100 Top Collectors Who Are Making a Difference

By: Roberta S. Maneker

March 2007

The passion to collect can assume many forms. During a year of researching collections and talking to their owners, A&A staff followed leads far beyond the expected categories of paintings, sculpture, photography and design objects. We found collections of antique canes, Turkmen textiles, automobiles, miniature books, naval warship memorabilia and the printed word as art. The collectors, too, are a varied group: investment bankers, executives, psychologists, automobile dealers, actors. Diverse as they are, our 100 Top Collectors share one trait— generosity. In some way, each of them offers something back to their community or to the larger world of the arts. Some make gifts or loans of art to cultural institutions; some sponsor emerging artists; some serve on museum boards; some create programs that foster art appreciation, scholarship or accessibility. Everyone on our list has helped expand opportunities for others.

Art & Antiques honors the public spirit that these collectors exhibited during 2006. Each year their open-handed support of the arts assumes greater importance. Increasingly the price of great works is beyond the purchasing power of all but two or three of our nation’s richest museums, and tax laws that affect fractional gifts are deterring would-be donors. Arts education is in decline because localities, facing financial pressures, see such programs as disposable elements in shrinking school budgets. But as long as big-hearted collectors provide alternate sources of support and supply, art will continue to play an important role in our communal and individual lives. The next time you visit a museum, read the wall card and tip your hat to the generous lender or donor. When you next attend a lecture, visit a collection or see an exhibit that was privately funded, be grateful to our Top Collectors. They’re enriching life for all of us.

MARILYNN ALSDORF
CHICAGO
ASIAN ART
For Marilynn and James Alsdorf, a life committed to art began with the purchase of a Modigliani in the 1950s, the progenitor of a collection of 20th-century works by such greats as Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse and Jasper Johns. Catholic in their tastes, the couple soon grew fascinated by sculpture, acquiring ancient, medieval and, finally, Asian pieces. The Alsdorf collection of Southeast Asian and Himalayan arts is among the country’s largest holdings, distinguished by its breadth and connoisseurship. James died in 1990, and in the ensuing years Marilynn has been supporting a number of art institutions. In 1997 she gave 400 works, mainly sculptures spanning nearly 20 centuries of Asian art, to the Art Institute of Chicago where she is a life trustee. This past year she received the University of Chicago Smart Museum of Art’s biannual Joseph R. Shapiro Award, presented by the then-AIC chair John Bryan, who said, “We are honoring an art patron without equal in our time in Chicago. As an art collector of extraordinary depth and breadth and quality, as a benefactor to so many, many, many art organizations, and as a leader who has given so much time and talent to cultural institutions, Marilynn Alsdorf has no peer.” Alsdorf helped underwrite the AIC’s exhibition “Silk Road Chicago,” which will be on view through October 2007.

DALE and DOUG ANDERSON
PALM BEACH, FLA., AND NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS AND GLASS
Dale and Doug Anderson give depth to the word “collect.” American Indian art and crafts, studio glass, photographs, fiber, ceramics, contemporary art, Chinese rank badges and shoes for bound feet— they’ve collected them all. The couple gives collections away, advocates for artists, underwrites scholarships and supports museums. They are, in short, ambassadors for crafts and the artists who make them. They’ve donated more than 800 pieces to the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin (Dale is on the board) and another 200 to other institutions. The Andersons don’t store art; they live with it or give it away. “We give really good pieces that make a difference. Not the stuff in a closet that no one wants,” Dale says. In 2003, the Andersons joined with Charles Bronfman and his late wife, Andrea, to form AIDA, the Association for Israel’s Decorative Arts (see “Ready for the World Market,” Art & Antiques, September 2005). AIDA exhibited at SOFA Chicago (Sculptural Objects and Functional Art) in 2003 and has participated ever since, exposing dozens of Israeli craft artists to an international marketplace. “We’ve made a substantial difference in the lives of artists working in Israel, introducing them to dealers, collectors and museums in America and England,” says Doug. “It’s the thing we’ve done in the last five years that makes us most proud.”

JOAN and MILTON BAGLEY
BOCA RATON, FLA.
LATIN AMERICAN ART
Ilike them because they’re earthy, Rubenesque,” says Milton Bagley, talking about his Francisco Zuñiga sculptures. “Because they’re unglamorous and real. Zuñiga venerated the simple peasant.” Joan and Milton Bagley have assembled a collection of more than 60 Latin American paintings and sculptures, which fill their homes. And over the summer of 2006, they filled much of the Boca Raton Museum of Art. “Masters of Latin America: Selections from the Joan and Milton Bagley Collection” featured art from more than 10 countries (heavy on Mexico and Cuba), most of which had never been exhibited before. The Bagleys started collecting 27 years ago. After a brief brush with Abstract Expressionism, they began to buy American Indian art in Santa Fe and Taos, where they often vacationed. Then, warmed by the cultural crosswinds of the Southwest and inspired by seeing Latin American art in the galleries of the area’s finest dealers, they quickly fell in love with the colorful and robust art from south of the border, particularly of the 1980s. And they’ve been unwavering in that love ever since.

BRUCE BARNES and JOSEPH CUNNINGHAM
NEW YORK CITY
AMERICAN ARTS AND CRAFTS
Bruce Barnes and Joseph Cunningham live amidst what many consider a peerless collection of American Arts and Crafts and Prairie Movement decorative art (1890–1920) comprising more than 300 pieces by such designers as Greene & Greene, Charles Rohlfs, Roycroft, Gustav Stickley, Frank Lloyd Wright, Grueby, Newcomb, George Ohr and Teco. Barnes started collecting furniture, then metalwork and lighting. After adding art pottery, “it became an entire period encapsulated in one environment.” Cunningham is currently working with the Milwaukee Art Museum on a Rohlfs exhibition scheduled to open there in 2009, travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Huntington in San Marino, California, and finish in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010. Barnes and Cunningham have established the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, which works with museums to foster and support research and collection development in early modern American design—principally through gifts, long-term loans, advising and making the collection available for scholars, curators and patrons. “We try to be helpful to curators in whatever ways we can,” says Cunningham. Recently, the foundation donated pieces to the Met, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Carnegie Museum of Art, in each case honoring the achievements of an important scholar or curator in early modern design.

MAX N. and HEIDI BERRY
WASHINGTON, D.C. AND NANTUCKET, MASS.
AMERICAN ART AND DECORATIVE ARTS
Max and Heidi Berry are well-known figures in the Americana community and philanthropists on the Washington scene. The couple collects American paintings and decorative arts, and has amassed a collection of scrimshaw at their Nantucket home. Max, a lawyer and lobbyist, has served as chairman of the National Board of the Smithsonian Institution and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and has been a trustee of the Phillips Collection and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is founder and past chair of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association and, with Graham Gund, founded the Nantucket Preservation Trust in 1999. He and Heidi, a freelance journalist in the arts, serve on the Collectors Committee of the National Gallery of Art. Max also is chairman of the board of advisors of the Bryant Fellows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which helps underwrite publications and purchases for the American Wing, and, with Heidi, is a supporter of the Decorative Arts Trust.SCOTT BLACK
BROOKLINE, MASS.
IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART
An understanding of the art market’s vicissitudes as well as a picture’s quality has guided Scott Black in the formation of his excellent collection of Impressionist, post-Impressionist and modern paintings. He has spent the last 20 years purchasing museum-quality works by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and more, many of which have been loaned to top-tier museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Grand Palais in Paris. Most recently the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibited “The Romance of Modernism: Paintings and Sculpture from the Scott M. Black Collection”—40 paintings and 15 sculptures tracking the rise of modern art from the 1860s to the 1960s. Founder and chairman of Delphi Management Inc., a Boston-based investment advisory company, the self-described Francophile is a longtime supporter of both the MFA and the Portland Museum of Art in his native Portland, Maine, where he sits on the board of trustees. After a 2006 auction at Sotheby’s, the ever-outspoken Black commented to Bloomberg News on bidding he thought was higher than justified by the quality of the art: “There is a lot of newly minted wealth. This is a way to confirm status, by buying a collection with a signature. New wealth doesn’t know one period from the next.”

HENRY and MARION BLOCH
MISSION HILLS, KAN.
IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART
It’s as long as a 67-story skyscraper laid on its side. The new Bloch Building, a Steven Holl–designed expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, will add 165,000 square feet, increasing museum space by 70 percent. And it will be a permanent reminder of the importance of Henry and Marion Bloch to the cultural life of Kansas City, Missouri. Scheduled for June 9, the opening will mark the completion of the museum’s expansion plan and will be celebrated with a special inaugural exhibition. “Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection” will feature 30 important paintings from the couple’s renowned collection and is sponsored by the H&R Block Foundation, which Bloch chairs. “This building is an architectural masterpiece and will serve as a gateway to bring the world to Kansas City and to the rich depths of the Nelson-Atkins collection,” says Henry. “Marion and I are honored to be a part of this enduring legacy and look forward to sharing our collection with visitors next summer.” Bloch currently chairs the Nelson-Atkins board.

