LEONARD RIGGIO
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART
Leonard Riggio, founder and chairman of the Barnes & Noble chain, was the guiding hand and fount of resources at the Dia Art Foundation, one of the country’s most contemporary of contemporary museums, until 2006, when he stepped down after nearly 10 years. Under his leadership, Dia made the gutsy move from modest though trail-blazing quarters in New York’s Chelsea to a cavernous space in the formerly sleepy hamlet of Beacon, New York. It’s certain that Riggio’s name will long be connected to the institution: the new Dia galleries are called Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, in honor of the more than $30 million he has given the museum. For himself, Riggio continues to collect what he refers to as “the art of the Dia generation”— from Abstract Expressionism to art of the moment, and his Long Island home boasts a garden full of Noguchi sculptures. Riggio says that at the moment he has no plans to involve himself with other arts institutions: “It was a wonderful, exciting 10 years, very intense and time-consuming. Right now I’m happy to just relax a bit—and probably I’m overdue to study a little more art.” But, he adds, “My biggest passion is public art, and I’m always open to any ideas.”

ELIZABETH SACKLER
NEW YORK CITY
JUDY CHICAGO WORKS
Having grown up in a family of renowned collectors and benefactors—there are Sackler museums, galleries and wings at Harvard, the Metropolitan, the Smithsonian— Elizabeth Sackler continues the tradition, serving as CEO of the Arthur M. Sackler  Foundation, which was founded by her father in 1965 to collect, study and loan Asian artworks. But perhaps more self-defining is her role as founder of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation, which works to return ceremonial pieces to the Indian nations and has so far returned more than 30 objects. A leading collector of art that is concerned with women’s role in society and history, Sackler has the definitive collection of works by Judy Chicago. Her Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation recently gave “The Dinner Party,” Chicago’s iconoclastic 48-foot-long installation, to the Brooklyn Museum, where Sackler is a trustee. The Chicago work anchors a new wing, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, whose opening exhibition, “Global Feminism,” begins this month. “‘The Dinner Party’ is a launching pad to teach all of us about the important women in history,” she says. “We stand on the shoulders of our foremothers.”

MARVIN and RUTH SACKNER
MIAMI
LANGUAGE AS ART
Marvin and Ruth Sackner founded the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami in 1979. Forget the recondite name, and think of text whose appearance is both part of the creative process and critical to the viewer’s experience— language as art. The Sackners have assembled what must be a record-setting accumulation of rare books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, collages, ephemera, ceramics— any object that attracts them that utilizes words. “I get to define the collection,” Marvin says. “If it appeals to us, we acquire it.” The result is everything from valuable artists’ books to a set of Rosenthal china vases bearing poems. Or a rubber stamp with a poem on it by jwcurry [John Curry] that Sackner paid 1 cent for (he did decide to buy 400 of them, though). This vast and unique accumulation of more than 65,000 items resides in the Sackner home and can be seen only by invitation, but you can view the collection at www.rediscov.com sacknerarchives. See if you can find that penny stamp.

VICTORIA P. and ROGER SANT
WASHINGTON, D.C.
NABI PAINTERS
Victoria Sant plays a considerable and very visible role in two of Washington’s foremost arts institutions. She is the current president of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art where, with a nod to their personal collecting tastes, she and her husband, Roger, have established an acquisition fund for 19th-century paintings. The Sants also are long-standing patrons of the Phillips Collection, where Victoria has served as president and is now honorary chair. The couple spearheaded the museum’s fund-raising campaign with a challenge gift of $9 million given between 2001 and 2005, and in 2006 the Phillips opened the Sant Building, which effectively doubles the size of the museum—and recognizes the enormous contributions made by the Sants. The couple’s personal art collection focuses on the French Nabi painters of the late 19th century— Vuillard, Bonnard and Denis.

DONNA SCHNEIER
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART JEWELRY
When I realized that fine art was being done in ceramics—when I looked at Peter Voulkos’s Abstract Expressionist work—I had an ‘Aha!’ moment,” says Donna Schneier, a long-time dealer in the secondary market for post–World War II ceramics, glass, fiber, metal and wood (she emphatically does not use the word “crafts”). Then, faced with “a passion to collect and an unwillingness to argue with clients over who gets a particular piece,” she hit upon a different segment of this field, contemporary jewelry by artists—art to wear—as an area in which she could happily collect. “My criterion is that the artist has to conceive of it, design it and make it,” she says. Schneier assembled a personal collection of jewelry made of non-precious, alternative materials, such as aluminum and stainless steel, which she gave to the Museum of Arts & Design. In 2002 the museum exhibited 80 pieces in “Zero Karat: The Donna Schneier Gift to the Museum of Arts & Design” (which traveled to the Tacoma Art Museum in 2004), and honored her with one of the its annual “Visionary!” awards. On the occasion of the exhibition, Holly Hotchner, the museum’s director, said, “Donna is one of those rare collectors whose prescience and connoisseurship crucially influence the directions in which jewelry develops.”

WALTER C. SEDGWICK
WOODSIDE, CALIF.
EARLY CHINESE CERAMICS
For a decade Walter C. Sedgwick assembled “what is unquestionably the largest, finest and most comprehensive museum collection of early Chinese ceramics in the West, and one of the best in the world,” says Robert D. Mowry, curator of Chinese art (and head of the department of Asian art) at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum. “The works are exceptional in their beauty, historical significance and cultural value.” Through The Walter C. Sedgwick Foundation, Sedgwick purchased works expressly to strengthen Harvard’s holdings and then enabled the museum to acquire that collection as well as works from his personal holdings of early Asian art. “At Harvard, a catalog of medieval Japanese manuscripts particularly inspired me, the idea that some collector’s scholarship could teach me about that period,” he says. “My hope is to be able to inspire someone else.” The Sedgwick collection at Harvard comprises more than 300 Chinese works dating from 6000 B.C. through the Tang dynasty (618–907 A.D.) and three rare and early Japanese Buddhist sculptures.

MELVIN R. SEIDEN
NEW YORK CITY AND CONN.
OLD MASTER DRAWINGS, THEATRICAL MEMORABILIA
Wide-ranging seems an apt description for Melvin Seiden’s interests. He collects Old Master drawings and for more than 25 years has been an active supporter and fund-raiser for The Frick Collection in New York, where he has served as a trustee since 2000. Seiden has given to Harvard 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century European paintings and drawings, and Italian Renaissance drawings, and is considered a leading benefactor of the drawings department. He co-chaired the Harvard University Art Museums’ capital campaign, is chairman emeritus of the Villa I Tatti Council, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and also is a Life Fellow of the Morgan Library. In a lighter vein, Seiden collected works by artist/caricaturist Al Hirschfeld (whose artwork appeared weekly in the Sunday New York Times), and then gave more than 100 original drawings and 150 prints by the artist to the Harvard Theatre Collection, creating in a swoop the largest public collection of Hirschfeld’s work in the world. He also has an extensive collection of original drawings for New Yorker cartoons, which were exhibited at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut.