Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - The Buffalo AKG Art Museum has received a new accolade that the museum hopes will draw even more visitors from around the world.
The museum was among 100 places included in TIME’s 2024 World’s Greatest Places, a significant and distinct honor for the museum that recently undergone a massive rebranding and remodel project.
"We are incredibly excited about it," said Andrew Mayer, Manager of Marketing and Media Relations for the museum in an interview with WBEN
"The staff is very excited. It's been a lot of hard work over the last 10 years or more to kind of get to this point where we are open as the Buffalo AKG. But we're also excited for what it means for the City of Buffalo, it has the potential to really draw a lot of people to this area."
The museum already has generated a lot of interest since its reopening in June of 2023. In its first year of operations as the Buffalo AKG (formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), the museum welcomed approximately 325,000 visitors, shattering a 50-year attendance record.
Visit Buffalo Niagara have been strong promoters of the museum, bringing travel writers to the city to write about what Buffalo has to offer.
"We've been working with the writer who wrote this segment for over a year, we've brought her to Buffalo. She was part of a tour that we held last year for several different writers," said Visit Buffalo Niagara's President and CEO, Patrick Kaler.
"What's also great about this piece was that it mentioned the Richardson Hotel, the Richardson Homestead Campus and the West Side Bazaar. So it gets people thinking about Buffalo as a full destination of things to see and do."
Kaler refers to the Buffalo AKG as "the launching pad" for someone looking to come to the City of Good Neighbors for an arts and cultural experience. He notes there's always something going on at the museum, with new exhibits coming in regularly, concerts and good food.
"It's more than just the art. They have the Lego experience to bring in families, the sky area is free, people can actually have a free experience within the Buffalo AKG as well," Kaler said with WBEN.
"The cafe has a fantastic chef that's creating wonderful dishes there. You can also get a picnic basket so you can have an experience out on the lawn, there activating concerts on the weekend. So it's really a fully immersive experience and you can go many times, even as a resident of Buffalo and Erie County, you can continue to go even just to have these different experiences as well as the ever changing exhibits that they have as well."
"What we hear over-and-over is people walk through the galleries and they're shocked at the strength of our collection, the artworks that we have," Mayer added. "It seems like every new gallery we walk into with them, they're like, 'Oh, my gosh, you have that too.' So it's been nice to kind of see how that understanding has kind of seeped into the broader understanding of what the Buffalo AKG holds. It's become this draw for people around the globe, we have had visitors over the past 12 months from all 50 states, and many countries around the globe."