JACQUELINE BRADLEY and CLARENCE OTIS JR.
ORLANDO, FLA.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART
Acollection that began with realist Hughie Lee-Smith, incorporated Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam and installation artist Fred Wilson boasts a commissioned Lyle Ashton Harris head photograph of Jacqueline Bradley and Clarence Otis Jr., and includes some new-media talents can fairly be said to trace the arc of contemporary art. “The collection has evolved over the years as we’ve gotten to know artists. Listening to their voices has led us to new artists and new genres,” says Bradley. “And we pore over catalogs to keep abreast of artists and trends.” It has taken the couple more than two decades to assemble this first-class collection of art by significant African-American artists, mostly from the 1950s to the present, and they continue to add to it. All 70 works in this group will be on view through April 2007 at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Over the years, about one-third of the collection has been exhibited at museums, Bradley reports, including the Whitney Museum of American Art.

NORMAN and IRMA BRAMAN
MIAMI BEACH
MODERN AND POSTWAR ART
Each year since Art Basel Miami Beach first blew into town in 2002, Norman and Irma Braman have chaired the Host Committee, whose efforts help make the fair such a must-do event. And each year they open their museum-like home to invited Basel Miami Beach guests, such as curators and museum groups. Central to the Miami art scene for decades, the Bramans have an exceptional collection of modern art, headlined by Jasper Johns’ iconic “Diver.” The painting was loaned to the MoMA Johns retrospective in 1996 and, reports Norman, is currently on view in the National Gallery of Art’s “Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965.” The collection includes major works by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, and Alexander Calder whose pieces the Bramans own in sufficient number to have created a wing of their house for them. In 2003 they gave works by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and Antoni Tàpies to the University of Florida’s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. A Frank Stella painting went to the Menil Collection in Houston in 2006. The couple has made numerous gifts of art to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), where Irma has chaired the board for more than a decade.

PETER M. BRANT and STEPHANIE SEYMOUR
GREENWICH, CONN.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Peter Brant has been a player in the art market since his days as part of the Andy Warhol crowd, when he bought art directly from the painter and for a time had a financial stake in Warhol’s magazine Interview. He and his wife, Stephanie Seymour, have established the Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation, which acquires art from the mid-20th century to today and has holdings ranging from Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to current-day best-sellers like Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley and Andreas Gursky. The Foundation lends extensively to museums around the world; it sent eight pieces to the Brooklyn Museum’s Basquiat show, which traveled to Los Angeles and Houston in 2005 and 2006. The foundation’s collection will be housed in a renovated building in Greenwich, which the couple plans to open in 2008. Brant’s art interests are expansive: Besides serving as a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum, he was executive producer of the films “Basquiat” (1996), “Pollock” (2000) and “Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film” (2006).

ELI and EDYTHE BROAD
LOS ANGELES
CONTEMPORARY ART
Eli and Edythe Broad use their considerable financial resources to underwrite programs in the arts, education and scientific research. The Broad Art Foundation lends contemporary art to colleges, universities, museums and other public venues from its collection of more than 800 works by artists mostly working since 1975, and it continues to acquire works, many of them large or multi-part installations. “It enables us to continue our collecting, sharing our passion for contemporary art,” says Broad, who made his fortune from home-building company KB Home, and then from insurance conglomerate Sun America. “And at the same time it makes art available to a wide audience—so much art leaves the country or goes into private collections and thus isn’t available for the public.” The Broads have established art centers at UCLA, Pitzer College (Calif.) and the California Institute of the Arts. And they recently pledged $60 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a new building (The Broad Contemporary Art Museum) and an acquisition fund. The museum will exhibit works from the foundation and from the Broads’ collection, as well as newly acquired art. The couple has one of the country’s strongest collections of contemporary art—much of it large-scale—including works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Mark Tansey, which they continue to augment. In 2006 they acquired an early Andy Warhol for $11.7 million.

MELVA BUCKSBAUM  and RAYMOND J. LEARSY
ASPEN, COLO., AND NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART
Every other year an artist who appeared in the Whitney Biennial and “has the potential to make an enduring contribution to American art” wins the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award, established in 2002 by Whitney Vice Chairman Melva Bucksbaum. She and her husband, Raymond Learsy, also a Whitney trustee, are an art-world power couple. Bucksbaum is a trustee of the Hirshhorn
Museum & Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Drawing Center (New York) and Save Venice; Learsy is a member of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. They have established purchase funds and endowments at numerous museums and make frequent gifts of substantial artwork. Whether it’s 38 works by 2004 Bucksbaum Award–winner Raymond Pettibon to the Whitney or a Joel Shapiro sculpture for Des Moines’ ambitious Riverwalk project (given with Bucksbaum’s daughter), they deploy their energy, commitment and resources to support a range of museums and artists. Their personal collecting aim, they told the British magazine Prospect, is not just to buy into history, but to anticipate it, collecting artists early in their careers. “The exciting thing about collecting contemporary art is that there is no real body of validation,” says Learsy. “You can become part of the process of validation.”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.KAREN and J. ROBERT DUNCAN
LINCOLN, NEB.
CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE AND ART
The rolling land of Lincoln is perhaps an unexpected site for enormous contemporary sculpture, but the 40-acre estate of Karen and Robert Duncan is dotted with a dozen such pieces, including a giant bronze Louise Bourgeois spider and oversized works by Julian Schnabel and Beverly Pepper. Thisisn’t merely a sculpture garden, though. The Duncans own more than 700 works, mostly three-dimensional, by well-known artists (Georgia O’Keeffe, Niki de St. Phalle, Roy Lichtenstein) as well as by unknowns. They have some paintings (including Motherwell, Sultan and Hung Liu), video works (Tony Oursler and Nam June Paik among them) and a growing photography collection. “We buy what we love, no matter what the medium, no matter known or unknown artist, no matter fine art or craft, no matter easy or tough and controversial,” says Robert. “It’s an eclectic gathering of beautiful things, a very personal collection.” The couple has established friendships with some of the artists whose works they collect, which adds a special pleasure. In 2003, 70 artists came to a weekend celebration the couple hosted. “We plan to do that again in 2007 and hope for an even larger turnout,” says Robert. “We host many tours of our collection; anyone seriously interested in art or architecture is welcome.” Not without reason, this magazine has called the Duncans “the Medicis of the Midwest” (Art & Antiques, May 2005).

BARNEY EBSWORTH
SEATTLE
MODERNIST AMERICAN ART
Barney Ebsworth has been collecting mostly Modernist American art for about 30 years, compiling a collection that numbers more than 200 works by artists including Calder, Warhol, de Kooning, Hockney, Hopper, Johns, Pollock and O’Keeffe. Wherever he calls home, he plays a pivotal role in cultural life. When he lived in St. Louis, he was a museum trustee and generous donor there. He currently resides in Seattle, where he is a trustee of and major donor to the Seattle Art Museum. Ebsworth has built a unique home-cum-gallery on Lake Washington— an architecturally lauded structure that, although 14,000 square feet, was designed to blend comfortably into the landscaped setting— and he opens his home for numerous arts benefits. (See Art & Architecture: The Ebsworth Collection & Residence, William Stout Publishers, 2006.) Seventy of his works were exhibited in “Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he is a member of the trustees council and co-chairman of the collectors committee. He has given to the NGA works by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove, among other gifts. He also is a commissioner of The Smithsonian American Art Museum. When asked once about the fate of his collection, Ebsworth answered, “I’m not going to sell them, that’s for sure.” It’s the answer you’d expect from a holder of the 2002 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture’s Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Award for Outstanding Patronage of the Arts.

JULIAN I. EDISON
ST. LOUIS
MINIATURE BOOKS
Books the size of a playing card, a postage stamp or your thumbnail have beguiled Julian Edison since his college days. Today he has a library of many thousands of these remarkable miniatures spanning 4,000 years, almost all 3 inches high or smaller, which fill bookshelves in his library. Some might be hard to see: His smallest book is less than 1 millimeter high, printed by the Tokyo-based Toppan Printing Company in 2000. “Miniature books have been produced for reasons of practicality, curiosity and aesthetics,” he says. “Many people think of these as novelties which can’t be read, and for the most part nothing could be further from the truth. Most of them don’t require a magnifying glass to be read. The type size and the size of the book don’t necessarily correspond.” Harvard’s Houghton Library held an exhibition of highlights from the collection in 2005. This spring, the Grolier Club in New York will hold an exhibition of highlights from it, to coincide with the publication of Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures (Harry N. Abrams Inc.), which Edison co-edited with Boston rare book dealer Anne C. Bromer. “Bringing knowledge of this segment of book publishing to the larger world is, I hope, our tiny contribution to the world’s culture,” Edison says.

