmatic and agreeable. The peristyle courtyard has a new ceiling that’s decidedly non-Bunshaftian in fashion, but results in an intriguing dialogue. Previously, the courtyard had a single tree, another trapping of a modernist repurposing of nature as sculpture at its essence. Now, it has been replaced by Common Sky , an arboreal installation by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces, which features a far-from-natural but very fun canopy of acoustic panels covered in reflective skin extending over the space beneath an undulating dome. They also added a second entrance facing Delaware Park, restoring the original Olmsted link between museum and park.

Sirén spoke of a prime interest in restoring this connection: “How do you take down barriers from entering a museum? First of all you make it so easy to come in that it’s almost like you are slipping in; you don't even notice that you’ve entered. It’s free, there’s no one at a desk. If you want to just take a shortcut from east to west, you can do that.”

Let’s not forget the art. The AKG’s collection is strong in many regards, but particularly in abstract expressionism. Ellsworth Kelly, Gene Davis, Richard Hunt, and Tony Ausler have come out of the vaults, and 33 Clyfford Still pieces are on display in the inaugural exhibition, Clyfford Still: A Legacy for Buffalo.

An exhibition of recent acquisitions also showcases pieces by Nick Cave, Ragna Bley,

Tiffany Chung, and more. One Gundlach gallery is named after Marisol, the Venezuelan American Pop art polymath. The AKG was the first museum to acquire her work, and she repaid this favor by donating her estate to the museum; an exhibition is coming next year. Other new notables include installation pieces that activate new and unexpected display spaces, like Cornelia Firelei Báez’s Chorus of the Deep : The aqueous glass tile mosaic in the new courtyard literally shines. And a Miriam Bäckström tapestry is even being installed at the museum’s garage entrance, an admirable use of a space most would ignore.

Museum expansions are intrinsically tricky. The job is always to respect your elders without parroting, and plenty of expansions fail on one or both counts. OMA’s work is ultra-2023 in character, and yet the project does reflect a nuanced attention to what was there and what wasn’t. “I think that modernism was all about flexibility” Shigematsu ed, “but the 1905 building is all about spatial character. Both are important, and we need to embrace both. We’re not into compromising flexibility, but we don’t want to make a gallery that’s the same everywhere either. In a subtle way we’re trying to inject a spatial specificity to the place.” By this count, OMA’s new Buffalo AKG genuinely succeeds.