♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Janne Siren: From 2007 to 2013, I served as director of the Helsinki Art Museum, one of the largest cultural organizations in the Nordic region.

The Helsinki Art Museum is known for its robust and expansive public art program, which means that the museum is basically the custodian of hundreds of artworks, both historical as well as new, in the city of Helsinki.

When I started my tenure in Buffalo as director of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in April of 2013, one of the challenges that both the board and I saw was that many people in Western New York and in Buffalo did not feel an intimate immediate connection with the museum.

Perhaps the museum had an air of elitism around it.

So based on some of those thoughts, I came up with this idea of the AKG Public Art Initiative.

The idea was that we would become the first museum in the United States with a dedicated department for public art to place artworks all across Western New York and the city of Buffalo, especially areas that had seen no cultural investment in the past.

Over the last 10 years we've placed more than 60 innovative artworks in different parts of our community.

We care about things not just within the museum walls but all across our region, and the Public Art Initiative bears witness to this.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Aaron Ott: It was really unique to see the title of curator of public art available at a museum.

A lot of public art spaces or places of production are either centered around municipalities they're associated with, with government, or other sort of civic organizations that you'll find in a number of American cities.

There aren't really museums in the United States who are dedicated to the production of public art that is outside of their campus and off of their boundaries, right?

You have other museums that have the benefit of physical land acreage that is their own to operate on sometimes, you know, several hundred acres, but this is the only museum, still to this day, that operates sort of throughout a huge geographic swath.

Our foundational sponsor is the county legislature here in Erie County.

Erie County is over 1000 square miles.

So as a curatorial landscape, it's unparalleled and there was just nothing else like it and so we didn't inherit anything even though we're sixth oldest museum in America, oldest museum of contemporary art.

We have this legacy history and I knew that from being an art history student.

I was familiar with the then Albright-Knox Art Gallery, now Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

I was familiar with aspects of the collection.

I knew its importance in the American and the international landscape of museology but the opportunity to create something brand-new within that structure was really exciting.

And in the beginning, I identified an artist named Matthew Hoffman who led a project called "You Are Beautiful."

I felt like it was just this really generous statement and I felt like this starts a dialogue that doesn't have a period.

It doesn't say one thing and mean something completely different to a whole bunch of other people.

It's not all that threatening, right, in terms of how it's displayed.

It was impermanent so, you know, it's a way to kind of test how people are reacting to and responding to it.

I was trying to think of, like, how do I make this statement visible to the most people possible, and then it hit me that billboards were a way to kind of get out there and be present and we were really adamant at the time that it not say, you know, AKG at the time, Albright-Knox, like we were-- I just wanted something out there that said, "You are beautiful."

I wanted people to find it on their own and discover how it was connected to us.

And then I knew Casey Reardon.

I had known-- Interviewer: We have to pause here.

Aaron: Yeah, go for it.

Interviewer: The absolute absurdity and pop culture that is Shark Girl cannot be stated in this film.

Aaron: No, you couldn't have begun to anticipated the impact of Shark Girl.

No, not at all.

I mean, I loved Shark Girl.

I always thought she was hilarious and again, I've known Casey for a long time, so I'd seen multiple iterations of it.

It always made me giggle.

I always thought it was funny.

I always thought it was touching and heart-wrenching.

It's kind of all the things.

What I loved about this particular piece is that it's interactive, right?

It kind of begs for this relationship that you build, this narrative that you build in your mind, and--but no, did we know at the time it was going to become a destination and an icon for a city?

No, absolutely not.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Amanda Browder: Definitely hands down the biggest beast.

We have sown the most fabric, more than any other town that I've worked with, which is amazing.

People from Buffalo really came out.

Between this donations and volunteers, it would--you felt like it was a community.

Katey: I think it's like a big challenge of creating a mural.

I mean, especially with this wall, it's like 280 feet long, so how do you keep that interesting?

Whoever is driving by or walking by, you need to have some kind of changing elements or patterns in more detail.

Bunnie Reiss: I think smaller cities need this more than larger cities sometimes so I'm always really excited when smaller cities want something big and significant because it means that they're paying attention on a different level and I think that that's unusual.

Betsy Casanas: You know, and I think that when you're working in these spaces, it's really important for the people to see a reflection of themselves in the work around them, especially if they're coming from other places and they've migrated from other communities.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Eric Jones: NOAA, I'm a big fan of.

With NOAA, gives me my hourly, gives me my precipitation.

I have a really great radar.