MITZI and WARREN EISENBERG
SHORT HILLS, N.J.
+ SUSAN and LEONARD FEINSTEIN
LONG ISLAND, N.Y.
CONTEMPORARY ART
The Eisenbergs and Feinsteins are tied by many threads. Both couples have been collecting contemporary art for more than a decade. The women are trustees of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the only museum in the city devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The men are the founding partners and co-chairmen of Bed, Bath & Beyond, the thriving national housewares chain. And the four are close friends, often traveling together. Thus, it’s perhaps unusual but not surprising that the couples together pledged the lead gift, reputedly around $10 million, for the New Museum’s new building on New York’s gentrifying Bowery, scheduled to open this year. “We’ve made a commitment to the New Museum because it’s truly a unique New York institution and because of its unwavering dedication to contemporary art,” says Warren Eisenberg. “The new building will be a new landmark for the city,” adds Susan Feinstein.

ROBERT HATFIELD ELLSWORTH
NEW YORK CITY
CHINESE ART AND ARTIFACTS
Robert Hatfield Ellsworth is a renowned scholar, collector, dealer and author in the fields of classical Chinese furniture and Chinese 19th- and 20th-century paintings. In 1970 he wrote the first authoritative book on dating Chinese furniture; this classic reference work was reprinted in 1998. Ellsworth, who has been a dealer in Chinese art since 1958, gave nearly 500 Chinese paintings to the Metropolitan Museum in 1986, which featured 90 of them in a special exhibition in 2001. All of these works had been previously reproduced by Ellsworth in his epic work, the hard-to-find three-volume Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 1800–1950 (Random House, 1987). His most recent book is the twovolume Chinese Furniture: The Hung Collection (AMR, 2005). Ellsworth, who has traveled to China many times, spent years aiding the Chinese in raising funds for the restoration of temples, residences and decaying historic villages. He is, not surprisingly, greatly honored in China for these efforts.

SARAH GAMBLE EPSTEIN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
EDVARD MUNCH WORKS ON PAPER
Sarah Epstein, with her former husband, Lionel, has one of the largest private collections of works on paper by Edvard Munch in the United States. Epstein became fascinated with the artist when she first saw an exhibition of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1950, moved by what she described in an article she wrote in 1997 (Scandinavian Review) as “anxious, lonely looking individuals in a crowd ... I was so taken by these images that Munch immediately became my artist for life.” She began collecting with the purchase of three prints in 1962. Today the Epstein Family Collection numbers more than 300 graphics— drawings and a few oil paintings—and an accompanying oral history of people who knew the artists, compiled by Epstein. “Over the years,” she wrote, “on numerous trips to Norway, Germany and France, I taped interviews with many people who had known Munch and many whose portraits he painted.” Epstein plans to donate the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art, which held a major exhibition of her collection in1997 that subsequently traveled to other museums, and published Edvard Munch: Master Prints from the Epstein Family Collection, with text by Epstein. She also wrote the foreword to Munch and Women: Image and Myth, 1997. And, in further testament to the strength of her commitment to Munch’s oeuvre, she commissioned a composition by Swedish composer Ulf Grahn inspired by themes in Munch works for a concert which premiered in her home.

DAPHNE FARAGO
LITTLE COMPTON, R.I., AND KEY BISCAYNE, FLA.
STUDIO JEWELRY AND FIBER ART
Wearable works of art using unconventional forms and materials.” That’s how the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston describes a recent gift from Daphne and Peter Farago of more than 600 pieces of contemporary studio jewelry, mostly made after 1940 by American and European artists. (Highlights of the collection will be on display May 2007–Feb. 2008.) Farago has amassed one of the largest and finest collections of these unusual pieces, defined as one-of-a-kind or limited-production objects, created by artistscraftsmen in independent studios. Her first collection was of early American objects. “I loved the uniqueness of a single object made by one person, so it was an easy transition to studio jewelry. And as my collection grew I decided that I would like it to go to a museum, so I tried to form a group a museum would want,” she says. The Faragos additionally gave the museum 80 contemporary fiber art pieces. They also are supporters of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, which opened a Daphne Farago Wing in 1994.AARON FLEISCHMAN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Aaron Fleischman, the Washington communications and utilities mega-lawyer, has been building one of the country’s major art collections over the past 20 years. His holdings range from early 20th-century European abstraction to the present and include outstanding examples of scores of important modern European masters, as well as A-list American Modernists, Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists and Minimalists. “What’s most impressive about his collection is that it runs literally from the beginning of the 20th century to today, and in every case the artists are represented at their highest level of accomplishment,” says Lisa Dennison, director of the Guggenheim. “He also collects several artists in depth; you can see the whole history of a career in a few key paintings.” Fleischman is a frequent lender to museum exhibitions. In the past year, his David Smith sculpture “Sculptor and Model” was in shows at both the Whitney and the Guggenheim and his 1934 Picasso “Tête de Femme, profil droit (Marie-Thérèse)” was featured in the Whitney’s “Picasso and American Art” catalog. Other works from his collection have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. Fleischman serves on boards of trustees and committees at museums in Washington, New Orleans, New York and Miami.

JOHN C. and ELIZABETH FONTAINE
NEW YORK CITY
AMERICAN, ASIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN ART
Over the years, Jack and Betty Fontaine have filled their Manhattan apartment with an eclectic collection of American, Asian and Latin American art and decorative objects. It started, simply enough, in the 1950s with a couple of prints. “We didn’t set out to make a collection. We’ve bought what we like, what has meaning for us and what works well in our home,” Betty says. “When we think about our collection, Betty and I immediately think of the National Gallery, which we visit as often as we can, because in a very real sense, the Gallery is part of our collection, as it is every American’s,” says Jack, who was recently elected chairman of the NGA’s board of trustees. He just retired after 12 years as chairman of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and 30 years on its board. The foundation has a history with the NGA: When the Kress Foundation dispersed its collection of more than 3,000 pieces of European art between 1947 and 1961, 1,800 works were given to the National Gallery of Art.

ELLA FONTANALS-CISNEROS
MIAMI
LATIN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART
The hot-hot Miami art scene continues to evolve. The rapidly expanding Miami Art Museum (MAM), established in 1996, and Miami Art Central (MAC), established in 2003, have just signed a cooperative agreement. MAC, a kunsthalle created and supported by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, has distinguished itself by its international and experimental programming, and will henceforth produce these cultural events for MAM. “As an active member of MAM’s board of trustees, I felt that the missions of MAM and MAC were converging,” says Cisneros. “This partnership [known as MAC@MAM] provides an elegant solution.” Cisneros is the force and money behind another well-regarded Miami institution, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, known as CIFO, which she established in 2002. CIFO is dedicated to promoting “emerging and mid-career contemporary multi-disciplinary artists in Latin America,” providing grants, commissions and group shows. Occupying a redesigned warehouse in the Wynwood Art District (with a mosaic tile façade that looks like a bamboo jungle), CIFO showcases Cisneros’ collection of abstractgeometric and contemporary art from Latin America, and contemporary international art with an emphasis on photography and video art.

MAXINE and STUART FRANKEL
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND CERAMICS
Every academic art museum needs supporters like Maxine and Stuart Frankel, whose eponymous foundation gave $10 million in 2004 to support an addition to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Ann Arbor, the largest gift in the museum’s history. The new 53,000- square-foot wing will more than double the museum’s present space when it opens in 2008. It will be known as The Maxine and Stuart Frankel and the Frankel Family Wing. Maxine serves on the national advisory boards for UMMA and for the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. She is on the board of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, a museum based on Donald Judd’s artistic theories about the interrelationship between art and the surrounding landscapes, and chairs The Cranbrook Academy of Art and The Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills) board of governors. The Frankels have built an outstanding personal collection of contemporary art and ceramics, including works by Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou and Barbara Hepworth, which they loan to museums around the world.

PATRICIA and PHILLIP FROST
MIAMI BEACH
AMERICAN ABSTRACT ART
Say “Florida International University” and the names of Patricia and Phillip Frost instantly surface. The Frosts gave the lead naming gift to the university, for its Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, which, in its rebuilt and greatly expanded form, will open in 2008. A medical doctor, Phillip is the founder of the IVAX Corporation, which develops and markets pharmaceutical products; Patricia has been a public school educator for nearly 30 years. Together, they assembled a representative collection of American abstract art from the 1930s and ’40s by artists like László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, John Sennhauser and Charles Green Shaw. In 1987, they gave this collection to The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, which in 1989 published The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection, American Abstraction, 1930– 1945 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Patricia is chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Board and chairman emeritus of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Last year, Phillip was elected a regent of the American Art Museum, where the Frosts have established an endowment that helps fund The Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award, which annually honors a scholarly essay in American art history that has appeared in the museum’s journal, American Art.

