Almost everyone – art aficionado or not – has heard of the Louvre or New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but such big, celebrated institutions hardly hold a monopoly on great art.
In fact, some of this country’s best art museums are ones that most people outside of art circles know little or nothing about.
Take the highly respected Albright- Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., of all the unlikely places. It boasts what director Louis Grachos justifiably calls “an almost textbook history of 20th-century art,” yet most people have never heard of it.
“The image of Buffalo as being a kind of dying industrial town on the Great Lakes that has seen better days is kind of the bigger picture,” Grachos concedes.
“The reality of what exists here in terms of its history, long-standing commitment to building great buildings and this incredible art museum are not what people think about when they think about Buffalo.”
Similar misperceptions exist about dozens of cities and towns from Davenport, Iowa, to Fort Worth, Texas, to Andover, Mass., which all have top-rank art institutions.
The Post asked 10 of this region’s top museum professionals to name their favorite underappreciated museums – places worth a special trip or certainly a visit if you’re in the area. .
