BARBARA LEE
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
ART BY WOMEN
Ihope that by collecting art by women and donating art by women to museums such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the women artists of our time will assume their rightful position alongside the art of men in our cultural institutions,” says Barbara Lee, who for the last five years has exclusively collected art by women and whose substantial holdings include works by Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Kiki Smith and Marlene Dumas. The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which she launched in 1999, has two divisions to support programs that reflect her personal passions: contemporary art and women in politics. A lead gift of $5 million from the foundation launched the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston’s capital campaign for the new building, which opened to glowing reviews in December. So far, the foundation has given close to $7 million, and Lee has given five works from her collection. No surprise: She serves as the honorary chair of the campaign, as well as chair of the museum’s Collections Committee. Lee also is the founding chair of the contemporary arts program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

H.K. (GERRY) and MARGUERITE LENFEST
SUBURBAN PHILADELPHIA
MODERN ART
Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest had assembled perhaps the finest collection of Pennsylvania art extant—59 paintings by Bucks County exemplars such as Edward Redfield, Daniel Garber and Fern I. Coppedge—and gave them in trust in 1999 to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown/New Hope, along with a $3 million endowment. The trust, with the addition of three paintings, was converted in 2005 to an outright gift—the regional museum’s largest single gift. Today, the Lenfests lean toward more avant-garde works by European and American Modernists as well as major Philadelphia-area artists. Lenfest joined the board of trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1993 and became chairman in 2001. “Gerry Lenfest has been an extraordinary, generous, thoughtful and inspiring leader for the museum,” says Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the PMA. “He’s been spectacular in his gifts of works of art and in funds to acquire wonderful works like the Tiffany column [a Favrile glass, wood and metal column acquired by the PMA in 2001]. At the same time, he has led the way in a cause that means so much to the museum and to him: to pursue the museum’s vision of its master plan.” A $10 million gift from the Lenfests launched the museum’s 125th anniversary capital campaign. Additionally, the Lenfest Foundation, along with the Pew and Annenberg Foundations, has spearheaded what may be the successful move of the beleaguered Barnes Foundation to downtown Philadelphia, giving $15 million to that fraught effort. The foundation also contributed $3 million to a successful fund drive aimed at keeping Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic,” in Philadelphia. Recently, Lenfest gave $10 million to his high school alma mater, Mercersburg Academy, earmarked for a new arts center.

MARGARET LEVI and ROBERT KAPLAN
SEATTLE
ABORIGINAL ART
The vibrant abstract images of nature, evocations of an animated spiritual world, and lush colors and designs of Aboriginal art captured the imagination of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan on their first trip to Australia more than 15 years ago. The couple believes that an understanding of the history and culture of these artists enriches an appreciation of their works, and they’ve returned every year since, assembling an extraordinary collection. They buy little at auction, preferring to seek out tribal artists, local art centers and dealers who are known to pay their artists fairly, in an effort to make sure the financial rewards get into the hands of the tribal artists, most of whom are impoverished. The couple can be credited with helping to bring an awareness of Aboriginal art to the American collecting community by loaning their art and speaking to collecting groups, most recently at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum. Kaplan is a trustee of the Seattle Art Museum, where a part of their unique collection is on long-term loan.

PETER LEWIS
CLEVELAND
CONTEMPORARY ART
Long a powerful figure in the art world, the sometimes-controversial Cleveland businessman Peter Lewis contributed $101 million in 2006 to support an arts initiative at his alma mater, Princeton University, where he serves as a trustee. His first million-dollar gift to Princeton, in 1982, was earmarked to help create a contemporary art gallery (over the years his gifts to the university total more than $220 million). A former chairman of the board at the Guggenheim Museum (where he was a major donor) and a trustee emeritus of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Lewis is closely associated with the corporate art collection he started at The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies, the business he built from a small automobile insurance company into the third-largest in the country. Progressive is home to more than 6,000 often-provocative art works by emerging artists in a variety of media, displayed in company locations across the country. Lewis believes that art fosters the company’s culture of change and “encourages openmindedness to what is unfamiliar and different.” The firm has commissioned several site-specific installations, and annually selects an artist to design and illustrate its annual report.

TOBY DEVAN LEWIS
CLEVELAND
CONTEMPORARY ART
For nearly 20 years, Toby Lewis stewarded the enormous corporate art collection— now more than 6,000 works—of The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies, the giant Cleveland-based insurance business. She was noted for acquiring challenging installations and then providing arts education programs to help employees understand and feel comfortable with art that frequently pushed boundaries. (Lewis expects to have a book out in 2007 on the Progressive Collection, being published by the Lewis family.) “Because I always collected emerging artists for the company, my interest lies there. My personal collection is the result of 25 years of searching,” Lewis says. “It includes Elizabeth Peyton, Vik Muniz, Ed Ruscha, Amy Silman, James Hyde, Cornelia Parker, and my most recent acquisitions, works by Serge Spitzer and Ernesto Neto.” The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, where Lewis is vicepresident of the board, recently honored her at a fund-raising event. Donation incentives were mugs decorated with an Andy Warhol portrait of Toby Lewis, one of two portraits of her that the artist created. (In four minutes, 32 contributions were received.) Lewis is a trustee of the New Museum in New York, where she created a fund to support exhibitions of emerging artists, and recently gave a grant to Nick Cave through Artists Foundation. Lewis is a director of the Cleveland Institute of Art and Artpace San Antonio, as well as the DIA Art Council in Beacon, New York.

KENT and VICKI LOGAN
VAIL, COLO.
CONTEMPORARY ART
In 2006, the Denver Art Museum received the largest planned gift in its history when contemporary art collectors Kent and Vicki Logan bequeathed their entire remaining collection of more than 330 works, supplementing an earlier outright gift of more than 200 pieces. The Logans collect art from the 1960s to the present (they have a lot of Andy Warhol) with an emphasis on the last 15 years, including art from Japan and China. The bequest includes the Logans’ 15,000-squarefoot house in Vail and their adjacent private museum, which will be maintained as a showcase for parts of the collection; it also includes cash and endowed maintenance funds. Highlights of the collection are on view at the Denver Art Museum through July 15 in “Radar: Selections from the Collection of Kent and Vicki Logan,” an exhibition celebrating the opening of the museum’s new $90.5 million addition. The Logans, who moved to Vail in 2000, are serial donors. When they lived in San Francisco they gave 300 works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Vicki Logan is a trustee. They also were patrons of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts, where the galleries, as well as a scholarship, bear their names.

MEREDITH and CORNELIA LONG
HOUSTON
AMERICAN ART
American art was a young collecting field in the 1950s when Meredith and Cornelia Long developed their love for it and began their personal collection, as well as their Houston art gallery. Today, their collection is regarded as one of the best in the country. “Our pictures tell the story and trace the development of art in America over the last century,” says Meredith. Among the earliest artists in the collection are Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate, John James Audubon and Ralph Blakelock. Moving forward, it includes Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Theodore Robinson, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, William Glackens, Arthur Dove and Elie Nadelman. The collection continues with Abstract Expressionist and Color Field artists such as Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler and includes art being made today. The Longs have given major works to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, including Nadelman’s “Tango” and Cassatt’s “The Nurse,” which had appeared in the 1999 National Gallery of Art’s Cassatt exhibition. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the Meredith Long Gallery is among the oldest galleries in Houston and was one of the first in the country to specialize in American art.