Author: Mark Summer | Date published: May 30, 2023 | 5 -minute read
Source: Buffalo News
The work to create a new Buffalo AKG Art Museum is seen in the soon-to-open Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, the return of the grand stairs outside the 1905 building and the kaleidoscopic canopy that adorns the newly named Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square.
Less evident has been the planning to let people near and far know about this major cultural achievem
ent that opens June 12 in Buffalo.
“The marketing campaign for the opening of the Buffalo AKG is the largest and most far-reaching advertising campaign in the museum’s history,” said Callie Johnson, Buffalo AKG’s director of communications and community engagement.
It also helps to have Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, already singing your praises.
Armstrong had a chance to tour the museum on Thursday with Janne Sirén, the Buffalo AKG director.
“It’s commonly known that the museum has one of the great collections in America,” Armstrong said. “With this renovation and expansion, it seems likely to me that it will become an obligatory place for art lovers to visit. That’s complimented by the astonishing array of architecture in the city. It’s really a complete package.”
Regionally, advertising has been seen, or will soon appear, on TV, radio stations and billboards, and in The Buffalo News, Buffalo Spree and an array of smaller publications. Beyond Western New York, several ads have appeared or will appear in conjunction with Visit Buffalo Niagara in the print and digital versions of the New York Times, the closest thing to a national paper of record. A full-page announcement appeared in a special museum section earlier this month.
“This is a magnificent, transgenerational opportunity for the various Western New York communities to institutionally come together and market the region.”
– Former Visit Buffalo Niagara President Jonathan Dandes
Digital ads also are planned. Print ads will go into the visual arts publications Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail and, in Toronto, the Walrus.
Visit Buffalo Niagara is complementing Buffalo AKG’s ad campaign with a marketing effort that boosts the museum and other Buffalo’s cultural attractions. A more Buffalo AKG-focused ad effort will occur later in the year.
The current colorful ad features five people with silhouettes over them of the Guaranty Building, the Richardson Olmsted Campus towers and Buffalo & Erie County Botanical Gardens. Words that surround the image, under “Weekend (Buffalo Remix),” make references that begin with Fitz Books & Waffles, the Olmsted parks and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House and end with the Buffalo AKG.
“We really view this as a once-in-a generation opportunity to reintroduce Buffalo to the traveling public and to the traveling media,” said Ed Healy, Visit Buffalo Niagara’s vice president of marketing. “It doesn’t really get any bigger than this.”
Great expectations
The expansion, restoration and renovation project at the former Albright-Knox Art Gallery is the biggest change to the campus since the opening in 1962 of the Gordon Bun shaft-designed building, now known as the Seymour H. Knox Building, which occurred 100 years after the formation of the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, which oversees the museum.
The completion of the Darwin Martin Complex was expected to draw considerable fanfare from the travel press and others, only to be severely hampered by the pandemic. Healy foresees a far different outcome with Buffalo AKG and is excited about the impact it will provide to other tourist destinations in Western New York.
“We’ve been talking about this for a couple years now,” Healy said. “We really are pulling out all the stops and using every tool we have at our disposal.”
Buffalo AKG and Visit Buffalo Niagara will co-host a press trip with cultural journalists from around the country on June 8 and 9. The first day will be devoted to AKG, with a chance for journalists to interview Sirén, as well as architect Shohei Shigematsu and artists who created new works, including the co-creators of the “Common Sky” sculpture. The journalists will be provided overnight accommodations at the Richardson Hotel and whisked the next day in a motor coach for a tour of arts and cultural attractions.
“We want to let people know that we have this world-class museum of modern and contemporary art, but we also have an extremely vibrant cultural community beyond the walls of the AKG,” Healy said. “We feel it’s our job to connect the dots.”
The reopening of the Buffalo AKG, which for the first time will offer free admission in the Knox Building, “is really a story of a city reinventing itself over the course of the past 10 to 20 years,” Healy said. “It is the culmination of all this investment in new tourism attractions, assets, amenities and infrastructure.”
The tourism bureau’s ads target people interested in arts and culture in key feeder markets. Those are the tri-states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, along with Pittsburgh and Cleveland, southern Ontario, and central and eastern New York.
“These are tens of millions of people with a higher likelihood of traveling to Buffalo from those markets,” Healy said.
The ads have been placed in the New Yorker, Architectural Digest, Conde Nast Traveler and the New York Times.
Visit Buffalo Niagara has revamped its website to better reach its 200,000 subscribers found across different platforms on social media, and is launching targeted ads on Instagram and Facebook.
The organization also sent representatives to an international writers conference in San Antonio earlier this month to rev up excitement over the Buffalo AKG, and are working with tour operators to put together packages with the AKG at the center of itineraries.
Regional boost
A 2021 study by the University at Buffalo Regional Institute offers projections after the reopening that the museum and others hope will materialize.
The study projected 185,000 to 205,000 museum-goers, an increase of more than 123,332 visitors. The most optimistic estimate forecasts 45% of visitors will come from out of town, compared to 31% before the museum closed for renovations in November 2019. Between 24,652 and 33,210 visitors, depending on two estimates, were expected to have a three to four-night hotel stay.
The museum also is expected to generate visitor spending of $17.9 million to $23 million annually, and $3 million to $4 million in state and local tax revenues.
Jillian Jones, Buffalo AKG deputy director, said new visitor amenities are intended to make the museum more visitor-friendly than ever.
The changes include family and nursing rooms, more restrooms and the changes to the Knox Building, with the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square, the LEGO Foundation-sponsored Creative Commons, an art gallery and updated auditorium among them. There will also be two food outlets – the Cornelia cafe, just outside the Town Square, and Sculpture Bar, which will offer coffee, wine, muffins and other small bites on the Gundlach Building’s second floor.
Bridget Niland, dean of Niagara University’s College of Hospitality, Sport and Tourism Management, said she’s been encouraged by the attention the museum and Buffalo have been receiving in the national and specialty press, including a prominent shout-out the city had in Architectural Digest earlier this year. “That Regional Institute report was so rich with data and projections, and the dominos are falling into place because of what’s happened since,” she said.
Niland thinks the changes coming to the Buffalo AKG can be a major catalyst for linking tourism between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, a proposition that has bewitched tourism and government officials in the past.
“The tourism industry always talks about, ‘How do we get that one thing to get people to stay one more day?’ I think this is it,” Niland said. “You have people who are naturally going to the Falls, and now there’s something new for them to see from the architectural side.”
Jonathan Dandes, a former president of Visit Buffalo Niagara and corporate vice president of Rich Products, is also excited by the potential.
“This is a magnificent, transgenerational opportunity for the various Western New York communities to institutionally come together and market the region,” Dandes said. “Given the numbers that we would expect to visit the gallery, I hope all of the culturals and marketing organizations will figure out how to come together and benefit everybody.”