DAVID and DANIELLE GANEK
CONNECTICUT
PHOTOGRAPHY, CONTEMPORARY ART
Hedge fund investor David Ganek and his wife, Danielle, are active collectors across a number of fields—painting, sculpture, photography and video, with an emphasis on works from the 1990s by artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst. In 2004 the couple made a promised gift to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of 13 rare vintage Diane Arbus prints, more than doubling the museum’s holdings by the legendary photographer. Included are some of Arbus’ more famous images, such as “A young waitress at a nudist camp, N.J., 1963,” and “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968.” According to the Met, the gift represents one of the most significant acquisitions of 20th-century photography in the museum’s history, all the more so because the prints were made by Arbus and acquired directly from her estate by the couple. Ganek, who runs a hedge fund called Level Global Investors, is reported to have commissioned Ed Ruscha in 2003 to paint one of his signature word pictures for the firm’s corporate headquarters using the word “Level.”

STEPHEN A. GEPPI
BALTIMORE
COMICS MEMORABILIA
Step right up, kids of all ages. Steve Geppi’s Entertainment Museum has something to amuse and inform just about everyone. GEM, which opened in 2006, is a sprightly history of America’s comics, and their spillover influence on toys and board games, animation cels, movie posters and advertisements. The thousands of items on view, almost all of them owned by Geppi, fill 17,000 square feet above a baseball museum at Baltimore’s Camden Yards— which is fitting because Geppi is a minority owner of the Orioles, the fulfillment of yet another boyhood dream. To give historical context to the mass of material, objects are arranged by era and create a lively and amusing continuum of pop culture. “Look around the museum and you’ll see that the history of popular culture is so tightly woven into the social fabric of the United States that it parallels mainstream history,” Geppi says. He has been collecting comics memorabilia all his life, and this infatuation eventually led to his founding Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the largest distributor of Englishlanguage comic books.RICHARD GILDER
NEW YORK CITY
+ LEWIS LEHRMAN
GREENWICH, CONN.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
Linked by politics, proclivities, careers in finance and a shared attachment to Yale, Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman together have used their considerable resources to expand and enrich opportunities for the study of American history. “Dick Gilder and I established the Gilder Lehrman Collection and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to tell the story of the country we love,” says Lehrman. “We believe the history of America is one of the greatest stories ever told and that the story is best told and interpreted from the original documents themselves. Only in such a telling can every scholar, each citizen— even every person in a faraway country— read, study and interpret the record of the American people who forged, from 13 impoverished colonies, the great American republic.” The Gilder Lehrman Collection comprises 70,000 letters, manuscripts and other documents with particular depth and breadth in the period from the Colonial and Revolutionary years through the era of President Lincoln and the Civil War. It includes rarities such as the earliestknown draft of Abraham Lincoln’s “house divided” speech opposing slavery (which when purchased at Sotheby’s for $1.5 million in 1992 set an auction record for an American autograph or manuscript), a rare printed copy of the first draft of the Constitution and thousands of soldiers’ letters. “A principal purpose of the collection is its availability to scholars and students,” says Lehrman. For that reason it was on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library from 1992 to 2003, and is now at the New- York Historical Society, where the two serve as trustees.

SONDRA GILMAN
NEW YORK CITY AND CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS
20TH-CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
The Gilman name is closely associated with excellence in the collecting of photography. The late Howard Gilman, through his Gilman Paper Company, created a spectacular corporate collection, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired in 2005. Sondra Gilman, his sister-in-law, has been a major collector herself since the 1970s when, as she described in “From the Heart: The Power of Photography—A Collector’s Choice” (Aperture, 1985), she was “thunderstruck at an exhibition of Eugène Atget’s photographs” and immediately bought one. Gilman is a trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she has endowed the position of Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, as well as the Sondra Gilman Photography Gallery. Gilman and her husband, Celso Miguel González-Falla, direct the Sondra & Charles Gilman Jr. Foundation, which has a substantial photography collection. González- Falla serves on the Texas Commission on the Arts and is a trustee of the Art Museum of South Texas.

WILLIAM and MILDRED GLADSTONE
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y.
BASEBALL ART AND MEMORABILIA
The crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd are basic nutrients for Bill and Millie Gladstone, who live surrounded by hundreds of baseball-themed objects. While the collection has the occasional fan-find, such as the first ball ever in play at Ebbets Field, at heart it’s a distinguished art collection. Baseball paintings by artists such as John Marin, Ben Shahn and William Merritt Chase are matched by extraordinary examples of folk art, including pictures, carvings and other vernacular objects. Long-time supporters of the American Folk Art Museum, the Gladstones have made a promised gift of a carved wood figure of a baseball player (more than 6 feet high with base), considered one of the great pieces of American folk art. Acquired from the Whitney Museum, the figure is attributed to noted American carver Samuel Robb (of cigar store Indian fame), who worked between 1888 and 1903. The Gladstones were major lenders to “The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball,” a popular exhibition mounted by the American Folk Art Museum in 2003–04. “We’re still acquiring,” says William, who notes that in 2006 they purchased Gerald Garston’s painting “Opening Day in the Minors,” which carries special meaning: The Gladstones own a minor league team, the Tri- City Valley Cats, a Troy, New York farm team for the Houston Astros. Bill, who retired as co-chairman of Ernst & Young, calls this “the ultimate collectible.”

CAROL and ARTHUR GOLDBERG
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART
In bucolic Mt. Kisco, New York, some of the most advanced contemporary art can occasionally be seen in an exhibition space known as the Foundation To-Life, which was created five years ago by Carol and Arthur Goldberg to showcase art from their vast contemporary art collection that otherwise would be in storage. Each year a themed exhibition is professionally curated and then opened, by invitation only, to various art groups from museums and universities— and from Carol’s mailing list of 1,600 names. The couple started collecting right after their marriage in 1962 and have never stopped, buying at the start of most of the contemporary movements, from pop and minimalist art to art made  this year. They always buy the work of living artists (photography excepted) and own works by at least 1,000 artists, including Carl Andre, Catherine Opie, Tony Cragg, Nancy Dwyer, Olafur Eliasson and Matthew Ritchie. Some of the collection has been in storage for more than 30 years; the Mt. Kisco art space enables the Goldbergs to rotate pieces out of storage and into the air. “The collection is completely catalogued; someone has been working on it since the 1970s. We take it very seriously,” Carol says, “although we don’t know exactly how many pieces we have.”

BARON and ELLIN GORDON
WILLIAMSBURG, VA.
AMERICAN FOLK ART AND SELF-TAUGHT ART
Baron and Ellin Gordon have been collecting folk art—or, as they prefer, selftaught art—since the 1960s. Though the Gordons started their collection with 19thcentury decorated stoneware, they began concentrating on 20th-century works in the 1980s. Over the years, they assembled around 1,000 pieces, most of them by self-taught artists. They have donated works to various institutions, including the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Hampton University in Virginia and the American Folk Art Museum. But those donations were dwarfed by their recent gift of 300 pieces to Old Dominion University, a 75-year-old urban campus in Norfolk, Virginia, Baron’s hometown. Describing the university as “interested in current problems of all types, with a focus on science and technology,” Ellin says, “We’ve felt that the art fits a contemporary university, and it didn’t take us long to decide that this was the right place.” The gift includes works by 20th- and 21st-century, self-taught American folk artists, including paintings, sculptures, jugs, canes and carvings, and will be housed in what will be the university’s first art center, scheduled to open later this year.

KENNETH C. GRIFFIN and ANNE DIAS GRIFFIN
CHICAGO
CONTEMPORARY ART
Kenneth C. Griffin and Anne Dias Griffin, who are in the process of assembling an important group of Impressionist, modern and contemporary works, made news  when they recently purchased Jasper Johns’ seminal “False Start” from Hollywood mogul David Geffen for a reported $80 million. Kenneth and Anne, who both run hedge funds, recently promised $19 million for a new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Kenneth is a trustee. (He also is a trustee of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art; Anne is a trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.) “Ken and Anne Griffin always have been extraordinarily generous supporters,” says James Cuno, director of the Art Institute. “Not only have they given the museum a gift that will almost literally be a cornerstone of the new Modern Wing scheduled to open in 2009, but for many years they have lent rare and significant works to us. Thanks to the Griffins, Chicagoans and visitors have been able to enjoy such masterpieces as Degas’ sculpture ‘Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,’ Cézanne’s ‘Self-Portrait’; and Monet’s ‘Water Lilies.’ The Griffins’ commitment to the arts extends far beyond their collection; they are just as committed to making sure that artworks are accessible to all.”

