Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery Renamed After $42.5M Donation

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, has received a $42.5 million donation from billionaire investor Jeffrey Gundlach, founder of DoubleLine Capital. The gift, announced in September 2016, will support the museum's AK360 expansion project and rename the institution the Albright-Knox-Gundlach Art Gallery. Gundlach, a Buffalo native, cited childhood visits to the museum as inspiration. The donation is part of a $125 million fundraising campaign, with additional private investments over $40 million and public grants of about $20 million, including $15 million from New York State. The expansion, designed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, marks the firm's first U.S. museum project. It will add new exhibition spaces, educational areas, and a café, and improve connections to Frederick Law Olmsted's Delaware Park. The museum's collection has quadrupled since its last expansion in 1962. Gundlach's donation is the second-largest to a U.S. museum this year, after David Geffen's $100 million gift to MoMA in April. Gundlach previously suffered a theft in 2012 at his Santa Monica home, where artworks by Piet Mondrian and Jasper Johns were stolen but later recovered.