1285 Elmwood Ave

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery — now known as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum — at 1285 Elmwood Avenue is one of the great art museums of the United States, housed in a magnificent Neoclassical building that is itself a landmark of American civic architecture. The original building was designed by Buffalo's preeminent architect Edward B. Green and funded by industrialist and philanthropist John J. Albright, and it opened in 1905 as the home of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, one of the oldest art institutions in the country.

Green's design is among the finest American examples of the Neoclassical temple form applied to museum architecture. The building's austere Greek Doric portico — with its massive unfluted columns of Vermont marble — presents one of the most powerful classical facades in upstate New York. The severity of the exterior gives way inside to grand top-lit galleries perfectly suited to the display of painting and sculpture. A Knox addition of 1962 by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill extended the museum with a glass-walled wing that has itself become a modernist landmark.

The Albright-Knox built one of the most remarkable collections of modern and contemporary art of any museum its size, with particularly strong holdings in Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and contemporary painting and sculpture. Works by Pollock, de Kooning, Warhol, and hundreds of other major artists made the collection internationally significant.

In 2019, the institution embarked on a transformative $230 million expansion designed by New York firm Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, which added a major new building adjacent to the historic structure while preserving and restoring Green's 1905 original. The expanded campus reopened in 2023 as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, with the historic building serving as the anchor of a revitalized campus.