Steina: Playback @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Steina: Playback 

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Through June 30, 2025 

Steina: Playback surveys the work of pathbreaking media artist Steina Vasulka (Icelandic, active in the United States, born 1940) whose career traverses video, performance, and installation. Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument—initially a Sony Portapak—a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Iceland-born artist did not consider television culture in the United States as a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”

Steina also shaped the avant-garde media arts environment that characterized Buffalo in the 1970s. Steina: Playback represents a homecoming for the artist, who taught at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo for the majority of that decade, and exhibited at the 1978 Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition, The VASULKAS / Steina: Machine Vision, Woody: Descriptions.

With more than a dozen single-channel works and multi-channel environments, this focused retrospective surveys Steina’s fearless DIY approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural. While Steina’s early collaborative works with her life partner Woody Vasulka centered largely around the pair’s obsession with video’s signal and the custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it, her independent works from 1975 onward probe the limits of human perspective and pursue non-anthropocentric modes of visualizing the natural world.

“This exhibition not only offers a revolutionary new view of Steina’s work, but it serves as a compelling reminder of the depth and richness of the media arts environment in Buffalo more broadly,” said Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art and Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. “Steina was a key figure in the arts community in Buffalo in the 1970s and the breadth of her influence is evident in this immersive, evocative exhibition.”

Throughout her career, her works were continually shaped by her shifting environments: from downtown New York’s avant-garde and Buffalo’s experimental media arts scene of the 1970s, to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. In her works from the 1990s onward, new projection technologies allowed her video environments to become even more immersive: flows of river, waves, light, and wind spatialize what the human eye cannot see and seem to offer analogues to the electronic flow of video and audio signals. With her distinctive translation of musical modes, like polyphony, into the visual realm and her effort to exceed human perception, Steina reveals an electronic sublime and attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.

STEINA - BIOGRAPHY

Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, in Iceland in 1940, lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She trained as a violinist in Reykjavik and Prague, and she emigrated to New York City in 1965 with her life partner Woody Vasulka. Initially working as a freelance musician, she began to focus on video in 1970 and, in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), the legendary alternative art space in New York City. After moving to Buffalo in 1973, Steina helped develop the production lab at the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980 where she has lived and worked ever since. Steina has exhibited at leading institutions internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (now the Carnegie Museum of Art); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Important collections with her work include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Julia Stoschek Foundation; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Awards and grants include: Rockefeller Foundation and NEA grants (1982); the Maya Deren Award (1992); the Siemens Media Arts Prize from ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (1995); as well as an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute (1998).

STEINA

MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT Press, 

and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 2025

238 pp., Hardcover, 8 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.

ISBN: 978-0262551625

Accompanying the exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is the new monograph, Steina, which brings renewed recognition to the artist, tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The book is the first comprehensive monograph on the pioneering video artist in more than a decade. Contributors include scholars Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom, who consider how Steina's generative sense of play gave way to methods of processing and computation; contextualize Steina alongside a group of her peers who shared an obsession with the electronic signal; and argue for her interest in video as a proto-virtual space. 

Steina: Playback is organized by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Helga Christoffersen Curator-at-Large and Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. 

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Steina: Playback @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum, March 14 - June 30, 2025

Adam Fuss @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum - "Visual Resonance" Exhibition

Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

Through September 29, 2025

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance, the artist’s first museum show in more than ten years. 

ADAM FUSS (British, born 1961) works with early photographic processes and camera-less techniques to capture one-of-a-kind images. He is known for taking up nineteenth-century innovations in the medium, such as the photogram, which is made by placing objects on light-sensitive paper, with breathtaking results. In this way, Adam Fuss subverts the primacy of the camera and celebrates the print as an independent object. By their very nature, his images capture an aspect of reality that is otherwise fleeting.

Drawn predominantly from the Buffalo AKG's collection, with key loans from the artist and a private collection, each of the photographs in this exhibition is a musing on the energy that exists between life and death. Together, they trace the development of Fuss's My Ghost series, which he began in the early 1990s and continues to the present in his most recent work, titled Theia.

