Buffalo AKG to open 'Allan D'Arcangelo: Landscapes and Constellations'

Press Release

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum announced an upcoming exhibition titled “Allan D’Arcangelo: Landscapes and Constellations,” which will open in the museum’s Hemicycle Gallery on Friday, Nov. 7, and will remain on view through April 26, 2026. The exhibition is curated by Zack Boehler, assistant curator, special projects, at the Buffalo AKG.

“In an era where there is so much debate around what the identity of America is, D’Arcangelo’s work is just as relatable today as when the artist produced it in the 1960s and 1970s,” Boehler said. “With this exhibition, we hope to reintroduce the artist to his hometown audience and explore D’Arcangelo’s challenge of the myth of the American expanse from a contemporary lens.”

A consistent inspiration for many artists, writers and dreamers, the frontier myth remains as embedded in our collective psyche as it remains hard to define. For many, the open road has been a symbol of freedom, especially in the post-World War II highway boom. Americans were able to travel great distances, often for leisure, like never before.

D’Arcangelo (American, 1930-98), was one such traveler of this new, monotonous highway looking for that undefined freedom. Raised in Buffalo, and a graduate of the University at Buffalo, D’Arcangelo began crisscrossing the country on trips to Los Angeles and Mexico City in the late-1950s. Eventually settling in New York, D’Arcangelo’s experience of the road became a source for the works that catapulted him into the top tier of the 1960s pop art scene.

What he found, and what we see in these “Landscapes and Constellations,” was not limitless freedom but, instead, the obstacles that bar access to open space. D’Arcangelo’s vision of the road was one where advertising interrupted nature with the promise of trivial desires just ahead. Where the desired expanse is always kept behind the glass of a windshield or deferred by signs that constrain your direction.

As he continued to work through these themes into the late 1960s, D’Arcangelo begins to remove the recognizable components of the traditional landscape. Gone are the horizon lines and trees, in landscapes reduced to just the striping found on a roadway. Repeating lines of concrete barriers no longer symbolize movement, just where one cannot go.

By the mid-1970s, D’Arcangelo had retreated from the art world of New York to a farm in the Hudson Valley. He continued to make work until his passing in 1998.

D’Arcangelo’s images challenge the version of Americana so many are raised on, but this critique is not solely a dismissal of unfulfilled promise. He is asking us to not believe the myth and instead to observe what is actually in front of us – to view the world as it is so we can understand ourselves better and find our way.

More about the Buffalo AKG Art Museum: Founded in 1862, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright- Knox Art Gallery) is the sixth-oldest public art institution in the U.S. For more than 160 years, the Buffalo AKG has collected, conserved and exhibited the art of its time, often working directly with living artists. This tradition has given rise to one of the world’s most extraordinary collections of modern and contemporary art.

In June 2023, following the completion of the most significant campus development and expansion project in its history, the Buffalo AKG opened anew to the public. The project is funded by a $230 million capital campaign, the largest such campaign for a cultural institution in the history of Western New York, including $195 million raised for construction and $35 million in additional operating endowment funds.