It’s been over 21 years since the Albright-Knox Art Gallery presented The Wayward Muse: A Historical Survey of Painting in Buffalo.

This significant show documented more than a century of fine art created in Western New York. Its accompanying 208-page exhibition catalog remains an important historical record.

The Wayward Muse was a response to a growing desire for a greater historical understanding of the Buffalo art scene by culturally oriented Buffalonians and those who collect art. Additionally, it served to introduce this rich history to a general audience.

William Beard, The March of Silenus (detail). Oil on canvas, ca. 1862. Subscribers Fund, 1874. Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

For the first time, more than 100 works by important artists who lived and worked in Buffalo were placed in historical context through the show and catalog. The show affirmed what a small group of collectors and artists had known all along—that Buffalo was a city with an abundant cultural past, present, and future.

Looking back at the list of featured artists, it reads like a “who’s who” of American art. Paintings by 19th-century greats Lars Sellstedt, William Beard, and Thomas LeClear were presented. Mildred Green, Alexander Levy, and Ralston Crawford memorialized Buffalo’s industrial past. Among the many amazingly talented artists presented in the exhibition were several who taught within the Buffalo-area SUNY system, including Harvey Breverman, Joseph Piccillo, and Duayne Hatchett.

To cite any single artist for special mention would do a disservice to all of them, and to its curators. The exhibit was a resounding success and remains the most important regional group art show ever mounted in the area.

The Wayward Muse anticipated a growing national trend towards scholarship of regional art. At the time the show was presented, regional art was looked upon as déclassé by many of the art intelligentsia. The curator of the show, Susan Krane, even wrote about the “problematic notion of regionalism” in her catalog essay.

In 2003, Joan Vita Marotta summed up the current and momentous national shift towards interest in regional art. In the exhibition catalog to Realism’s Allure, a show featuring the works of regional artists Walter Garver, Donald Haug, and Catherine Koenig, she wrote “…it is a post-modernist, post-9/11 sensibility that informs us. We do not shy away from the figurative, the representational, the historical, the recognizable, the organic, the indigenous. We are no longer embarrassed by regionalism.”