Adam Fuss does not seek to manipulate his subjects; instead, he records their pure essence. This allows him to expose the inherent mystery of his images, leaving viewers to imagine a world beyond. The successive effects of a droplet on a pool or the motion of a snake as it slithers through water embody infinite movement and the creative energy only found in nature. Meanwhile, images of thick billowing smoke evoke the transmutational work of an ancient alchemist searching for answers to life's mysteries, and visions of crushed flowers recall just how fleeting beauty and life can be.

Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance is curated by Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes. The exhibition is inspired by and largely drawn from a significant collection of artworks generously gifted to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum by Deborah Ronnen.

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance

Buffalo AKG Art Museum, April 25 - September 29, 2025

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum + Gammel Strand, Copenhagen

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

April 26 - August 19, 2024

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents After the Sun—Forecasts from the North, a new exhibition that surveys a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment. Organized by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is on view in the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, after which it will travel to Gammel Strand in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Featuring the work of twenty artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, After the Sun considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally. The exhibition presents new artistic engagements that build on the Nordic region’s tradition of depicting the natural world, and asks what art is generated in response to the intensifying global climate crisis.

“As the inaugural exhibition of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is a fitting example of the prescient, global projects that define the Buffalo AKG,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elvin Director. “The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative creates an unprecedented international platform for new art and pressing subject matter. We are honored to present After the Sun and to partner with Gammel Strand in Copenhagen to extend the exhibition’s reach across the Atlantic.”

Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, observed, “This remarkable exhibition envisions the scope of our vulnerability as a species, as we navigate an existence that is increasingly, consistently in extremis. Encompassing artists who approach the pressing subject of climate change from vastly different perspectives, it is a case study for the ways artists can help us see otherwise opaque aspects of life in a time of natural and manmade crises.”

The exhibition’s title is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the Nordic Literature Prize in 2019. Eike has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling that he believes is shared by many: “That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing.” 

As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in After the Sun grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.

Occupying the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building’s special exhibition galleries along with outdoor space on the museum campus, After the Sun presents artistic responses to the climate crisis that range from the analytical to the speculative, the poetic to the political. Some artists consider the repercussions of temporary solutions to climate change, among them Lea Porsager (born Frederikssund, Denmark, 1981, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), in whose hands a sequence of massive disused windmill blade fragments become poignant ruins. Amitai Romm’s (born Jerusalem, 1985, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) slight but throbbing sculptures and sound work are among several in the exhibition to approach science and data related to the environment from a visceral, embodied position. Olof Marsja’s (born Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, 1986, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden) plant-human hybrid sculptures are contemporary guardian figures, related to indigenous knowledge and the artist’s own Sámi tradition. These, and all the artists in After the Sun explore what a meaningful engagement with nature might mean today and how we might forge practical, theoretical, and metaphysical paths forward.

Participating Artists

Sigurður Ámundason (b. 1986, Reykjavik, lives in Reykjavik, Iceland),  

Felipe de Ávila Franco (b. 1982, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in Helsinki, Finland), 

Á. Birna Björnsdóttir (b. 1990, Reykjavik, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway), 

Sara-Vide Ericson (b. 1983, Bollnäs, Sweden, lives in Älvkarhed, Sweden),  

Carola Grahn (b. 1982, Jåhkåmåhkke, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Malmö, Sweden), 

Alma Heikkilä (b. 1984, Pälkäne, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (b. 1982, Helsinki, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Linda Lamignan (b. 1988, Stavanger, Norway, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 

Timimie Märak (b. 1988, Stockholm, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  

Olof Marsja (b. 1986, Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden), 

Santiago Mostyn (b. 1981, San Francisco, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  

Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 

Amitai Romm (b. 1985, Jerusalem, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  

Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna, India, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Inuuteq Storch (b. 1989, Sisimiut, lives in Sisimiut, Greenland),  

Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Turku, Finland, lives in Berlin),  

Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang (b. 1987, Bangkok, lives in Oslo, Norway),  

Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b. 1988, Hamburg, lives in Oslo, Norway)  

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is the inaugural exhibition of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative. It is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is a unique platform in North America for art of the Nordic region in a broad sense, encompassing artists whose practices are tied to a landmass that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Åland Islands. The Initiative is dedicated to organizing programs and exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG and in the Buffalo community with artists and cultural producers across disciplines who are substantively associated with the Nordic region. As part of the Initiative, over the next sixty years the Buffalo AKG will develop North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from the Nordic region.

