When Janne Sirén took the job as director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, an art museum in Buffalo, New York, he got to know the city by running. An avid jogger who relocated from Helsinki in 2013, Sirén chatted with strangers on his routes. Whenever the art museum came up, people would tell him the same thing: It’s nice, but it’s for the elites.

“People might not have felt like it was their home, but they’re proud of it,” says Sirén, who led a $195 million transformation of the newly renamed Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is expected to reopen fully to the public in early August. “There was this sense of, ‘I might not go every weekend, but don't mess it up.’”