The art world and OSU Cowboy family lost one of its beloved members last weekend with the passing of renowned Native American artist and printmaker Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Seminole/Absentee Shawnee).

Harjo died May 21 at the age of 77.

Graduating from OSU in 1974 with a Fine Art degree, Harjo went on to produce heavily sought-after artwork for over five decades.

As one of our nation’s prominent Native American artists, Harjo never lost sight of his Oklahoma roots, staying based in Oklahoma City throughout his prolific career.

Among his many national accolades and accomplishments, Harjo received the 2002 OSU Distinguished Alumni Award, was named the Red Earth Festival Honored One in 2003, was recognized by the OU Health Center Foundation as an Oklahoma Living Treasure, and was inducted into the OSU Alumni Hall Of Fame in 2012.

Harjo and his wife Barbara served on the Art Advisory Council that established the OSU Museum of Art.

Inspired by his heritage, Harjo helped redefine Native art by forging his own path. His colorful geometric shapes and pen and ink styles are highly recognizable throughout the world and galleries across the nation.

Harjo’s collections can be seen at First Americans Museum (OKC), Red Earth Art Center and Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa), Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Sante Fe, and the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian. His final gallery showing can currently be viewed at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center as a part of the Patterns of Knowing collection.

A friend and mentor to many, with his genuine smile and signature beret, Benjamin Harjo, Jr.’s life and legacy will continue to inspire artists and the Native community for years to come.

Detroit Lakes, Minn. (KDLM) – Street Faire of the Lakes is returning to downtown Detroit Lakes on June 2-3 with plenty of new additions to the outdoor arts and crafts festival.

Elle LeMere, marketing manager for the Historic Holmes Theatre, said this year’s faire will feature some new artists and crafts aimed at younger kids.

“Kent Estey is a native American painter and artist and he’s really amazing and he make really beautiful nature scapes,” said LeMere. “And really uses a good value for the color … and he’s really popular in the area and he’s done a lot of other art shows before, but this is the first time he’ll be at Street Faire.”

LaMere also said a custom puzzle maker that designs their work around educating kids will also have a booth at this year’s Faire.

“You Name It Toys, they make homemade puzzles that are meant for kids,” she said. “They both watched their children grow, and learn, and develop, and the noticed, when they played with puzzles, this activity really held their attention, and it involved them and their playtime as well. (The kids) became really excited once they mastered a puzzle and learned while doing that they mastered basic shapes, colors and letters through the process of completing those tasks.”

For parents looking for something, or someone, to distract their kids while they shop, Lemere said, she has that covered too.

“We’re bringing our art class teacher, Kate Stearns, and she’s setting up a booth in the Street Faire and she’s going to be doing rock painting, and it’s free,” said LeMere. “Parents can drop their kids off and have them paint a rock, and hang out with Kate … and the kids can do a free fun craft and take it home with them.”

She also said the Street Dance will be back this year for the first time since 2019. This year’s concert will feature the rock band, Get Over It, who play classic rock and country from the 1970s to today. The concert will get underway at 9 p.m. on June 2 at the Eagle’s Beer Garden. The cost is $5 and the show is 21+.

Designers from Glenn Spiro to Silvia Furmanovich are turning shells into fine jewelry.

click to enlarge

• IMAGE COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• The new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, seen here in the foreground of a rendering, expands the Buffalo AKG’s exhibition space to more than 50,000 square feet, and is part of the museum’s $230 million expansion.

Known until recently as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo’s most major art museum was founded during the Civil War in 1862. Today, it’s the 6th oldest public art institution in the United States and is on the cutting edge of contemporary museum culture.

Poised to reopen on June 12 after a four-year, $230 million expansion and renovation, the freshly dubbed Buffalo AKG Art Museum now houses more than 50,000 square feet of state-of-the-art exhibition space, five classroom studios, a public gathering space with a major sculptural commission, underground parking, and more than half an acre of public green space at its 1285 Elmwood Ave. campus.

And all that extra room means the ability to pull work out from the vaults into the gallery lights.