I got this one called Windy that I got from Wojciech Otecki who's from Poland, so it's more of a European model, but if I want like air flows, all this, like it really gives me a lot in terms of wind, but yeah, I'm constantly looking at my phone because the last thing I want is to have someone get stuck in the rain.

Rain obviously coming down the surface of the mural, wet paint, is very bad.

Just one of those things where it's either like super-super-hot and sun-baked or, you know, you're fighting clouds and the wind.

It's basically one or the other for us, for the most part.

With Tavar, you know, that was projecting the design up onto the wall that, you know, took place on, like, a very cold September night that we were out there until 4:30 in the morning with 150-foot boom lifts.

Like, that was well outside of my comfort level and what I had done myself so, not something I wanna do again by any means, but you know, we do what we have to do for these sorts of projects.

But yeah, we--I've learned a lot about those big projects because, you know, the other side of that is, you know, the growing pains but then you have all this growth and then the other side of those growing pains is that you've done too much and now, you know, we also have to be good stewards of those spaces as well.

We can't just drop in and drop something in place and drop out.

Like, that's not who we want to be with this initiative.

I would say for us in public art, the inclusion of community voices are an important aspect of what we do when it comes to planning, facilitation, the content, where projects land and a social space and a public space.

But likewise, you know, I always--whatever is going on on the other side of those walls that we're working on, we understand that we're interfering with someone's day in some sort of manner, so I'm oftentimes like, you know, I bring a bottle of Windex and make sure I clean their windows because no one's done that for, like, the past, like, 5 years or something and their windows just look horrible.

So, you know, it's those kind of opportunities that, you know, we're also, like, trying to make sure that we're respecting the people that utilize these spaces as, you know, as much as we possibly can.

♪♪♪ Louise Jones: I feel like public art, the most important thing is that it's an active placemaking, and I think it makes people feel very proud of where they live or, you know, where they work.

♪♪♪ Felipe Pantone: It all basically started with graffiti for me.

I realized that I had to increase the contrast in my work, and make it louder, make the colors more vivid, so I ended up pretty much painting like all part, like really black and white and with really vivid colors.

♪♪♪ Hillary Waters Fayle: I came back up here to do this amazing project with the Albright-Knox, a lot of community engagement.

We made a bunch of prints, cyanotype prints, of plants from the community with the community and then created a mural from those prints.

Logan Hicks: So much of the history of Buffalo eclipses the current that I think that as Buffalo tries to find its new voice, a lot of times you look to the past to try to figure out what you're about, where you came from, and where you're going.

Edreys Wajed: Like, it's not a monolith, right?

It's not--it's not one way of expressing, you know, like art, you know, black music is not one tone.

James Moffit: Just always been drawn to hand-lettering whether it's, you know, something that's been around here for half a century or painted letters on the side of a bodega.

Ellen Rutt: Clean lines and washes and gestures in an attempt to sort of explore the dynamics of how we relate to one another.

Karle Norman: Hang out with and talk with and eat with and paint with such a number of great artists.

I believe we have more in common with one another than we do difference.

Zack Boehler: Buffalo AKG since its inception has had a policy of trying to be artist-centric, be artist first, and that means really creating the space to allow artists to make the work that they wanna make.

And in public art we try to carry over that policy, but working in public is very different than working inside the walls of a museum.

There's so many other factors to consider.

What population is there?

What does the audience wanna see?

What should the audience see?

All these different things.

And so, when an artist is working in public they are working with us as the co-producers, they're working with property owners, they're working with city officials, they're working with residents.

There's so many different things trying to influence what the artwork becomes.

And something that I've learned in this program is part of our responsibility as the producers of this public work is to make sure the artist has a safe space to create the artwork they wanna make.

What can happen really easily is the artist is so influenced to have to answer all of these different needs and calls that they end up making something that doesn't actually reflect their artistic intention.

So, something that we've kind of stepped into in our role is not only helping to facilitate all of the relationships between the artists and all of these different stakeholders, but to ensure that at the end of that, the artist is still being able to speak with their voice and execute their program.

I had an opportunity to work with what in the street art and kind of graffiti communities is an absolute legend.

Futura 2000 really was one of the foundational figures behind what we now would call graffiti and street art and hip hop culture and streetwear culture.

It was by seeing the other work we had produced that this kind of legend in our field wanted to add something to it.

You know, some people were like, "Oh, we wanna go as big as we can and Futura is gonna go massive on this wall," and one day I just said, "What do you want to paint?"

And he looked over and said, "I want something that's the size of a subway car.

That's where I started.

That's the size I understand better than anything else, and if you can find me a wall the size of a subway car, I would absolutely love to paint that for the city of Buffalo."

