MARK BYRNES
AUG 9, 2018
Aaron Ott, the first-ever curator of public art at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, talks about leading an uncommon cultural initiative across Western New York.
As the director of the Helsinki Art Museum, which is owned and operated by city government, Janne Sirén was required to provide art for the streets and parks of the Finnish capital. So when he moved to Buffalo, New York, in 2013 to become the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, he asked to meet with their public art curator.
They didn’t have one. Most U.S. museums don’t.
Sirén quickly changed that, hiring Aaron Ott, who had previously worked on art projects for various Chicago-area institutions, as the first-ever curator for the Albright-Knox’s public art initiative. The 156-year-old museum is now five years into an ambitious program that’s been injecting life into the Western New York region’s parks, neighborhoods, buildings, and other infrastructure through paint, plastic, steel, cloth, and whatever else their international cast of commissioned artists want to work with.
Buffalo isn’t exactly known as a hotbed for adventurous contemporary public art—at least not since Green Lightning, an infamous downtown installation that drew the ire of then-mayor Jimmy Griffin in 1984 for its perceived vulgarity before being dismantled and relocated to Chicago. But Ott’s team has already delivered a few instant hits. Casey Riordan Millard’s Shark Girl sits on a bench by the city’s Inner Harbor, accommodating selfie-seekers from across the region. New “emotional wayfinding” signs by Stephen Powers (a.k.a. “Espo”) tap into the region’s love-hate relationship with itself and are sure to fill up local Instagram feeds. Robert Indiana’s Cor-Ten steel NUMBERS ONE through ZEROprovide photogenic pop art in the verdant Outer Harbor while the museum itself hosts a retrospective on the recently deceased artist.
But the program, funded with city, county, and private money, stretches well beyond Buffalo’s most visited parts. In a city neatly segregated by its street grid, murals by London-raised Shantell Martin and Wrocław-based Wojciech Kołacz bring contemporary, internationally identifiable murals to the city’s East Side—the hub of black culture in today’s Buffalo, laced with the lingering traces of the Polish community that has mostly resettled in the suburbs. Closer to Main Street, four local artists have transformed a bus depot wall into a tribute to 28 civil rights leaders. And in a section of the West Side that has been the center of Buffalo’s Hispanic and Latinx community since the 1960s, a mural by artist and activist Betsy Casañas celebrates the neighborhood’s identity.
CityLab recently caught up with Ott to talk about the origin of the program, the planning behind each commission, and the power of public art to change the community conversation in Buffalo.
So this is for forever?
That’s my hope! The Albright-Knox, it’s such a big part of Buffalo. We’re the sixth-oldest museum in the country. Period. We’re the oldest museum dedicated to modern and contemporary work. We’re essentially the oldest museum in America that’s not encyclopedic, so people are really familiar with us as a cultural beacon. But the public art initiative is now only on its fourth year. In the long history of the institution, we’ve started something that’s only taken up a wee little bit of it, but people have responded well to it so far.
It’s been humbling to see how excited the public is for the work we’re doing. Since we have a campus expansion coming up, my hope is that during the construction period we can be more active in the community by having great art outside the museum’s walls.
We have great partners, which is critical. It’s not just about relying on other institutions or individuals to help us manage the work—we also share financial obligations. Placing the Robert Indiana numbers at the Outer Harbor was larger than my annual budget. Having the assistance of a number of people in the community—in this instance, the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation—to help make that financially feasible allows us to do the kind of work that we’re really excited about.
Besides Helsinki, are there other case studies you looked at for public art programs?
It’s a bit novel for a museum to be doing this in the States. There are museums that have programs that present as public. Newfields in Indianapolis has 100 acres of space that serve as a garden of sorts for sculptures. The Walker in Minneapolis has a newly expanded sculpture garden and a big hill that they program with performances. There are places like the High Line and anything Creative Time and the Public Art Fund have done, which aren’t necessarily museum-affiliated projects but are museum quality.
There are all kinds of different models to do something like this, but we took what we liked and what we thought could be applied to our own situation. We wanted to figure out how to craft a public-private partnership using the assets and expertise of this museum, not just in terms of the collection but the people we have and our relationships with the art world. It’s a network that’s been developed over a century and a half. You can’t create that from whole cloth.
When did public art start appearing?
I got here in April 2014. Because the Public Art Initiative didn’t exist yet, one of my first tasks was to go out in the community and meet stakeholders, individuals, and organizations that wanted to partner with us, because that was going to be the only way we could make it as successful and broad-based as we wanted it to be. Through those conversations we established how we might want to begin. It took a couple of months to figure it out.
There were a couple pieces that we launched all at once. In late August and early September of 2014 we placed a couple of things that were concurrent with each other. We did Matthew Hoffman’s You Are Beautiful project, which included 44 billboards placed throughout Erie and Niagara counties as well as a sticker campaign. We also had a temporary, performance-based mural with a Providence group called Tape Art where people from the public would come and meet the artists and build it with us on the facade of the Central Library