AKG Director Janne Sirén said in years past, the museum was able to show roughly 130 works from the collection at any given time.

click to enlarge

• PHOTO COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• Household-name contemporary artists fill the collection at AKG—and post-expansion, more of the work can be displayed. Pictured is a selection of that work in the historic and newly renovated Wilmers Building.

“Now when our visitors come on opening day and thereafter, they will be able to see more than 400 works,” he said.

Everything about the museum’s new design, additions and recent acquisitions serves a central concern that preoccupies museums and major galleries as they shift fully into the 21st century: inclusion.

Entertaining largely white, well-off people who politely encounter high culture, museums have long needed to become open, interactive creative hubs and expand their collections of artistic voices to reflect a wider range of human experiences. The only alternative is to fade from relevance.

Now, at 161 years old, Buffalo AKG is poised to grow with generations far into the future.

INCREASING VISIBILITY AND ACCESS

A key word for the museum’s new identity is “porous.”

Major characteristics of the new building and renovations to the older ones promote visual communication between the museum’s interior and the outside world.

click to enlarge

• PHOTO COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• Old meets new: The Gundlach Building at right, with a skyway that connects to the museum’s renovated older buildings.

“Effectively, it’s a way of pulling down that barrier that separates the museum from what lies beyond the museum,” Sirén said.

Designed by Shohei Shigematsu of the New York firm Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and New York firm Cooper Robertson, the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building is a glittering, glass-walled tower wrapped around a central, walled exhibition space that will keep the art safe from sunlight exposure. But visitors inside the halls and common spaces of the structure–as well as the serpentine glass skyway that connects the buildings–will be visible from street level, and they’ll be able to see the campus and bustling streets from inside the building. Some indoor sculptures will also be visible through the glass façade.

“Art museums have historically been somewhat, let’s say, inaccessible—even just visually, castles on a hill,” Sirén said. “They’ve protruded this sense of inaccessibility, perhaps even elitism. So the challenge we gave to our architect and his team was a building that communicates with its public, with the surrounding environment, with the city, with the community.”

An entire wing of the museum will be free to visitors year-round. Museum leadership hopes the renovated Seymour H. Knox Building—and especially its new, central Town Square space—will be used by the public as a place to rest, eat lunch, and socialize.

Major structural changes to the Town Square’s ceiling, floors and walls were required to convert the 6,000-square-foot center from an outdoor courtyard and sculpture garden into a weather-tight room that would support the Knox building’s anchor artwork.

click to enlarge

• IMAGE COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• “Common Sky” is the anchor artwork in the renovated Knox Building. Comprising the ceiling and funneling to the floor of the Town Square space, the artwork creates an indoor-outdoor tension.

That work, “Common Sky,” is a several-ton, site-specific sculpture designed by renowned Icelandic-Danish installation artist Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann of Studio Other Spaces, and it’s in line with the AKG’s new transparent aesthetic. Heavy as it is, the work seems to float above the square—where performances, readings, and other events will be presented.

Overhead, dozens of mirrored and clear glass triangles serve as both reflections of the activity below and windows to the sky. Together, the panels funnel into a hollow column, also made of glass, reaching the floor. The sculpture doubles as a memorial to the apple tree that stood in the courtyard for decades. Its hollow, glass trunk (and drainage system under the floor), will bring the sky down “into” the space as it rains or snows.

“It allows us to be close to the elements even though the space is enclosed,” Sirén said.

click to enlarge

• IMAGE COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• A rendering of “Common Sky” in the new Town Square space of the renovated Knox Building.

The Town Square is flanked by a cafe called Cornelia—named for Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton, the museum’s second director and the first woman director of a major art museum in the United States—and the Creative Commons, an accessible, multi-generational learning space that’s the result of the first ever philanthropic partnership between the LEGO Foundation and a fine art museum.

“That’s a space where children of all ages, whether they are one or 90, can engage in various different types of activities and learn through the act of play,” Sirén said.

The Creative Commons will host hands-on creative learning opportunities and connections with museum collections. Each of the five new classroom studios has a specific programming focus, including a studio for children and their caregivers, and studios equipped with tools for making with different media.

click to enlarge

• IMAGE COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• A rendering of the Creative Commons, created in partnership with the LEGO Foundation, at the renovated Knox Building at Buffalo AKG.

