Buffalo AKG Art Museum

For a museum in a mid-size city, Buffalo's has an outsized record of buying new art early. Founded in 1862 and long known as the Albright-Knox, it acquired abstract and modern work while much of America was still wary of it, so its rooms hold major Abstract Expressionist canvases, among them 33 paintings by Clyfford Still, the largest group of his work anywhere outside his own museum in Denver.

The campus reads as a timeline of American architecture. A white marble Greek-revival gallery from 1905 sits beside a sleek 1962 black-granite wing by Gordon Bunshaft, and in 2023 both reopened joined to a translucent new building by the Dutch firm OMA, part of a rebuild that renamed the place the Buffalo AKG.

The collection runs from van Gogh and Gauguin through Pollock and Warhol to the Venezuelan-American sculptor Marisol, who left the museum her entire estate.