AGNES GUND
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART AND 20TH-CENTURY DRAWINGS
Agnes Gund, celebrated internationally for her advocacy and support of the arts, was elected to the board of The Frick Collection in New York in 2006, after retiring from the board of the Getty Museum, where she’d served since 1994. Add that to a long list of arts programs that have benefited from Gund’s generosity and loyalty. She has donated more than 150 important works to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she is president emerita and chairman of MoMA’s International Council. She chairs the (New York) Mayor’s Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission; she sits on the boards of The Menil Collection and The Barnes Foundation; and she created and funded New York’s Studio in a School program, which gives children early exposure to the arts. Born in Cleveland, she is a long-time supporter and honorary trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Art. She and her husband, Daniel Shapiro, are noted collectors of contemporary art and have an outstanding collection of 20thcentury drawings.GRAHAM and ANN GUND
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Graham and Ann Gund’s collection of contemporary art ranges from five-star names to the not-yet-discovered. When the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibited “A Private Vision: Contemporary Art from the Graham Gund Collection,” The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Gund is not the kind of collector who sticks to the big names and treats the others as amiable nobodies. He has taken a flyer on younger and less-known artists all over the country,” including artists like Scott Prior, Natalie Alper and Roy DeForest. The Gunds have been supporting Boston art institutions for decades. At the MFA, they established the endowed Ann and Graham Gund Director position and the Graham Gund Gallery, and at Harvard Gund created the Architecture Exhibition fund. They’ve loaned their art, supported museum acquisitions and opened their home to art fundraisers such as 2006 Blooming Art, which raised over $1 million for youth arts programs. Gund Partnership, his architecture firm, has designed buildings on many college campuses, most notably the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Gund has been a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and is a cofounder of the Nantucket Preservation Trust.

HUGH and MARIE HALFF
SAN ANTONIO
AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISTS
Adazzling collection of American Impressionist art graces the San Antonio home of Hugh and Marie Halff—26 paintings mostly from the 1880s to the early part of the 20th century. Following their first purchase 20 years ago—a Winslow Homer—the couple has acquired works by Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, John Twachtman and Edward Hopper, among others. The complete collection was on view at the Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum early this winter. “An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection” was described by the museum as “one of the finest small private collections of late 19th- and early 20th-century American art.” This was the first time this art was seen publicly in its entirety, although the Halffs frequently lend their paintings. Immediately upon the closing of the Smithsonian exhibition, their two Venetian Sargents went straight to Adelson Galleries in New York. They are traveling with the Adelson exhibition, “Sargent’s Venice,” to the Museo Correr in Venice (March 24–July 22). The Metropolitan has exhibited Hassam’s “Clearing Sunset (Corner of Berkeley Street and Columbus Avenue)” and Chase’s “The Ring Toss.” “If it’s a good museum or a dealer we really like, we’re glad to lend our pictures,” says Hugh.

ANDREW and CHRISTINE HALL
FAIRFIELD, CONN.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Last summer a 25-foot-tall gray steel shed dominated the lawn of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. It was “Velimir Chlebnikov,” an installation of 30 recent Anselm Kiefer paintings, acquired in London and loaned to the Aldrich by Andrew and Christine Hall. The British-born couple has assembled a remarkable collection comprising largely German neo-expressionist art—Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck and Sigmar Polke among others— but also works by other hot contemporary names, such as Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Franceso Clemente. The Halls are full of enthusiasm: They flew to Baselitz’s castle in Germany and bought his entire personal collection of German contemporary art—120 huge works that filled 20 rooms. Not long after, the Halls bought 30 new Kiefer paintings and, directly from Baselitz, an additional 15 Baselitz paintings. They have so much art that a good part of is stored in Manhattan, where one hopes they get to visit it. The Halls have established the annual Hall Curatorial Fellowship at the Aldrich, which enables curators from abroad to curate and install an exhibition of art created within the past five years by an international artist.

ANDREW D. HEINEMAN
NEW YORK CITY
NAVAL WARSHIP MEMORABILIA
Retired attorney Andrew D. Heineman has amassed a unique body of naval warship information—an encyclopedic database of photographs and explanatory historical data for thousands of individual steam-steel ships from 1860 to the present. This mountain of material is maintained in 600 binders containing separate files for each ship. Though the collection concentrates on naval warships from the United States and England, it also includes Japan, Italy, France, Russia and Germany, plus all major ships from other countries. Heineman also has 300 ship models and many related books. “I began this collection at the start of World War II, when Dad gave us a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships, and I’ve been unrelenting ever since,” he says. “I’ve gone through at least 10 pairs of scissors and bought a second apartment for the collection.” Heineman has promised this extraordinary collection to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

BEN W. SR. and NATALIE HEINEMAN
CHICAGO
CONTEMPORARY STUDIO GLASS
The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, received the largest gift in its history when Ben and Natalie Heineman donated their entire collection of contemporary studio glass, valued at $9.5 million and assembled over 20 years. Tina Oldknow, curator of modern glass, describes the gift of 250 pieces as “one of the largest and finest private collections of contemporary studio glass in the United States, distinguished by the wide-ranging history that it represents and by its high level of connoisseurship.” The collection features all the movement’s stars— Harvey Littleton, Lino Tagliapietra, Howard Ben Tré, Toots Zynsky, Dale Chihuly and others. “The Heinemans acquired pieces made at different times over the course of these artists’ careers from the 1960s to the present, which is the best way to understand an individual artist’s body of work,” Oldknow says. The collection will be featured in a summer exhibition in 2009.

JOHN and MAUREEN HENDRICKS
GATEWAY, COLO. AND CHEVY CHASE, MD.
CLASSIC CARS
Marylanders John and Maureen Hendricks bought a remote ranch in Colorado in 1995, and soon realized that the nearest community, Gateway, was destined for ghost-town status without something to replace a dying, mining-based economy. The solution: Gateway Canyons, a small resort complex anchored by the Gateway Colorado Auto Museum. “I had my first sculptural art experience as a 7-year-old, the memorable occasion when my big sister’s boyfriend took me for a ride in Harley Earl’s latest design creation, a brand new 1958 Corvette,” says John, the chairman and founder of the Discovery Channel. The museum enables him to indulge his love of the “adventure machine” and pursue his dream-car acquisition list, which included, of course, a perfect ’58 Corvette. The museum features more than 40 great classic cars, spanning a century of automotive history and filling 30,000 square feet of galleries named “Mass Mobility,” “American Muscle” and “Custom Crazy.” Among the oldest is a 1906 Cadillac Model H Coupe with a wooden carriage. Among the hottest is the one-of-a-kind 1954 Olds F-88 concept car designed by Harley Earl that Hendricks bought at an Arizona car auction for a wellpublicized $3.24 million. Maureen (who favors the 1950 Packard Super 8 Victoria Convertible Coupe) makes and collects contemporary art quilts, owning more than 55 examples. She recalls her first quilting effort in 1985: “It’s amazing how a little bit off on every seam makes a quilt really uneven and hard to assemble. I still have that quilt so I can see how far I’ve come—plus it keeps me humble.” She is on the board of Studio Art Quilt Associates.

MARIELUISE HESSEL
JACKSON HOLE, WYO.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Bard College, a small liberal arts institution in upstate New York with strong ties to the arts, recently opened its Hessel Museum of Art—an event that can be traced back to Marieluise Hessel’s chance meeting with Bard president Leon Botstein on a trip to Russia organized by the Whitney Museum in the late 1980s. Botstein must have been persuasive because Hessel has been a patron ever since. In 1990, together with her then-husband Richard B. Black, she donated $8 million toward the construction of Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture. The 17,000-square-foot Hessel Museum, part of CCS, is largely underwritten by Hessel and will house her collection on long-term loan: more than 1,700 paintings, sculpture, photographs, works on paper and video installations created since the 1960s by 900-plus artists. “I take great delight in thinking about the young curators going out into the world to educate others and make great exhibitions,” she says.DONALD and BARBARA JONAS
NEW YORK CITY
POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART
When the hammer fell and ended a Christie’s evening sale of important contemporary art, the Jewish Communal Fund of New York City was $40 million richer than at the evening’s start. The auctioned art—13 works by artists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—were part of the distinguished collection of Donald and Barbara Jonas, who for more than 30 years have been acquiring important postwar art. (Barbara is a former trustee of the Guggenheim Museum.) Since their first purchase, a painting by Arshile Gorky, they have largely focused on the Abstract Expressionists who lived and worked in New York City. When the couple decided to give part of their collection to fund good causes while they were still alive to see the results, they chose the donor-advised JCF as the vehicle. “We had planned to do this anonymously,” says Donald, a retired retailing executive and former CEO of Lechters, the national housewares chain, “but we were persuaded that our public avowal might stimulate other collectors to follow suit.”