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Sin Wai Kin @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum - "It's Always You" Exhibition

Sin Wai Kin: It's Always You 

Buffalo AKG Art Museum 

March 1 - August 12, 2024

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents Sin Wai Kin: It’s Always You, a new solo exhibition of the work of one of the world’s most exciting visual artists.

It’s Always You, 2021, which the Buffalo AKG acquired in 2022, encourages viewers to reflect on the performance and commodification of identity in our present moment. The two-channel video work features a boyband of Sin’s construction in which they perform dressed up as each of the band’s four members—The Universe, The Storyteller, The One, and Wai King (a pun on the artist’s name). Each sways in slow motion against a greenscreen to a slow beating rhythm, alternately taking on the frontperson’s solo as they flirtatiously repeat the captivating lyrics.

The personalities that Sin deploys through each character developed out of their careful research into boyband culture, from late 1990s groups such as the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC to contemporary groups such as BTS and Mirror. The members of such bands are often marketed individually, creating distinct fandoms around each. This sociocultural phenomenon serves as the backdrop for the universal message of It’s Always You: that all gender in the social sphere is a staged performance. In addition to the video, the installation features framed “publicity” posters and life-size cutouts of each of the group’s characters, with which visitors are invited to pose and take selfies. By actively engaging with Sin’s work, the public plays along in the performance and commodification of gender identity—a role that offers a collective escape into a world that celebrates the diversity of all beings.

SIN WAI KIN (Canadian, born 1991) produces complicated fictions based on their own journey through the spectrum of gender identity. In their teens, they became interested in the Toronto drag scene but found true liberation in the fluidity of London’s thriving queer community and drag cabarets when they relocated there in 2009. Around this time, the artist performed as Victoria Sin, a drag character that exuded a larger-than-life female archetype. In the artist’s own words, through “a process of doing [female] drag and purposefully putting on a gender and then taking it off again,” Sin’s nonbinary identity was realized. These personal experiences inform their fantastical narratives, in which Sin aims to interrupt social norms around issues of desire, identification, and objectification.

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Caledonia Curry - Swoon @ Albright-Knox Northland, Buffalo, NY - Seven Contemplations

Caledonia Curry - Swoon 

Seven Contemplations

Albright-Knox Northland, Buffalo, NY

Through January 10, 2021

Albright-Knox Northland presents Seven Contemplations, by CALEDONIA CURRY (American, born 1977), who works under the name SWOON.

Caledonia Curry is a New York City–based artist who has achieved international acclaim for her immersive installations, community-based projects, and intricate portraits wheat-pasted on city streets. Her work is widely recognized for advancing the conceptual and formal limits of public artwork, following her vision for art as a catalyst for social transformation and healing. 

Swoon’s site-specific installation at Albright-Knox Northland builds on 20 years of works created in response to the architecture, scale, and spontaneous interactions of the urban landscape. Seven Contemplations is a monumental exhibition that reimagines every surface of the cavernous 8,000-square-foot space with block-print portraits, paper-cut patterns, and sculptural forms that echo the cacophonous layers of the city, the undulating forms of the natural world, and the awe-inspiring expanse of the cosmos with fabric, paper, and found objects.

Seven Contemplations evokes the transcendent sensory and visual experience Caledonia Curry has become known for in her major installations, and also imagines a new way to engage with the idea of transformation by asking viewers to turn inward. When entering the space, individuals are invited to participate in a self-guided viewing experience inspired by the artist’s contemplative meditation practice. All seven large-scale works in the exhibition are accompanied by written prompts leading the viewer in a structured, fixed-gaze meditation. The prompts respond to the visual components of each sculpture with profound questions about our shared human condition that touch on love, loss, grief, transformation, suffering, and forgiveness. 