The museum’s programming features inclusive engagement considerations, such as the multi sensory tours for people who are blind or have low vision, tours in partnership with Alzheimer’s Association of WNY, and an access program to support under-resourced groups and organizations working with people with disabilities.

REPRESENTATION IN THE COLLECTION AND PROGRAMMING

For any art lover, a stroll through the museum’s halls will yield an unending sequence of excited recognition. The walls are lined with important contemporary masterworks seemingly plucked from a survey of contemporary Western Art textbook, and more often than not they are the actual paintings, sculptures, and assemblages used in the textbooks as iconic representatives of an art genre or movement.

That includes Paul Gauguin’s “Yellow Christ,” and masterworks by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Clifford Still—too many cannon artists fill the collection to do it justice in a line or two.

The AKG has recently begun collecting more art from historically underrepresented demographics, with an emphasis on work made by living artists of color. Notably, the museum was early in acquiring art by African Americans—including sculptor Richard Hunt and painter Horace Pippin—while they were working artists in the 1940s and ’50s. But it was also guilty of the same institutional biases that have shaped museum collections for generations.

“What was on our walls was primarily by white men in the past,” Sirén said. “And as we look at the art world of today, it is not solely populated by white men—however, revolutionary and radical they may have been, or might still be in some instances—they are women artists, artists representing different ethnic groups, different nationalities, different linguistic groups, different sexual orientations. All of these artists are in the mix of our work today.”

click to enlarge

• PHOTO COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• Installation view of Lap-See Sam’s “Dreamers’ Quay,” on display at Buffalo AKG.

After the museum reopens, its inaugural exhibitions will include “Dreamers’ Quay,” an immersive multi-channel video installation by Lap-See Sam, a Swedish artist of the Chinese diaspora, in the Gundlach Building’s Ronnen Glass Box Theater. It will also debut a site-specific artwork commissioned from Dominican artist Firelei Báez: a 30-foot-long mosaic based on an Afrofuturist myth about women cast overboard in the Middle Passage thriving underwater, titled “Chorus of the Deep (something ephemeral and beautifully whole, when seen from the edge of one’s vision, too full when taken head on).”

click to enlarge

• PHOTO COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• Artist Firelei Báez works on a 30-foot-long site-specific mosaic commissioned by Buffalo AKG and installed in the Knox Building.

In recent years the museum has more aggressively collected works by Black, Latino, and Indigenous artists, including Niagara Falls-based artist Jay Carrier (Onondaga/Tuscarora).

Carrier’s painting “The Hand of the Devil Was Warm in the Night” came to the AKG’s collection in 2022. It’s a mixed media work of an Indigenous man with headdress regalia with a title drawn from U2’s song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”—a reflection of Carrier’s change of heart when he started the painting in 1985. He was then enrolled as a BFA student in Santa Fe, painting what he describes as “reductive” native imagery for the local tourists market.

“I didn’t really feel good about selling them,” he said. “So I kind of changed my philosophy and perspective, how I wanted to represent myself as an artist, slash Native American artist.”

Carrier reworked the painting, which he said represents a pivot in both his style and meditations on identity. He said he’s proud that it’s part of a major contemporary collection today.

“Inroads are being made,” Carrier said, regarding museum representation of Indigenous fine artists. “But it comes in waves.”

A LIVING COLLECTION AND ITS COMMUNITY

The museum has more than doubled in size, but its growth can be measured in other ways. Under Sirén’s decade-long stewardship, its operating budget went from $6.7 million to $17 million. Full time museum staff increased from 62 to 150.

Sirén also launched the museum’s Public Art Initiative, its partnership with local government bodies and private businesses to support and install murals and sculptures throughout the city, spreading art to where more people live, work, and play.

click to enlarge

• PHOTO COURTESY THE BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM
• Buffalo AKG director Janne Sirén.

After fundraising began for the expansion and renovation in 2016, the museum staff and architects conducted two years of town hall meetings to solicit input on what the community wanted to see.

