The Albright-Knox Art Gallery will hold a free public opening for a collection of paintings that will soon return on a year-long tour across the country. The exhibit “Sincerely Yours: Treasures Of The Queen City” will be in Buffalo until September.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery Deputy Director Joe Lin-Hill explains what art enthusiasts can expect when they go to view the museum’s collection of 70 world renowned paintings.
“Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gogan, Pablo Picaso, Henri Matisse. The list goes on and on well through Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and into minimalism and conceptual art,” said Lin-Hill.
The exhibit began its tour with a showing in Denver earlier this year where over 80,000 people viewed the masterpieces. The artworks will travel to San Diego, Arkansas and Milwaukee before returning home in early 2016. Lin-Hill says the paintings act as ambassadors for Buffalo while touring other parts of the country.
“The Albright-Knox really is an American national treasure and it’s part of our responsibility to share the great wonders that we have here with the broader national community and to fulfill that role we thought it both important to have a national tour, but at the same time to feature these works once again at their home,” said Lin-Hill.
Lin-Hill says “Sincerely Yours: Treasures Of The Queen City” is one of the great masterpiece collections in the country.
“I have been here only since September. I spent 20 years in New York City and it is a great privilege as a professional in the modern and contemporary art world to work with a collection of this quality. Western New York is very, very lucky to have such an extraordinary collection. There aren’t many places like this for cities of this size that would have the opportunity to have such a wonderful collection as you have here,” said Lin-Hill.
Saturday, July 5, 2014 the museum will hold a free viewing of the exhibit from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. The event will feature food trucks and live music.