Buffalo Fine Arts Academy

On November 11, 1862, a group of prominent Buffalo citizens met to adopt a constitution and by-laws for the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy. At this initial meeting, it was agreed to establish and maintain a permanent art gallery in Buffalo. Until this was accomplished in 1905, the Academy held exhibitions in several locations in downtown Buffalo. In 1905, the Academy moved to its current location on Elmwood Avenue. The 1905 building, gifted by Buffalo entrepreneur and philanthropist John J. Albright, was intended to serve first as the Fine Arts Pavilion of the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, but was completed too late for that purpose in 1905. The original building was designed by Edward B. Green, a distinguished Buffalo architect also responsible for the design of the Toledo Museum of Art and the Dayton Art Institute. In 1962, the Gallery was significantly enhanced with the addition of a new wing designed by Gordon Bunshaft, also Buffalo-born, of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill of New York. Made possible with major donations from Seymour H. Knox, Jr. and his family, and hundreds of other contributors, the new addition was dedicated in 1962, and the museum was renamed the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Significant exhibitions in the Albright's early history include the First International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography (1910), arranged by Alfred Stieglitz, and one of the first museum exhibitions to acknowledge photography as a fine art. From June to October 1916, the Gallery's indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces overflowed with over 800 sculptural works during An Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture. In the 1950s, the Gallery acquired and exhibited works by the Abstract Expressionists within a year or two of a work's creation, truly collecting the contemporary art of the time. Today, the Gallery is a modern/contemporary art museum, with a collection especially rich in post-war American and European art. Abstract expressionism, pop art, and art of the 1970s through the end of the century are well represented by exceptional examples by artists such as Gorky, Pollock, Warhol, and Johns. In addition, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are well represented by such leading French artists of the nineteenth century as Gauguin and van Gogh. Cubism, surrealism, constructivism, and other trends of the revolutionary twenties and thirties are documented by a large selection of significant works by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Miró, Mondrian, Rodchenko, and others.