Engaging audiences is a Sisyphean task, but one that the Buffalo AKG is up for, Sirén said.

When he became director in 2013, he was surprised to learn that more than 50-percent of the museum’s visitors were under 35—a remarkable statistic for a North American art museum, he said. For that he partially credits the museum’s longstanding efforts to expand representation in its collection and listen to what the public wants.

“I think that there’s something sort of in the DNA of the museum—being on the cutting edge, being revolutionary for the sake of being revolutionary—I think it’s been easier for us to pivot our collecting power,” Sirén said. “It hasn’t been a challenge for us to be courageous once again, and expand the philosophical breadth and content of our collection to include and really foreground artists that previously may have been marginalized.”

Following the museum’s opening celebration and ribbon cutting on Monday, June 12, Buffalo AKG will host an opening weekend Thursday, June 15 to Sunday, June 18, featuring free admission to the whole campus, performances and activities. Visit buffaloakg.org for details.

EXTRA, EXTRA:
The museum’s new half-acre Great Lawn and other surrounding green spaces will get some use this summer as visitors gather for free, open-air musical performances on the lawn and on the museum’s stone steps facing Olmstead’s Delaware Park and Hoyt Lake.

At 7 p.m. on Sunday, July 16, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will give a free concert on the Great Lawn.

The Lipsey Summer Jazz at Delaware Stairs series takes place on Sundays from July 23 through Aug. 13, and the chronological lineup is Silver Serenade: The Horace Silver Project (a quintet tribute to Silver’s lesser works); singer-saxophonist Camille Thurman with George Caldwell and Friends; singer Heather Bambrick with trumpeter Chase Sanborn; and The Buffalo Jazz Composers Workshop ensemble of composers and performers.

More details at buffaloakg.org.

Rebecca Rafferty is an arts writer for CITY. She can be reached at [email protected].

click image

CINCINNATI (WXIX) – A Cincinnati native is working to restore a piece of the West End’s history and its legacy that celebrates art, culture and diversity.

Toilynn O’Neal Turner, the founding director of the Robert O’Neal Multicultural Arts Center, is working to renovate the historic Regal Theater to help revitalize the art scene in the West End.

”I’ve seen art save lives,” Turner said. “I mean, it can definitely change the dynamics of racism and conflict. Art is one of those spaces we can all come and be together and appreciate. And it can help build dialogue.”

Her father, Robert O’Neal was a prominent artist who merged his work and activism to inspire others.

While he passed in 2018, Turner is now working to continue his legacy, creating the Robert O’Neal Multicultural Arts Center, a nonprofit that highlights African American artists while also exposing more of the community to the art scene.

”So we’ve been able to start some art programs for young people, [such as] free dance classes [and] free visual art classes,” Turner explained. “We’ve had a few fundraisers and so we’re really just building capacity in our programming.”

The project Turner is working on currently with the iconic Regal Theater will soon be a new home for the arts center, which she says holds so many happy memories for her and others who grew up in the West End.

”The Regal was our babysitter our safe space,” she said. “We were able to watch African American films like Shaft and Pam Grier and we were given popcorn and a hotdog. And we thought that was everything. Our lives were simplistic, but at the same time we had a community, which I think is sometimes what we’re missing.”

Recently, Turner was able to get the Regal marked as a historical designation through the state and is raising $20 million to complete renovations.

”The kids are so inspired by the activities to the point where it’s almost like you get emotional because they’re almost like, some of those kids haven’t used scissors. Some of those kids haven’t been exposed to the symphony and the opera and there’s a great partnership in the neighborhood of us really trying to make a difference,” she explained.

Just like her father, Turner is hoping to leave an imprint on the city and continue to inspire others over the years to come.

”Working with the artists and teaching them how to be educators is important that we give that gift to someone to live beyond us. And that’s how my father lived,” she said. “There are so many artists that he touched in the community. I want to have that same impact.”

Turner says she needs about $13 million to still to complete renovations.

Her goal is to re-open the Regal Theater in 2025.

See a spelling or grammar error in our story? Please click here to report it and include the headline of the story in your email.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.

Copyright 2023 WXIX. All rights reserved.