Jock Reynolds, Transformative Director of Yale Art Gallery Bruce Buck for The New York Times The renovated Yale University Art Gallery, with buildings from 1866 to 1953. JOCK REYNOLDS, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, likes to say that when he took over in 1998, the collection - the oldest and one of the most important university art collections in the country - had grown so large that its landmark Louis Kahn building resembled an "old sock drawer." The museum could show only a small fraction of its holdings, and some works had been in storage so long that even the curators had never seen them. Beyond campus few people knew that there was a world-class encyclopedic art museum in New Haven, of all places, just an hour and a half from New York. The 1953 Kahn building was in dire need of rehab, and two adjacent buildings on Chapel Street that had previously housed the collection - the so-called Old Yale Art Gallery, a 1928 neo-Florentine Gothic building, and, next door, Street Hall, a Ruskinian Gothic structure from 1866 - were in even worse shape. Among the three buildings there were 280 years of deferred maintenance, Mr. Reynolds said. Almost as soon as he arrived here Mr. Reynolds set out to transform his stretch of Chapel Street at the urging of Yale's president, Richard C. Levin. He planned a renovation of all three buildings that would restore the older ones, which had long since been put to other uses, to their original purpose as gallery space. The Kahn makeover, by Duncan Hazard and Richard Olcott of Ennead Architects in New York, was finished in 2006. Work began on the two others in 2009, and the entire refurbished complex - a block-and-a-half-long stretch that is itself a museum of changing architectural styles - is scheduled to open officially on Wednesday, a few months after visitors began being admitted to the galleries as they were completed. While all the work was going on Mr. Reynolds and his staff were also busy acquiring yet more art, much of it reflecting a broader range of cultures than the core Yale collection, to fill additional space made possible by the renovations. There is a brand-new collection of Indo-Pacific art, for example, and a new curator, Ruth Barnes, hired away from the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, to look after it. The collections of African art and the art of the ancient Americas have also been expanded. Newly on display as well are lots of works from the old collection, like paintings by Corot, Degas and Rothko, that there was never room to show before. The American decorative arts collection now includes a restored parlor from an 18th-century house in Gilead, Conn., that used to be just numbered boards in a Yale storage barn. And there are a number of old-master works - including paintings by Titian, Fra Angelico, van Dyck and Uccello - that had been wrongly attributed and consigned to the junk pile. Laurence Kanter, the museum's keen-eyed chief curator (lured from the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Mr. Reynolds) discovered them while cleaning out the basement before renovation. The price tag for the renovation was $135 million, an immense sum in this economy, but Mr. Reynolds seems to have raised it effortlessly, along with additional funds for the art acquisitions. Mr. Reynolds is, or used to be, a sculptor and a designer of installations for institutions like M.I.T. and the University of Washington in Seattle, but lately he has mastered a rare and difficult form of performance art: raising money. He has caused hundreds of millions of dollars - sums that would be the envy even of the Met or the Getty - to pour into Yale's coffers. He makes money rain on the place. Part of his secret may be that at a time when museum directors are increasingly bottom-line-focused types, or even former art dealers, who have less in common with artists or curators than with the high-rolling crowd that buys art as an investment, he doesn't look or act the part of the museum professional. He's a big, friendly, sandy-haired man who favors the official uniform of the aging preppy: khakis, navy blazer, striped oxford-cloth shirt.