Caledonia Curry began a daily meditation practice six years ago while struggling with the trauma of growing up in a family affected by opioid addiction. Meditation offered a space to simply be within her own body and consciousness, undoing the dissociative responses she learned as a way to manage a painful upbringing and ultimately leading to shifts in awareness that generated healing. Through sharing this experience with others as part of a public art installation, she hopes to provide space not only for individual growth, but also collective healing. As communities face simultaneous crises caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the subsequent economic downturn, and a national reckoning with police brutality, she believes self-compassion and compassion for others learned through meditation are critical to achieving the social justice envisioned by liberation movements. 

The works in the exhibition include Thalassa, Medea, Tree of Life, Dawn and Gemma, Memento Mori, Cosmos, and Cicada. Thalassa, one of Swoon’s most recognizable works, was originally commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2011. The 12-foot-tall linoleum block print was inspired by the Greek goddess of the sea rising triumphantly out of the water in a powerful, protective stance imagined in response to the horror of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In this iteration, Thalassa asks us, ”Who were you before you were born?”

Medea is a sculpture and sound installation that visually centers around the portrait of a home that is splitting apart. Caledonia Curry looks through time at the intergenerational trauma passed on by women in her family, confronting her deepest fears and prompting viewers to consider the emotions that dislocate us from our bodies. Dawn and Gemma and Memento Mori come together in a single sculpture that considers the cycle of birth and death. Cicada, Swoon’s first stop-motion animation, considers the incremental transformations that elude detection and lead us towards self-realization. Cosmos asks us to feel ourselves within the fabric of a universe much bigger than we are. 

Tree of Life, the central sculpture of the exhibition, greets viewers as they enter Albright-Knox Northland’s main hall. The sculpture’s canopy stretches nearly 30 feet across, with a cascade of hand-cut paper tendrils and hand-dyed fabric branches and roots. At the center of the trunk is a spring of flowing water. In response to this sculpture, Caledonia Curry asks us to consider the miracle of life that is given to us freely with each breath we take, and how this gift enables us to transform ourselves and the world in which we live. 

CALEDONIA CURRY, or SWOON, is recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Caledonia Curry’s gallery and museum exhibitions are deeply influenced by her activism and community projects outside of traditional gallery spaces. She has founded and led multiple collaborative projects that use art to respond to crisis. These include Konbit Shelter, in response to the 2011 earthquake in Haiti; Music Boxin response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2011; Braddock Tiles in response to the economic crisis in Braddock, Pennsylvania; and The Road Home in collaboration with Philadelphia Mural Arts and the Million Person Project in response to the opioid epidemic in North Philadelphia. She is also known for her floating sculptures and experimental living projects on water that include The Miss Rockaway Armada (Mississippi River); Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (Hudson River); and the Swimming Cities of Serenissima (Adriatic Sea), which crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale. In 2015 she founded the Heliotrope Foundation to support her social justice projects.

Caledonia Curry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden; MIMA Contemporary Art Museum, Brussels, Belgium; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her first museum retrospective was The Canyon: 1999–2017 at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). 

ALBRIGHT-KNOX NORTHLAND

612 Northland Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14211

www.albrightknox.org

____________________

Auguste Rodin, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY - Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation

Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, 

Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

April 20 - July 3, 2004

The Albright-Knox is presentis the exhibition Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. This fascinating exhibition features approximately 60 bronze sculptures from throughout the artist’s career, including many of his best-known and most-loved works: The Thinker, The Kiss, The Cathedral, Monumental Head of Pierre de Wiessant, Monumental Head of Balzac, and The Three Shades.

"Rodin is considered to be 'The Father of Modern Sculpture' because he revolutionized sculpture in the late 19th century," said Ken Wayne, the Gallery's Curator of Modern Art and organizer of the exhibition for its presentation in Buffalo. "He took sculpture in entirely new directions from what he believed it had become – somewhat stale, lifeless, and boring. Instead, Rodin injected passion, feeling and life into sculpture."

