The art world, a realm of constant change, is often shaped by individuals whose influence marks an entire era, and the passing of arts patron Agnes Gund at 87 on September 19th is truly one such moment. Her death, as reported by The New York Times, signifies not just the loss of a prominent figure, but the close of a significant chapter, leaving a void and raising questions about who will carry forward the stewardship of our vast and intricate cultural landscape.
Gund, a steadfast champion of art and culture, consistently ranked among the most influential U.S. patrons, and her transformative impact as president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art for over 11 years cannot be overstated. She didn’t just collect art; she poured immense resources and a clear vision into expanding MoMA’s reach and collection, directly leading the charge for the fundraising that made its massive expansion possible, and her legacy extends to inspiring generations of artists, pioneering arts education, and advocating for art as a catalyst for education, equity, and societal change.
1.Agnes Gund’s relationship with the Museum of Modern Art spanned over five decades, evolving from patronage to profound leadership. Starting with the international council in 1967 and joining the board in 1976, she became president in 1991, a role she held until 2002, and during her time as chair from 1993 to 1995, she masterfully guided the institution through a period of significant growth and strategic repositioning, firmly establishing its status as a global art powerhouse with a vision that profoundly shaped its trajectory into the 21st century.
Her most notable achievement at MoMA was undoubtedly her pivotal role in navigating the museum’s ambitious $858 million expansion, designed by architect Yoshio Taniguchi. This monumental project, completed in 2004 just after her presidency, effectively doubled the museum’s exhibition space, revolutionizing its physical presence and its capacity to showcase art, and Gund was instrumental in rallying the crucial financial support, helping to raise the substantial funds that brought this architectural masterpiece to life and significantly enhanced MoMA’s visitor experience and scholarly impact.
The impact of Gund’s tireless advocacy and financial acumen at MoMA remains palpable, visible in the very galleries where masterpieces she acquired and gifted appear frequently. At the time of her passing, she was recognized as president emerita and a life trustee, titles reflecting her enduring influence and dedication. Christophe Cherix, MoMA’s director, aptly articulated her profound contribution, stating, “Aggie’s impact on our museums is immeasurable. A dedicated and visionary leader, her generosity and passion helped shape MoMA and MoMA PS1 into the institutions they are today.” Her legacy at MoMA is a testament to the power of committed leadership and strategic philanthropy.
2.Beyond her remarkable work at MoMA, Agnes Gund held a deep-seated belief in the power of art education to reach everyone, especially young people. This conviction led her to found Studio in a School in 1977, an innovative nonprofit born from a critical juncture in New York City’s cultural scene. After reading in The New York Times about potential cuts to arts classes in public schools due to a severe fiscal crisis, Gund famously questioned, ‘How could children not have art?’, a question that spurred immediate and impactful action.
Studio in a School was established with a clear and ambitious goal: to bring professional artists directly into New York’s public schools, ensuring that even the most underserved students received high-quality visual arts instruction. For decades, this program has featured renowned artists like Mark di Suvero, Jeff Koons, and Fred Wilson, who have taught visual arts to tens of thousands of children, and its lasting success is evident in its vast reach, having provided art instruction to over a million students in more than 800 schools and community organizations across the city’s five boroughs.
The impact of Studio in a School has been particularly profound for those who need it most. Approximately 90 percent of all children participating in Studio programs come from low-income families, often in schools that would otherwise entirely lack visual arts instruction. This foundational program, which continues to thrive nearly fifty years after its inception, became one of Gund’s most enduring projects. Its significance was recognized nationally in 2017 when Studio in a School received the National Arts Award for Arts Education from Americans for the Arts, solidifying its place as a model for how art can be integrated meaningfully into public education.
3.Agnes Gund’s philanthropy extended far beyond conventional art patronage, bravely entering the realm of social justice with an impact that resonated deeply beyond the art market itself. In 2017, she made a remarkable decision that highlighted her unwavering commitment to systemic change: she sold her cherished Roy Lichtenstein painting, *Masterpiece* (1962), for an astonishing $165 million, and this significant sale was not for personal gain but to establish the Art for Justice Fund, a groundbreaking six-year initiative dedicated to combating the racial injustices inherent in mass incarceration within the United States.
The genesis of this fund was deeply personal and rooted in a growing awareness of societal injustices. Gund herself cited Michelle Alexander’s seminal 2010 book *The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness* and Ava DuVernay’s powerful 2016 documentary *13TH*, which explored the African-American experience in the prison system, as primary motivators. Her concern was further amplified by the realization that six of her grandchildren are Black, intensifying her resolve to confront these issues directly. From the sale of *Masterpiece*, Gund committed an extraordinary $100 million to launch the fund, which was conceived in partnership with the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
Over its six-year lifespan, which concluded in 2023, the Art for Justice Fund distributed more than $127 million in grants to a wide array of arts and criminal justice organizations. This initiative garnered widespread acclaim, with the New York Times profiling Gund under the evocative headline “Is Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?” The fund’s success also inspired other prominent collectors to follow suit, with Whitney Museum chair Laurie Tisch donating $500,000 and Julie Mehretu pledging $6.5 million from an auction sale to the cause. The Lichtenstein painting, which had long hung above a fireplace in Gund’s dining room, was symbolically replaced by a Stanley Whitney abstraction, a testament to her ongoing commitment, as Helena Huang, Art for Justice’s project director, observed: “Agnes is not done. She’ll continue to leverage everything that she has.”
