For a short period this year, a trip to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has been like stepping into a tour of Buffalo’s cultural history. A handful of factors, from an exhibition (closing Aug. 1) that highlights the city’s avant-garde arts scene in the 1970s to the museum’s display of objects from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s 2007 deaccession, have joined to make the city a central attraction inside the museum’s hallowed halls.

As you walk through the grand entrance off Fifth Avenue and through the ticket gate, you are immediately greeted with three pieces from Buffalo State College alumnus Robert Longo’s “Men in Cities” series. His brilliant charcoal and graphite drawings, iPod commercial prototypes of stunning impact, depict stylish young men frozen in contorted poses, trapped somewhere between dance moves and death throes.

Walk a little farther, through the museum’s luminous new Greek and Roman galleries, and you come upon a small bronze statue of the goddess Diana, accompanied by a small deer –that’s “Artemis and the Stag,” to you. The statue was until recently the property of the Albright- Knox (it now belongs to a private collector, who has loaned it to the Met) and the focal point of the 2007 debate over the gallery’s decision to sell much of its valuable ancient art. At the Met, Artemis receives a place of honor at the center of a room of larger but mostly lesser marbles and bronzes.

Take a walk to the second floor, and the Buffalo undercurrent becomes a deluge. For all the Western New York-connected art in “The Pictures Generation,” a major exhibition open through Aug. 1, the gallery walls might as well be hung with beef on weck. Formidable artists and onetime Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center denizens Cindy Sherman, Longo, Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer and Michael Zwack factor heavily into the show. Their work, especially that of Longo and Sherman, demands and deserves the lion’s share of attention.

One ecstatic photographic montage by Sherman, “The Vamp,” was part of the art world superstar’s first solo exhibition at Buffalo’s own CEPA Gallery in 1975. Two of her most compelling series, “Untitled Film Stills,” and a 1981 group of cinematically composed shots of the artist rank as some the most impressive work in the show and evolved directly out of Sherman’s early work at Buffalo State and at Hallwalls, where she regularly exhibited.

Next to “Vamp” hangs an early painting of two piercing eyes by Clough, based on himself and fellow Hallwalls artist Diane Bertolo. And on the Buffalo connections go. By the time you’ve gone through, you’ll have a clear sense of the city’s undeniable influence on the evolution of modern art — a truth about Buffalo that many of its own residents have a difficult time believing.

As if “The Pictures Generation” were not enough, the Met’s lauded centenary retrospective of work by Francis Bacon, open through Aug. 16, includes an important piece on loan from the Albright-Knox. The quintessentially Baconian “Man with Dog” was attracting a lot of attention, and more than a few grimaces from visitors, on a recent visit.

To see Buffalo’s cultural legacy — or in the case of “Artemis,” its former legacy — on such prominent display in the most comprehensive and popular museum in the United States says something about the continued relevance of Western New York in the national culture.

It’s true that most of the art on display at the Met is a testament to the city’s glorious past, most notably the pace-making avant garde heyday of the 1970s. But it serves as a reminder that, not so long ago, a group of optimistic Buffalonians injected themselves into the global culture in an important and lasting way.

That’s a lesson that today’s embattled optimists on the city’s cultural scene, reminded of the heights they can reach and the legacy of their hometown, can take to heart.