The exhibition also features works on paper by Auguste Rodin and a photograph of Rodin by legendary photographer Edward Steichen, plus large-scale documentary photo blow-ups for background. A special educational component will be a three-dimensional display explaining the lost-wax casting process by which bronze sculptures have been produced for centuries.

All of this material will be further supplemented by two Rodin sculptures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s own collection, Eve and the Age of Bronze, allowing regular gallery visitors an opportunity to see familiar works from the museum’s permanent collection in a fresh, new context.

Auguste Rodin is recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern period. He expanded the range of subjects for sculpture, not limiting it to historical and religious figures or scenes. He consciously sought to reinvigorate the sculpture medium by injecting passion and emotion. Rodin avoided the literalness of academic sculpture by introducing the modernist qualities of ambiguity and open-ended meaning whereby a sculpture could have several meanings instead of just one. An excellent example is his famous work The Thinker. What is he thinking? Who is he? Why is he naked?

Another major contribution to modern sculpture was the fragment or partial figure, which Rodin felt held great power and mystery. He got the idea for making partial figures from the many ancient fragments that were surfacing on the Paris art market in the late 19th century following archaeological digs. Rodin reasoned that if we can admire and revere the many broken and partial ancient figures, such as the Venus de Milo, why can we not make such figures? Indeed, he saw himself as the true heir to Phidias, the ancient sculptor. He wanted to return sculpture to its rightful path after it had lost its way because of academic sculptors. Like the ancients, he wanted to create sculpture that embodied his time.

Born in 1840 to a modest French family, Auguste Rodin in his teens attended the government school for craft and design. Here he learned by drawing plaster casts of ancient sculpture and by modeling in clay, modeling being the basis of sculpture in his day. Although he sought admission to the École des Beaux Arts (the very prestigious government school for fine art), he was rejected three times. Rodin's struggle for recognition dominated his early career. For years he earned a living by producing, as an anonymous member of a workshop, ornamental sculpture for Carrier-Belleuse, a successful decorative sculptor of the period. While his work as a craftsman provided a steady income, Rodin yearned to exhibit his own work under his own name. In the 1860s he submitted his sculpture to the annual juried Paris Salon exhibitions – the most important shows of their day – but suffered a series of rejections. (His work was finally admitted in 1877.)

During Auguste Rodin’s lifetime, the most highly regarded sculptures were projects done for public places because they were thought to have universal rather than personal meaning. These projects were usually commissioned by committees specifically formed to oversee the creation of these works. Rodin received his first public commission in 1880; it was to create a sculptural entrance for a (never-built) museum of decorative arts in Paris. He chose to design the door as a showpiece for Dante’s The Divine Comedy, an epic poem written about 1308, which was very popular in France in the 19th century. The work Rodin created is called The Gates of Hell.

In the years that followed, Rodin was commissioned to create other monuments, including The Burghers of Calais (1884-88), the Monument to Honoré de Balzac (about 1897), and the Monument to Victor Hugo (about 1897-1900). In 1900 Rodin stood at the pinnacle of success: an entire pavilion at the Paris World Exposition was devoted to a retrospective exhibition of his work. In 1908 he moved to the Hôtel Biron, a large home where he lived and worked until he died in 1917. A year before he died, Rodin donated this estate and his studio and its contents to the French government, in exchange for France’s agreement to establish a museum there. Today the Hôtel Biron is home to the Musée Rodin.

B. Gerald Cantor (1916-1996) and his wife, Iris Cantor, built the largest private collection of Rodin works in the world: approximately 750 large- and small-scale sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and memorabilia. The Cantors have generously shared their collection with others through exhibitions and donations. They have given more than 450 works to more than 70 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Stanford University Museum of Art received 187 of those works.

The Cantors’ support of the arts was recognized in 1995 by President and Mrs. Clinton, who bestowed upon them the National Medal of Arts. The current exhibition has been organized and circulated by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, which was established to promote and encourage excellence through the support!of art exhibitions, scholarship, and the endowment of galleries and sculpture gardens at major museums. Since being established in 1978, the Foundation has circulated various Rodin exhibitions to more than 150 venues in the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Singapore, attracting a total audience of more than 5 million people. 

ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

www.albrightknox.org