Albright-Knox Art Gallery: inside and out

I really enjoyed my trip to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery yesterday. The main reason for making the trip yesterday was a lecture in the evening by Jennifer Walkowski on John Bennett's plan for the city and John Wade's City Hall. John Hosford is taking a couple classes at the UB library school on Wednesdays so we were able to carpool, as it were. And boy am I glad I went.

The main show at the Albright-Knox is the "Beyond/In Western New York 2010: Alternating Currents." I especially enjoyed Joshua Reiman's four-projector installation on the sublime and Sarah Paul and Suzannah Paul's installation of film against a scrim of old windows. The grid of the windows resonated with the Sol LeWitt wall drawing which is being installed in the stairwell between the old and new buildings, one of his mighty fine "enigmatic vortexes of graphite scribbles." Throughout the galleries were arrows pointing your way or to an emergency callbox or similar things, courtesy of Micah Lexier.



The upper picture is not from the Albright-Knox; it is his "This is an arrow in a vitrine with other things" (2009; photo from an entry on the "View on Canadian art" blog). This arrow does nonetheless have about the shape of the AKAG arrows. When I was done inside the museum, I went out on the grounds and found this arrow pointing to the storm sewer drain near the bottom of the grand stairs from the museum down to the Delaware Park lake.

There was an Andy Goldsworthy video in the court gallery: "Rain Shadow." Goldsworthy is lying on the sidewalk near the grand stairs outside the museum as it starts to rain. He gets up and walks away after it has been raining for a while. The dry spot where his body was of course gets wet, and the rain shadow disappears. The video was done on one of Goldsworthy's trips to Buffalo to work on his "Herd of Stones" which is to be finished in the fall of 2011. At the moment, there's a stack of smaller stones and a few bigger ones, surrounded by protective tape, on the park side of the museum. Nearby, some nice sticks on the ground, also transitory.



There are a few more pictures of my day in Buffalo in my Flickr photostream which is available from the bottom of this blog page. Those of you who will be going to the ARLIS/NA conference in Toronto in 2012 should start getting ready; we'll probably be doing a day trip to Buffalo to see the Albright-Knox and maybe the Darwin Martin House by Frank Lloyd Wright and perhaps some of the greenbelt or the city hall or who knows. Maybe even Niagara Falls.