MARY GRIGGS BURKE
NEW YORK CITY
JAPANESE ART
St. Paul native Mary Griggs Burke made her first visit to Japan in 1955 and fell in love with the country. In more than 30 subsequent trips she assembled what’s been described by the Metropolitan Museum as “the largest and most encompassing private collection of Japanese art outside Japan”— more than 900 exceptional examples of Japanese pottery, statuary, folding screens, paintings, scrolls, lacquerware and ceramics spanning 4,000 years. Her collection has been exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Hiroshima Prefectural Art and two other Japanese museums, and when “Masterpieces of Japanese Art from the Mary Griggs Burke Collection” opened at the Metropolitan Museum, director Philippe de Montebello said, “It is the only American collection ever to be shown at the Tokyo National Museum, a testament to Mrs. Burke’s sensitivity to and appreciation of Japanese aesthetics.” Last year, the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation announced plans to bequeath the remarkable collection to both the Metropolitan and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “The importance of this gift cannot be overstated,” says Matthew Welch, the MIA’s curator of Japanese and Korean art.

BLAKE BYRNE
LOS ANGELES
CONTEMPORARY ART
Blake Byrne’s gift of 124 works stands as one of the most significant donations in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ history, adding key masterworks to our holdings, and creating new areas of strength for our collection,” says director Jeremy Strick. “Blake’s collecting is driven by relentless curiosity and a remarkable openness to new ideas. Maintaining residences in Los Angeles and Paris gives Blake an international perspective manifested in his strong and early commitment to such artists as Juan Muñoz and Marlene Dumas, and his engagement with European and American emerging talents.” Byrne’s gift to MOCA ranges from established artists to cutting-edge talents, here and abroad,  and includes works by Gordon Matta- Clark, John Baldessari, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, Tony Cragg, Cosima von Bonin, Kai Althoff, Annette Messager, Beat Streuli, Jan Vercruysse and Jacques Villegle. A retired broadcasting executive who headed Hearst Argyle Television, Byrne has been a MOCA trustee since 1999. In addition, at Duke University, his alma mater, he chairs the board of advisors of the new Raymond D. Nasher Museum of Art and, indeed, helped recruit the topflight group whose charge is to help build an endowment and advise on exhibition planning and acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection.

JEROME and SIMONA CHAZEN
NEW YORK CITY
GLASS, CERAMICS, PAINTINGS
Jerome and Simona Chazen have been guiding forces at New York’s Museum of Arts & Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum) for more than 25 years. Bearing witness to their deep involvement is their recent gift of 40 pieces of outstanding 20th-century glass and ceramics. In celebration of the gift, the museum mounted an exhibition, “Dual Vision: The Simona and Jerome Chazen Collection,” that featured 98 pieces—the glass gift along with works lent from the excellent holdings of contemporary painting, sculpture and the decorative arts that the couple has amassed over three decades. That personal collection includes 500 paintings, drawings and sculpture in glass, clay and metal by more than 200 modern and contemporary artists, from glass innovator Harvey Littleton to painters Arshile Gorky and David Hockney. “We love art, whether a painting or a glass or ceramic object worth less money but equally beautiful,” he says. Jerome, formerly CEO of Liz Claiborne Inc. and now head of a private investment partnership, chaired the capital campaign that raised the funds for the museum’s new building, which more than triples its size. He is chairman emeritus of the museum’s board; Simona is a current board member and co-chair of the museum’s Collections Committee. In 2005 the Chazens gave $20 million to the University of Wisconsin, their alma mater, to build a new art museum, the Chazen Museum of Art, scheduled to open in 2009.