CYRUS and MYRTLE KATZEN
CHEVY CHASE, MD.
20TH- TO 21ST-CENTURY ART, SCULPTURE AND GLASS
Cyrus Katzen, a dentist turned real estate developer, and his wife, Myrtle, gave American University a lead gift of $10 million toward the building of the Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center, a 130,000-squarefoot complex that provides space for visual and performing arts. In addition, the Katzens have donated 300 works by 20th-century masters, including Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Amedeo Modigliani, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, and are establishing an endowment to support the center’s gallery operations. It was Cyrus who talked the university into forsaking a modest addition to an existing arts structure in favor of the much larger free-standing building, which now enhances the campus, fills curricular needs and provides show space for young Washington, D.C., artists. The Katzen holdings are far more eclectic than the American University gift would suggest: folk art, studio glass, carved jade, traditional and contemporary sculpture, contemporary and modern paintings, and works on paper—and monkeys dressed as dentists. The Katzens enjoy personal relationships with some of the artists they support—they befriended Larry Rivers, who painted their portrait, and Gene Davis, represented in their collection by seven pictures; at AU Myrtle knew Ben Summerford, Robert D’Arista and John Grazier, all now represented in their collection. According to the Katzen Arts Center, their collection focuses on “art that makes you smile and laugh.”

JAY and JEAN KISLAK
MIAMI
MATERIALS RELATING TO THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS
Jay and Jean Kislak moved to Florida decades ago and, finding themselves fascinated by their new home, began collecting materials relating to its earliest history. As their interest expanded to the broader subject of the early years of European exploration of the New World, what had begun with some rare maps and books grew into an encyclopedic collection of diverse material. The happy culmination: The couple gave to the Library of Congress “The Jay I. Kislak Collection: The Cultures and History of the Americas,” 4,000 rare documents, maps, books, paintings, prints and artifacts. You might think such a sizable gift would leave a big hole, but the Kislaks still have thousands of objects from more than 25 centuries of pre- Columbian culture. Over 200 of those, primarily from Mexico and Guatemala, are on display in the Kislak Foundation’s gallery in Miami Lakes, Florida, which is located in the offices of the Kislak National Bank and is open five days a week by appointment.

HELEN KORNBLUM
ST. LOUIS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WOMEN
Apassion for photography has motivated Helen Kornblum since childhood, which is understandable given that her parents owned a photo supply business. And although she grew up to be a psychotherapist and not a photographer, it’s still a major part of her life. “The Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century,” organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum (and seen in five other museums), featured images that portray the complex lives of modern women by 80 accomplished female photographers in her collection, including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Kiki Smith and Hannah Wilke. “I noticed years ago that women were frequently excluded from clinical trials, which led me to think they’d been overlooked in the arts, as well. It seemed natural to use the art form of photography, of women in photography, to advocate for issues like women’s health and their role in society,” says Kornblum. She serves on the advisory committee of The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, and was a guiding force in its exhibition “Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’ s Health in Contemporary Art,” which featured prominent female artists. Kornblum also is a trustee of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

WERNER KRAMARSKY
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY WORKS ON PAPER
From earliest childhood museum visits with his art-collecting parents (his father owned two major van Goghs that sold at Christie’s in 1988 and 1990), it was the drawings that captured Werner (“Wynn”) Kramarsky’s young imagination. He developed a livelong love of Albrecht Dürer’s drawings and attributes to them the appeal of a reductive or minimalist way of seeing and communicating. Kramarsky has assembled what is probably the country’s largest but surely the finest collection of contemporary works on paper. Totaling more than 2,000 abstract works—almost exclusively Minimalist and post-Minimalist drawings—the collection encompasses all the giants in contemporary art. Kramarsky is a great and generous collector and supporter of young artists, and he has been known to insist on including their works in his frequent museum loans. He has given more than 200 drawings to the Museum of Modern Art (where he is a life trustee) and to numerous other institutions. Kramarsky just completed eight years as chairman of the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation and has been a trustee of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

LEONARD and EVELYN LAUDER
NEW YORK CITY
20TH-CENTURY MODERN FRENCH ART
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder have an acclaimed collection of modern 20thcentury French paintings, particularly by Cubist stars Picasso, Gris and Braque. But their interests are broad—the couple is known to also collect items as diverse as postcards and English porcelain dolls’ heads. And to the museum-going public, Leonard is most closely associated with the varied collection of American 20th-century art he oversees, and augments, at the Whitney Museum of American art where he serves as chairman of the board. The Lauders have given and loaned art from their extensive personal holdings to many institutions and have underwritten exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art among others. Leonard gave the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston his collection of 20,000 Japanese postcards and donated a poster collection to MoMA. He exemplifies the benevolent trustee practice of acquiring works specifically to meet a museum’s needs, to fill a gap in its collection or enable it to move in a new direction. In late 2006 he gave the Whitney eight works by Kiki Smith, in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition, “Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005.”

RONALD S. LAUDER
NEW YORK CITY
AUSTRO-GERMAN ART
Last year saw many record sales, not least among them the acquisition by Ronald Lauder of Gustav Klimt’s magnificent portrait of “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” Lauder, Leonard’s brother, purchased the celebrated work directly from the Bloch-Bauer heirs and installed it in the Neue Galerie in New York, the small museum he established in 2001 to celebrate Austrian and German art of the last century. The Klimt, which cost Lauder a reported $135 million, is an immensely popular addition to the collection that features art of the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte movements. It has been reported that since “Adele” has been on view, the attendance has nearly sextupled, to around 10,000 visitors a week. “The painting is a major masterpiece whose beauty should be enjoyed by many,” says Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art. “Klimt is one of Austria’s foremost artists, and ‘Adele I’ represents the best in German and Austrian art. It’s my hope that with this extraordinary work, the Neue Galerie will become even more of a destination than before.” At Christie’s fall auction, Lauder bought Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Berlin Street Scene” for the museum’s collection, paying a record $38 million.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.MARTIN Z. MARGULIES
KEY BISCAYNE, FLA.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
In 1976, luxury real estate developer Martin Margulies bought an Isamu Noguchi work, which launched an enormous and important collection that ranges from European Modernism through Arte Povera to video art. His photography holdings rank among the world’s most important collections. Since 1994 part of Margulies’ collection has been on long-term loan to Florida International University: 55 large-scale sculptures by Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Louise Nevelson and Jean Dubuffet dot the campus (and are known as the Martin Z. Margulies Sculpture Park). Another part of the collection is housed in The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, 45,000 square feet in Miami’s Wynwood district of art galleries, and kuntshalles exhibiting photography as well as sculpture, video and installation art— thousands of works by established artists like Frank Stella and newer artists like Ernesto Neto, Olafur Eliasson and Anri Sala. Warehouse exhibitions are free and open to the public October through April. Margulies believes in using his art holdings for educational purposes, providing not only public access to wonderful contemporary art, as at FIU, but also guided tours, guest speakers and student lectures at the Warehouse (where Margulies himself can be found serving as tour guide). Margulies is a founder of the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum and has served on the Collector’s Committee of the National Gallery of Art and the board of the International Sculpture Center, both in Washington, D.C. He is currently on the board of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York.

LESTER MARKS
HOUSTON
CONTEMPORARY ART
Ibegan to collect seriously in the early 1990s but didn’t go completely crazy until about six years ago,” says Lester Marks, whose enormous contemporary art collection— more than 400 pieces from the mid- 1950s to the present—fills his life, not to mention his home. Marks has assembled one of the finest and most diverse collections in Houston. Works by famous artists— Robert Rauschenberg, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd—keep company with young unknowns whose pieces he likes and whose careers he furthers, including a significant concentration of works by contemporary black artists. “I’m especially proud of the mentoring I’ve given to about a dozen artists at the beginning of their careers,” he says. “I’ve held exhibitions for emerging artists in my home, secured galleries, helped with working capital, introduced them to the art network in Houston and New York.” Marks is a passionate supporter of the arts community. For nine years his family has underwritten free admission to the Contemporary Arts Museum, where he serves on the board. He also is a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sits on numerous other arts organization boards and hosts dozens of annual fund-raisers for local and visiting museum groups. “I enjoy groups that are new to the arts, such as high school art classes, religious organizations, senior care centers and even an occasional elementary school class. As collectors we have an obligation, as does the artist, to discover, illuminate, entertain, educate, share and to do so with soul, passion and visual excellence.”

DOANLD and CATHERINE MARRON
NEW YORK CITY
20TH-CENTURY ART
Since joining the board of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1975, Donald Marron has been a steady and generous supporter (he is the current vice-chairman of the board and a former president). Most recently, in 2006, Marron and his wife, Catherine, who chairs the board of the New York Public Library, made a promised gift to MoMA of an important 24-foot-long Brice Marden painting. In recognition of the deep financial commitment made to MoMA by the Marrons, the towering atrium in the museum’s new building bears their name. Donald heads his own investment firm, Lightyear Capital, where some of his art is always on display. “It’s not a corporate collection,” says Marron’s art advisor and curator, Matthew Armstrong. “It’s a highly personal one. He has a deep love of the art and a very, very keen eye.” Marron has been collecting for a long time. Before he founded Lightyear, he was for 20 years the CEO of PaineWebber (since acquired by UBS), where he built a famously huge and excellent art collection of 850 works that were exhibited around the country. At the time of the acquisition, Marron had been talking with MoMA about a gift of art from PaineWebber. UBS followed through on those discussions, making a gift to MoMA of 44 works.