4. **A Champion of Diversity in Art** Long before the contemporary art world began to earnestly grapple with issues of representation and the expansion of the artistic canon, Agnes Gund was a staunch and prescient advocate for women artists and artists of color. Her collecting practices and her influence within institutions like MoMA were consistently directed toward ensuring that these often-overlooked voices received the recognition and institutional support they deserved. She recognized the inherent value and significance of diversifying collections, understanding that art institutions had a responsibility to reflect a broader spectrum of human experience and artistic innovation.
Her advocacy powerfully illustrates this commitment, as seen in the 2020 documentary *Aggie*, directed by her daughter Catherine Gund. Agnes passionately recalled urging MoMA to acquire Adrian Piper’s video installation *What It’s Like, What It Is #3* (1991), which the museum had exhibited but initially declined to purchase, and Gund’s persistence eventually led to MoMA’s acquisition in 2017, correcting the oversight and allowing Piper’s impactful artwork, featuring a Black man addressing stereotypes directly to the viewer, to become the centerpiece of MoMA’s retrospective for Piper the following year, underscoring the critical importance of Gund’s foresight.
Artists who knew Gund frequently lauded her willingness to support groundbreaking and sometimes challenging work that might have deterred other patrons. The artist and filmmaker John Waters, featured in the documentary *Aggie*, encapsulated this sentiment, saying, “Aggie has always been there for the new kind of art. She doesn’t question it. She gets behind it.” Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, further attested to Gund’s pioneering spirit in 2018, stating that Gund was “ahead of her time as far back as the 1970s. She had those convictions and in her own home, obviously, it didn’t require courage perhaps in the same way that it did require courage to advocate at MoMA for a number of artists who—if not for her advocacy—probably the curators would not have been looking at closely.” Her impact on broadening the institutional embrace of diverse artists is undeniable.
5.Agnes Gund’s private art collection was nothing short of legendary, a sprawling testament to her exceptional eye and profound passion for modern and contemporary art. It began with an inheritance and the purchase of a Henry Moore sculpture, eventually growing into an encyclopedic collection of approximately 2,000 works, covering the full spectrum of contemporary art across various mediums and styles, and her collection featured masterpieces by influential artists from the past century whom she not only admired but often knew personally, including figures like Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Cornell, Philip Guston, Vija Celmins, Willem de Kooning, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker.
What set Gund’s collecting apart was not merely its scale or the caliber of the artists, but her unparalleled generosity. She never viewed her collection as solely private property, instead seeing much of it as a public trust. Over her lifetime, she donated hundreds of works to MoMA, an institution she enriched immensely. The museum honored her with the exhibition “Studio Visit: Selected Gifts from Agnes Gund,” which showcased around 50 of the more than 800 works she ultimately gave to MoMA. In total, over 900 artworks from her collection have been gifted or promised to public institutions nationwide, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
The impact of these gifts is evident in galleries across America. At MoMA alone, visitors can encounter an array of treasures thanks to her philanthropy: a James Rosenquist painting based on a house layout, an Ana Mendieta sculpture aligning the female body with the landscape, a spare Agnes Martin painting, alongside key works by Elizabeth Murray, Catherine Opie, Martin Puryear, Julie Mehretu, and Mona Hatoum. Her approach was always one of shared enjoyment. As she told ARTnews in 2018, reflecting on her collecting journey, “I’ve loved collecting and I’ve had so much fun doing it.” This sentiment underscores a collector whose joy was amplified by sharing her cherished works with the wider public, ensuring their lasting cultural impact.
6. **Early Life, Education, and the Spark of Passion** To understand the remarkable trajectory of Agnes Gund’s life, one must trace her roots back to Cleveland, Ohio, where she was born on August 13, 1938. She was the second of six children, the only girl in a family of considerable means. Her father, George Gund II, built a substantial fortune through real estate, brewing, and investing, and served as the president of the Cleveland Trust Company, then Ohio’s largest bank. While her father tended to provide her brothers more opportunities, Gund persevered, crediting her childhood with instilling a resiliency that would define her entire life. Her mother, Jessica Roesler, nurtured an early appreciation for art and culture, a seed that would blossom into her life’s work.
Gund’s nascent passion for art was fostered by frequent visits to the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she also attended art classes. Though she confessed to ARTnews in 2018, “I was never any good at drawing but I was very good at learning the collection,” these early experiences were foundational. The death of her mother from leukemia when Gund was 14 led her to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. It was here that her interest in art history deepened under the tutelage of a “magical art history teacher who didn’t just give you the artist’s name and the date of the picture; she showed you how to look at artwork,” as Gund recounted to Lifestyles magazine in 2010. She continued her academic journey, graduating from Connecticut College for Women (now Connecticut College) in 1960 with a degree in history, and later earning her master’s degree in art history from Harvard University in 1980 through its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she worked closely with the Fogg Art Museum.
Her serious collecting journey commenced in 1966, following her father’s passing and the inheritance of a substantial trust. Initially, she considered collecting Old Master drawings, a pursuit favored by many leading collectors of her time, but a practical realization led her to contemporary art, as she explained to ARTnews in 2018, ‘I wanted to collect Old Master drawings, but I realized I couldn’t live in the low-light conditions those works required. I needed natural light for my life. That’s why I was stuck with contemporary art, which I haven’t regretted.’ Her first notable acquisition was Henry Moore’s sculpture *Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer* (1964), although she later donated it to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1970, citing ‘guilt’ and the fact that her children were using it as a plaything, an early act of giving that presaged a lifetime marked by an extraordinary blend of collecting and philanthropy.