MAYME AGNEW CLAYTON and AVERY CLAYTON
LOS ANGELES
AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
A black university librarian with a passion for the history of her people—and for the minutiae that document it—amassed an enormous trove of materials chronicling 235 years of African-American life. As first reported in The New York Times, the cache includes roughly 30,000 rare and out-ofprint books; 75,000 photographs; 9,500 sound recordings and tens of thousands of documents, manuscripts, letters and 16- millimeter films. The collection, amassed over a lifetime, is said to have cost Mayme Agnew Clayton hundreds of thousands of dollars and filled a garage behind her home. The collection has been described by Sara S. Hodson, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, as “one of the most important collections in the United States for African- American materials.” Since Mayme’s death in October 2006, her son, Avery, is trying to put together an estimated $565,000 to move the massive collection out of the garage and into new quarters in a former Culver City courthouse, which the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Cultural Center will call home.  “She was an amazing, humble woman,” Avery says. “My mother assembled it; that was her part. My part is to bring it to the world.”

RALPH T. COE
SANTA FE
AMERICAN INDIAN ART
In a lifetime of collecting, Ralph T. (“Ted”) Coe has assembled a collection of American Indian art that is perhaps the most important in the country. In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited some 200 of his objects in “The Responsive Eye: Ralph T. Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art,” and the accompanying book of the same name is a must-have for anyone interested in American Indian culture. The collection is a promised gift to the Metropolitan, and Coe has already made an outright gift of several pieces. “I’m promise-gifting my American Indian collection to the Met because it lacks strength in this area, which I believe should be an essential part of the greatest general art museum in this country,” he says. Coe was on the staff of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City from 1959 until 1982, serving as director the last five years. He is still actively collecting ethnic art—Native American but also African, Oceanic and even European art, the latter categories being a promised gift to Oberlin College. “I’ve collected eclectically,” he says of his 2,000-work collection, “and my holdings include such diverse objects as a 13thcentury Limoges enamel cross, a pastel portrait by Renoir, a Courbet landscape painting, drawings by Pissarro and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, plus a portrait of my grandfather by George Luks.”

BETH RUDIN DeWOODY
WEST PALM BEACH, FLA., AND NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART AND OBJECTS
Beth Rudin DeWoody is a collector of wildly disparate things, from fun and funky items to the contemporary art canon. “I love beautiful drawings, minimalist art, things with a sense of humor,” she says. “I’m always looking and learning, to develop my eye and my own taste and style. Putting dissimilar things together is part of this, and I’m not afraid to seek advice.” DeWoody’s three homes and her office are chock-a-block with art. “I’m hoping I won’t find things that are appealing,” she says. “I’m a hopeless art addict, and it’s hard for me to resist fabulous things I ‘have to have.’” Her well-known support of young artists is compatible with her role at the Whitney Museum of American Art,whose Biennale showcases new and newnew artists. She has been a trustee there since 1985. DeWoody spends time getting to know these often unknown artists, visiting their studios, observing their creative processes, watching them change and grow, and introducing them to dealers. “It’s important to support young artists,” she says. “Just buying a painting can change their life.”

CHARLES and VALERIE DIKER
NEW YORK CITY
AMERICAN INDIAN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
After assembling a top-notch collection of American and European Modern and contemporary art by Joan Miró, Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson and the like, Charles and Valerie Diker launched into the markedly different field of American Indian art—and art is how they esteem the quotidian objects they’ve amassed. The couple assembled hundreds of pieces—moccasins, clothing, rattles, baskets, pottery and drawings— that demonstrate the aesthetic similarities among different North American cultures and that are valued by the Dikers for their inherent art, not their utilitarian purposes. “These pieces were made anonymously and stand on intrinsic merit,” says Valerie. “The universality of form gives them their beauty.” With confidence and a good sense of design, the Dikers integrated the American Indian objects with their sophisticated paintings. “The geometric forms complement each other, and we find that they live together very happily,” she says of the two collections. Last year, 200 highlights of the American Indian collection were exhibited in The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s George Gustav Heye Center. And in the fall, the museum opened Lower Manhattan’s newest art and performance space, The Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Cultures—6,000 square feet of additional public space. The couple donated most of the funds for the $5 million space.