Maya Hayuk: To make a mural I take into account all of--all different kind of variables like what the space is, how many vantage points you have to view it from, and kind of combine all of these ideas.

Julia Bottoms: Public art, it's really for the people that live in a specific area and people that wanna travel to it.

Max Collins: The public aspect of this project, like, allowed me to engage with, like, a lot of different people and I got to hear so many stories of people remembering what it was like growing up by the parkway.

Phyllis Thompson: I like that idea of having almost a kind of outdoor museum gallery that is both formal and informal.

Fotini Galanes: We're here and they're seeing it happen.

And it's a positive response, so that, I would like it to be the takeaway, that we are here.

Rachel Shelton: And then in terms of having it out here, I think it's great.

I'm getting so many messages from people saying they've come to visit and it's, you know, there's so many murals in Buffalo that people see as like a destination for a night out, which I think is great.

Tricia Butski: I think that's one of the beautiful things about public art is we're not, you know, just painting throughout like Elmwood Village, you know?

Sarah Braman: The sculpture, while it also is a place to kind of travel spiritually, emotionally, psychically, it's also I'm hoping that the sculptures provide a time and a place for people just to be really present.

♪♪♪ Adeyemi Adegbesan: I don't want the work to feel like it's over people's heads or like that it's not connecting.

I want people to look at it and be, like, "There's a lot going on here, but there's definitely a few pieces that I recognize and connect with instantly."

That's kind of the bridge.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Aaron Li-Hill: I think being able to create artwork for people who don't feel as inclined to go to the places that, you know, have a concentration of artwork, that's the best part about public art.

Janne: In June 2023 when we cut the proverbial ribbon and opened our new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, a project that had been under construction for 3.5 years and 8 years of fundraising $230 million, it felt like the most unique moment in the history of the institution, at least since the previous expansion in 1962.

And the path to that ribbon-cutting really began with the launch of the Public Art Initiative in 2014 because, in order to harness the energies, the financial and intellectual energies of a community, you need to inspire people and what the Public Art Initiative did is it inspired people.

It laid faith in our community that we could do this together.

It was a sense of communal ownership that made this building project possible and public art was the bird that carried that message through our community.

Aaron: The new Buffalo AKG Art Museum is itself built with a lot of the DNA of the Public Art Initiative, right?

We have common sky and open spaces that are free and open to the public.

We have a free gallery in the M&T Gallery space.

We have an enhanced and expanded campus with green space and more opportunities for public art.

We're doing our first collaborative work with Delaware Park, our adjacent landscape.

Like, this kind of mentality you can't have assumed was going to happen.

It took a lot of work and a lot of risk and so I think that it seems perhaps convenient that it worked out to be quite the connection-maker, but that was not a foregone conclusion, especially for two people not from Buffalo, right?

Janne's not from Buffalo and I'm not from Buffalo originally.

Eric: But I would say now, like, you know, having gone through that, you know, we're also looking at ways that, you know, we can be closer to our campus and engage people and activate the spaces closer to, you know, these physical buildings so that we're still, like, drawing these people in, we're still engaging the people that are here for their 8th grade field trip, but it's more of, like, it's drawing a bigger thicker line between what we're doing out and, you know, around the streets of Buffalo and across Erie County, but also, like, what we're doing here, you know, on Elmwood Avenue at the same time.

And I think that's a very exciting component of what we're looking at now because we're really trying to, you know, reimagine, like, what we're doing.

We're not just trying to keep the static notion of what public art is.

We're trying to evolve what that is and how we have people interact with it.

Zack: Having a program that we've built to work in public space allows artists to directly kind of interact with the general conversation happening culturally.

And with that system built, we hope that artists can kind of always have a conversation with our communities, right, and that we can continue to support that.

But what that looks like may very well change.

We already kind of see a shift where we aren't producing as many murals as we used to because we're focusing on trying to bring some more performative or experiential programs and projects to the region.

And I think in 5 or 10 years, the program will look very different than it does now because we'll be continually looking at what we can provide as an arts institution to our region, but we'll also be looking to artists to comment on what our communities are asking for and what our communities need at whatever given period.

Janne: No organization, whether it's a nonprofit or a for profit organization, can just stay still.

You're either in a phase of growth or you are in a phase of cutting back, but you cannot in a continually changing and evolving world just stand still.

My hope and aspiration is that the Public Art Initiative will continue to grow, that this museum will continue to make future investments into placing public artworks in different parts of our community.

So, I see growth not just through the agency of placing artworks in different parts of our community, but also through us serving as a thought leader in the field, nationally and globally.

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