Ahead of its reopening in June, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York has revealed the 518 works it has acquired since 2019, the year it closed to add more than 50,000 square feet to its campus.
In the past four years, the museum has significantly bulked up its holdings of computer art—a kind of work that many institutions do not often collect—while also amassing the largest collection of Marisol in the world, with roughly 200 works by her added to its holdings.
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The Marisol gift and the purchase of a Yayoi Kusama “Infinity Room” with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden had previously been announced. But the 518 works acquired since 2019 also include a range of works by many of today’s most important artists, from Simone Leigh, who represented the US at the most recent Venice Biennale, to Sin Wai Kin, a nominee for the last edition of the Turner Prize.
There are was also a focus on local artists, with pieces by G. Peter Jemison and Phyllis Thompson entering the collection.
Notably, the museum has stocked up on video art classics, acquiring works such as Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), Joan Jonas’s Volcano Saga (1989), and Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).
“We have a core of great works of media art in the collection, and we started acquiring media art relatively early,” said Cathleen Chaffee, the museum’s chief curator, in an interview. “We really hadn’t acquired a number of those classic works, and we thought it would be a missed opportunity not to share those with our audiences.”
The focus on media art also extended to work made using digital technology of all sorts. Historical pieces by computer art pioneers such as Vera Molnár, Charles Csuri, and Manfred Mohr were acquired, and newer works by artists such as Rhea Myers, Osinachi, and Ix Shells were acquired. At least one NFT, by Simon Denny, entered the collection, making the Buffalo AKG Art Museum one of the few institutions worldwide to own an NFT. (Others include the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)
A fraction of these new acquisitions will be on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum when it reopens in June. Chaffee promised that the Leigh sculpture would be in the galleries, as would pieces by Jeffrey Gibson, Lap-See Lam, and Christine Sun Kim.
“I’m just thrilled that we were able to keep working with artists to really improve the breadth of the collection,” she said.
Below, a look at some of the works recently acquired by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Source: artnews.com