STEVE MARTIN
LOS ANGELES
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Steve Martin is among those neon names in the Hollywood community who create interesting collections and provide generous support to L.A.’s burgeoning museums. Since his first purchase in 1968 of a painting by Ed Ruscha, the “wild and crazy” guy has put together a notable collection of mostly modern American art, which over the years has included works by Edward Hopper, John Twachtman, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning and David Hockney, as well as newer artists like April Gornik and Eric Fischl. He has lent works in his collection to major museums and smaller venues like the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, and the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio. Martin was a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1984 to 2002, and a recent patron of The Huntington in San Marino, California, to which he gave $1 million for the museum’s American art collection. In addition to loaning art to the Huntington, he has helped it acquire a bronze sculpture by American artist John Gregory and sponsored the 2004 exhibition, “Sugaring Off—The Maple Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson.” (Back story: Martin discovered the Huntington when filming nearby.)

GLEN and ANDREA McCRELESS
SAN ANTONIO
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ART
The University of the Incarnate Word, chartered in San Antonio in 1881, recently received a series of approximately 25 gifts and loans from Glen and Andrea McCreless, including Renaissance drawings and paintings, manuscript pages from a Medieval Bible and from several versions of the Book of Hours. The most important of their loans is a Renaissance studio-of-Botticelli painting from the 1480s, “Madonna del Libro.” In recognition of these gifts, space in the campus’ J.E. & L.E. Mabee Library has been designated The McCreless Art Gallery. The couple began collecting around 1988, concentrating on Christian art and artifacts. In addition to their gifts to UIW, the McCrelesses established the McCreless Fine Arts Building at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, in honor of Glen’s father, who had chaired the board of trustees at the college.

RAYMOND NASHER
DALLAS
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Raymond Nasher is a regular on lists like this because of his consistently generous support of the arts. In Dallas, he spent $70 million to establish the Renzo Piano–designed Nasher Sculpture Center, which houses the encyclopedic Raymond and Patsy Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. Initiated by a wife-to-husband gift of an Arp bronze in the mid-1960s, it has mushroomed into a wide-ranging collection of 20th- and 21stcentury sculpture. The world-renowned collection is distinguished not only for its great historic breadth—works by 80 different artists, but also for the depth of its holdings by giants such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and David Smith (11 each), Henry Moore (five), Joan Miró and Auguste Rodin (four) and Alberto Giacometti (17). Nasher also developed a taste for works by living artists, acquiring pieces by Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon, Jeff Koons and Scott Burton, among many others. Nasher made a recent gift of $10 million to Duke University, his alma mater, to help establish the Nasher Museum of Art, the university’s first stand-alone art museum. It opened in 2005 and enhances the cultural life of both the campus and the greater Research Triangle area.

JEROME and MARGARET NERMAN
KANSAS CITY, MO.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Jerry and Margaret Nerman had the foresight to start buying art in 1976. Today their holdings include paintings by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko and Julian Schnabel, and sculpture by Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero and Isamu Noguchi in their own sculpture garden outside the art-filled house. After abandoning plans to convert their home into a museum, they cast about for “a good person to give some money to, to build a museum” that would promote an appreciation of the arts among young people and new collectors. The result: a naming gift from the Nermans and their son, Lewis, to the Johnson County Community College, which had a director with a good eye for emerging artists and a collection of 400 contemporary pieces—but only modest gallery space. The 30,000- square-foot Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art will open in the fall. “This museum will enable thousands of students and visitors to enjoy major exhibitions and a spectacular permanent collection,” Jerry says. He serves on the Nelson-Atkins Collections Committee; Margaret Nerman is a trustee of the Kansas City Art Institute. They’re still buying art, but now most of it is for the new JCCC museum.LEONARD NIMOY and SUSAN BAY NIMOY
LOS ANGELES
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Leonard Nimoy and his wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, have filled their home with modern and contemporary art that they’ve been collecting for 20 years. The couple is committed to supporting working artists, particularly young aspiring ones. Susan was a trustee of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (1999–2006), where the couple established a $1 million endowment fund in 2002 for young artists. The Nimoy Fund for New and Emerging Artists supports exhibitions and other programs that “challenge traditional categories of art making” and “define new directions in culture.” The couple funds fellowships, exhibitions and artist-in-residence programs for aspiring talents at museums and institutions across the country through their Leonard and Susan Bay Nimoy Family Foundation. In addition, they donate art (Nan Goldin and Hans Hoffmann works to LA MOCA, an April Gornik to the Orange County Museum) and underwrite museum shows and traveling exhibitions. For years they chose to provide support quietly, even anonymously, until they decided that by being more visible they would inspire others to perform similar acts of charity.

STEVEN and NANCY OLIVER
SONOMA COUNTY, CALIF.
SITE-SPECIFIC SCULPTURE
In 1985 Steven and Nancy Oliver commissioned Judith Shea to create a site-specific work for their 90-acre Geyserville ranch, and since that first installation 20 other artists have followed suit, including Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy and Bruce Nauman. A trained engineer and construction company owner, Oliver immerses himself in the creative process and in the fabrication of these often-monumental creations, to which he brings his professional abilities. “My children and grandchildren have grown up eating dinner with great artists at the table,” Steven said. “You have this incredible, rich life experience by knowing these people.” Steven is chairman of the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a long-time trustee of the California College of the Arts, which has granted him an honorary Doctor of Fine Art degree and named part of its Oakland campus the Steven Oliver Art Center. He is also a trustee at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden. Last September the Arts Council of Sonoma County honored Oliver with an Achievement in the Arts Awards. Of his investment in these giant, immovable artworks, Oliver told the Financial Times, “I can’t sell it. I can’t give it away. I can only enjoy the experience of its creation and existence.”

DONALD and PATRICIA ORESMAN
NEW YORK CITY
ART ABOUT READING
Donald and Patricia Oresman’s collection is focused not on books but on readers—images of people reading, created by such artists as René Magritte, Richard Diebenkorn and Andy Warhol. The Oresmans are generous supporters of a wide range of projects related to books and their preservation: They made a $50,000 grant to the Library of America’s Guardian of Letters Fund to underwrite the continued printing of works by obscure authors; Donald donated to Washington University in St. Louis his correspondence with William Gaddis concerning the author’s National Book Award–winning novel A Frolic of His Own (1994); the Oresman Gallery in the Larchmont, New York, public library recognizes his fund-raising efforts on its behalf. Oresman is a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, the Library of America and the American Antiquarian Society. He was honored by the 2006 New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Chairman’s Award for his work in helping to preserve endangered buildings. Oresman has chaired this group and served on its board for 26 years.

MARILYN OSHMAN
HOUSTON
CONTEMPORARY AND OUTSIDER ART
Under the curious name of “The Orange Show,” a creative eccentric named Jeff McKissack took found objects and 25 years to create an eye-popping, rambling structure named for his favorite fruit. After his death, Houston collector-philanthropist Marilyn Oshman led a group that preserved the structure as a locus for community art-related activities. The Orange Show is more than McKissack’s unorthodox edifice. Now publicly funded, it’s a vibrant element in Houston’s cultural life, a celebration of creative personal expression. Its outreach programs encourage public participation—at-risk youths have created 28 murals under its auspices. The annual Art Car Parade, which attracts more than 200,000 people, recognizes the “art car” as a creative form. The “Beer Can House” is a testament to what aluminum cans can yield. Now a publicly funded organization guided by Oshman, The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art is a vital center for personal creative expression, in all its wayward forms. Oshman, who has served on the boards of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has a varied personal collection, including works by Ed Ruscha, May Ray and other noteworthy 20th-century artists—but in recent years has focused on “artists working outside the mainstream. I’m always looking,” she says, “to uncover beautiful fresh stuff.”

RONALD A. and ANN PIZZUTI
COLUMBUS, OHIO
CONTEMPORARY ART
A$900 Karel Appel print was the first art purchase Ron and Ann Pizzuti ever made. It was 1974, and Columbus dealer Eva Glimcher let the young and enthusiastic couple pay in installments while introducing them to contemporary art. Since then the Pizzutis have relied on instinct and a good eye to assemble a sizable number of works by Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Frank Stella, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, as well as art by less-familiar artists like Jim Hodges and Tim Bavington. “I’m a big risk-taker in business, and I’m a big risk-taker in our collection activity as well,” Ronald says. “If I like somebody, if I like their work and I think they have potential, we’ll take a gamble,” and when he can, he tries to get to know personally the artists he collects. Soon the Pizzuti collection will be accessible to the public: The couple bought a building in downtown Columbus, which they plan to convert to space appropriate for showing their art. He is a trustee of the Wexner Center Foundation (the trustee board for the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University) and a former chairman and honorary trustee of the Columbus Museum of Art.

