The buzz is building. Documentary director Megumi Sasaki, who initially did a small, award-winning 2009 film documentary about art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel, launched into a full-scale film about the much-heralded couple. Sasaki is ready to premiere the work,“Doug and Dorothy 50×50,” in New York City on September 13 before sending it out across America, including to Akron for an October 3 showing.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel with Megumi Sasaki. Photo from www.artworks.arts.gov

The Vogels were a kind of fun, quirky couple who spent their lives (and their modest salaries as a civil servant and librarian respectively) collecting contemporary art works. The collection amassed to some 500 pieces with an estimated value in the millions of dollars.

Their small Manahattan apartment became so crowded with the art pieces that even the Vogels knew they had to do something. And so they did. Initially they presented them to the National Gallery of Art. The people in charge there knew that they would never be able to handle nor to present them as the works needed to be, so they hatched a plan with the Vogels. They decided to send out 2,500 works of art in the form of 50 works going to each of the 50 U.S. states.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel in their collecting years. Photo from www.duplexcollective.com

For Ohio, the Akron Art Museum, a Knight Arts grantee, became the recipient primarily through the efforts of then chief curator Barbara Tannenbaum. She made the pitch, according to curator Ellen Rudolph, and here they came.

Last year, AAM had the works on exhibit, interestingly including a drawing by artist John Salt, who made a color drawing of the Vogels’ crowded apartment from memory after visiting them one time.

For their part, the Vogels tried to keep things under control. They tended to select smaller and portable works to keep the vastness down and also, as Rudolph noted, so that they could carry them away as they rode home on the subway or via taxicab.

The works taken by AAM contain pieces by artists who were virtually unknown when the Vogels visited them, but who have since earned international reputations: Nam June Paik, Edda Renouf and Richard Tuttle, among others.

That kind of cleverness and foresight is being rewarded in Sasaki’s film, which, in keeping with the Vogels’ idea, will be shown in all 50 states. In Akron, it will be in the theater in the Akron Art Museum itself.

Megumi Sasaki’s “Herb and Dorothy 50×50” will be shown at 7 p.m. on October 3 at the Akron Art Museum, One S. High St., Akron; 330-376-9185; www.akronartmuseum.org. Admission is free to museum that evening.