BUFFALO, N.Y. — With a brand new building and a brand new name, the long-awaited reopening of Buffalo’s AKG Art Museum is happening next week.

It’s been closed for nearly four years for a massive expansion, but now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is ready to show off its makeover.

"The anticipation is very difficult to describe because this project has been 20 years in the making," said Janne Siren, director of the museum.

The centerpiece of the project is the new addition of the Jeffrey Gundlach building.

"We’ve doubled the amount of space for the permanent collection,” said Cathleen Chaffee, the museum's chief curator. “The kind of favorite works that people know and love from the Andy Warhol soup cans, Jackson Pollock’s Convergence, but also our great Monet painting, our impressionist paintings, all of these works have more space and we have about twice as many works on view as we were ever able to do before.”

The added space will also allow the museum to offer more special exhibitions — and bring out the entire collection at one time.

"We can install the full sweep of our historical collection, telling really the whole collection of Western modern art. So a visitor coming in out of town or somebody visiting again and again here in Buffalo can visit old friends and then discover new ones," she said.

The expansion also includes new places for education and programming with studios for people young and old, from a variety of backgrounds, to join the creative process.

"We’re the only art museum in the world to partner with the LEGO Foundation on building a dedicated space for play, and each of the stations within Creative Commons are there to activate different characteristics of play," said Charlie Garling, director of learning and creativity for Delaware North.

Despite a six-month delay because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the AKG Art Museum is poised to display years of planning and work to enhance a treasure — locally and globally.

"We think of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum as our regional hometown museum,” Siren said. “Around the world it is known as one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary art anywhere.”

One-third of the campus will be free from admission costs. The museum will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Monday.