THOMAS PRITZKER
CHICAGO
ASIAN ART
Thomas Pritzker has a scholar’s interest in Asian art and a home in Nepal from which to pursue it. Over years of trekking the Himalayas in search of Buddhist and Hindu sculptures, paintings, scrolls and fragments, Pritzker has assembled a substantial and wellregarded collection. Twenty-one of his pieces were on display in “Himalayas,” an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. He has published articles and photographs on different aspects of Tibetan, Nepalese and Indian art, and has chaired the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture as well as, since 1989, the AIC’s Committee on Asian Art. This past November, Pritzker (of the family that awards the Pritzker Architecture Prize) was appointed chairman of the board of trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he had served as vice chairman since 1999 and has endowed the Pritzker Chair of Asian and Ancient Art. He also has been a trustee of the University of Chicago since 1995. The Margot and Thomas Pritzker Family Foundation helped underwrite the AIC’s “Silk Road Chicago,” which will be on view through October 2007.

MITCHELL P. RALES
WASHINGTON, D.C.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY
Mitchell P. Rales, a Washington, D.C., businessman, philanthropist and collector, was recently elected a trustee of the National Gallery of Art, capping years of participation in the museum’s Trustees’ Council, Collectors Committee and Legacy Circle. The Glenstone Foundation, Rales’ philanthropic vehicle, has underwritten numerous acquisitions and made partial gifts of art to several institutions, such as a Rachel Whiteread installation to the National Gallery, and a group of early John Baldessaris given to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where Rales serves as board vice-chairman. In November 2006, Glenstone made another gift to the Hirshhorn of 13 photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto that previously had been exhibited at the museum. The Glenstone Foundation has made gifts to the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian and even Middlebury College in Vermont, where it helped underwrite a library mural.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.RICHARD and RUTH SHACK
MIAMI
CONTEMPORARY ART
A biography of the Shacks reads like a history of Miami’s burgeoning art scene. Richard Shack was a leader of the Center for Contemporary Art for 15 years, and then of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami that emerged from it in 1996 (the main MOCA gallery is named after him). Then he chaired ArtCenter/South Florida, a cluster of open artists’ studios, which now anchors the Lincoln Road Arts District (and which named its exhibition space the Richard Shack Gallery). Ruth and Richard have been part of Art Basel Miami Beach from its inception, and when 9/11 prevented international dealers from attending the planned launch in 2001, they were among a few couples who opened their home collections for the occasion. They’ve been doing that at every Art Basel Miami Beach since. The Shacks live in 5,000 square feet of soaring duplex space filled with the art of today, which is what has always attracted them. Because they started collecting avidly 50 years ago, “today” began with Larry Donovan and Robert Rauschenberg— and they now own more than 600 pieces. Much of their collection devolves from a sweet anecdote: As newlyweds, they exchanged only gifts of art, and none was to cost more than $100 (yes, the first Rauschenberg). “We feel lucky to be involved with ArtCenter,” Richard says. “These exciting young artists get exposure and often find dealers to represent them.” Ruth, a former Dade County Commissioner and President of the Dade Community Foundation who was in the forefront of the development of the Art-in-Public- Places program, says, “Richard and I are partial to dealers because they provide artists with visibility, credibility and access.

CAROLE and JOSEPH SHANIS
PHILADELPHIA
ENGLISH OBJETS D’ART
When Carole and Joseph Shanis married, each came with substantial, wildly diverse collections. “My collections were influenced by my mother,” says Carole. “I started with boxes—wooden tea caddies— and grew from there: snuff boxes, nutmeg graters, card cases, glass jewelry boxes. Then there were the perfume bottles, Oriental mugs—oh, and English furniture.” Joe’s collections included “anything to do with St. George on a horse killing a dragon,” mechanical banks, stained glass and American furniture. They managed to put this all together and continue to acquire items such as match strikers, card cases, rose medallion porcelain and more tea caddies. “My mother hooked me on accessories,” says Carole, who was a decorator for 37 years. She is the president of the Philadelphia Art Alliance, which describes itself as “the oldest multidisciplinary arts center in the United States.” Carole serves on the Chairman’s Council of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and has been honored with an Individual Leadership Award by the Philadelphia Arts and Business Council.

JON and MARY SHIRLEY
BELLEVUE, WASH.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Asoaring 39-foot-tall abstract red eagle by Alexander Calder is perched in a spectacular new seaside sculpture park in Seattle, which opened in early 2007. The sculpture, which seems likely to become the park’s identifying image, is a reminder of the generosity of Jon and Mary Shirley, who gave a $5 million leadership gift for the new Olympic Sculpture Park (part of the expanding Seattle Art Museum), and another $20 million to endow it—and then purchased the giant Calder for it. A retired president of Microsoft, Jon is chairman of SAM’s board, a position he’s held since 2000, and is co-chairman of the museum’s $180 million capital campaign. Over the years the Shirleys have made major gifts to the museum, including establishing the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. The couple’s collection of 20th-century American art includes works by de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Close, among many others. (When the Shirleys funded a major Chuck Close retrospective, the artist told the Seattle Times that the couple owns more of his paintings than any other collector.)

JERRY I. SPEYER
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART
Happily for New York residents and visitors, real estate mogul Jerry Speyer is a great advocate of public art. As the president and CEO of Tishman Speyer, the real estate firm that owns Rockefeller Center, he assures the city a continuous supply of interesting art. Thousands of people come to see the changing oversized installations which sit atop the famed Rockefeller Center skating rink—works that range from Jonathan Borofsky’s “Walking To the Sky” to Jeff Koons’ huge, verdant “Puppy.” Tishman Speyer maintains a collection of works by important contemporary artists, including Frank Stella, Julian Schnabel and Takashi Murakami, which is displayed in and around buildings it leases to other corporations. As vice chairman of MoMA and a board member since 1982, Speyer was deeply involved in the museum’s recent expansion and is a generous underwriter of innumerable exhibitions. Private in his personal life, Speyer and his wife, Katherine G. Farley, have a townhouse filled with a vast collection of contemporary art—and a catalog for the convenience of guests. Speyer is said to have never sold a work of art in 40 years of collecting.

TERRY and MARGARET STENT
ATLANTA
AMERICAN ART
Collectors of 19th- and 20th-century American art, Terry and Margaret Stent are model museum supporters: unstinting benefactors, energetic fundraisers and deeply loyal. In 2006, Stent was named the country’s Outstanding Volunteer Fund-raiser by the Association of Fundraising Professionals. As chairman of the renewed High Museum in Atlanta, he led its $130-million expansion campaign, generating multi-million dollar gifts and providing capital support himself, including acquisition funds for American art and a gift to endow the Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art. In recognition, the High named one of the new Renzo Piano–designed buildings the Stent Family Wing. “In addition to being a focused and dedicated collector of American art, Terry has served brilliantly as the board chair for the past six years,” says Michael Shapiro, the High’s director. “Terry understands the passions of collectors and curators, but also has a disciplined and businesslike side.” Shapiro adds, “One of the highlights of 2006 was our Andrew Wyeth retrospective, which included Terry and Margaret’s painting, ‘The Quaker.’ Terry and I had a memorable visit with the Wyeths in Maine, and after the show the Wyeths gave the High a very finished study for Terry’s painting.” Stent also is a past chairman and benefactor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Although art is in his DNA (his great-grandfather was the de Young who founded the eponymous San Francisco Museum), Stent became a naval fighter pilot after Yale, received an MBA from Harvard and spent most of his life as a pilot for Delta Airlines.

JEWEL STERN
MIAMI
MODERNIST SILVER
Jewel Stern bought an old Reed & Barton hors d’oeuvres tray with a 1930s modern design by Belle Kogan, her first piece of American silver, in 1986. “My background isn’t simply silver but Modernism— the art, architecture and design from the ’20s and ’30s,” says the Miami-based scholar and curator. But from that tray a silver collection grew. Today it includes more than 400 industrially produced pieces made in America from 1925 to 2000, with examples from every major manufacturer. The Jewel Stern American Silver Collection is considered the most important assemblage of 20th-century American silver extant. It was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art, which just mounted a traveling exhibition, “Modernism in American Silver: 20th-century Design” that Stern co-curated. She received the prestigious Smith Award for her contribution to the accompanying hardcover book of the same name. The exhibition opened at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, is on view at the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach until March 25, and then travels to