The name Ralph C. Wilson Jr. will soon be added to another site in Buffalo, this time, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
With its reopening set for June, the renovated Buffalo AKG Art Museum is taking a cue from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which reaped huge benefits from an expansion a decade ago.
A stadium, city park and children's museum have all been named for the founder and longtime owner of the Buffalo Bills who died in 2014.
The new 6,000-square-foot community area in the Seymour H. Knox Building will soon bear his name in a space designed in 1962 by Gordon Bunshaft that originally was an open-air courtyard at the historic museum.
A rendering of the "Common Sky" canopy for a new civic space coming to the Seymour H. Knox Building that will be called the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square. Reopening of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, is now set for June 12.
Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square will be covered by "Common Sky," a kaleidoscopic sculpture commissioned for the space and designed by artists Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces.
Visits to the Knox Building, as well as the new, three-story Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building and the refurbished 1905 building now named for the late banker Robert Wilmers will have to wait a little longer. The reopening of the museum – closed since November 2019 for a $195 million redesign and renovation – is being pushed back from late May almost three weeks to June 12.
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"Having Ralph's name on the new Town Square at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is an incredible honor and very fitting," said Mary Wilson, Ralph's widow and a life trustee of the Ralph C. Wilson Foundation.
The building is expected to be the museum hub for community engagement, as well as learning and creativity programming. Admission to the Knox Building will be free year-round. There will also be 2,000 square feet of gallery space for the museum's modern and contemporary art and the new on-site Cornelia restaurant.
"Common Sky," which features interlocking glass panels, is intended to integrate the indoors with the outdoors, with a funnel that represents, in part, the turbulent snow and rain known to Western New York.
"I recently toured the Ralph Wilson Town Square and was blown away by the beauty of the 'Common Sky' work of art that creates an indoor space that brings all the sights and feelings of outdoors all around you," Mary Wilson said. "I look forward to this becoming a new cultural landmark in the city of Buffalo, bringing people together from all walks of life, just as Ralph did throughout his life."
The naming of the space in Wilson's honor is in recognition of the more than $11 million contributed by the foundation in his name for the creation and operation of the museum.
In 2016, the foundation gave $6 million in response to Gundlach’s first matching challenge. It gave another $90,000 in 2018 to facilitate a comprehensive community-focused planning process.
After the process was completed in 2021, the foundation gave the Buffalo AKG $5 million to build and program the space.
The Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation today will announce a $100 million donation that will provide funding in perpetuity to support many of the region's most well-known attractions.
Also that year, the Wilson Foundation committed to give the Buffalo AKG $500,000 in annual operating funds through a grant administered by the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo. The grant was part of a $100 million commitment made to 13 arts and cultural organizations to help their long-term viability.
The planning grant the Wilson Foundation provided enabled the museum to convene a 22-member Town Square taskforce and undertake a rigorous planning process.
Community gathering spaces in other cold-climate cities were considered, as well as those that offered free admission. A public meeting was held in March 2019, and online feedback was provided to discuss how to apply what was learned to the Wilson Town Square.
Together, ideas were brought to the surface that formed the foundation for what the space will offer when it opens.
Take a tour over the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where construction is underway on a massive new campus expansion that will double the amount of the gallery's world-renowned collection that can be on display. The gallery will reopen in 2022 as the Buffalo AKG Art Gallery.
"The Wilson Foundation assisted in planning the space and engaging community voices not just in a ceremonial way, but in a true, authentic way," said Jillian Jones, Buffalo AKG's director of advancement. "From that, we articulated clear goals for the space that reflected what our community wanted to see."
The museum then applied for funding to build the space they planned.
"The Wilson Foundation is really unique in that it allows for the space and time for an organization to study and articulate what it needs, and then it provides those resources," Jones said. "We're most grateful that the foundation trusted all of us – the museum and the people in the community that spoke up during this process.
"We collectively are excited to debut a space we think Mr. Wilson would have been extremely proud of."
Mark Sommer covers preservation, development, the waterfront, culture and more. He's also a former arts editor at The News.
Mark Sommer
News Staff Reporter
