The art world is often described as a vibrant, ever-evolving ecosystem, yet even within its dynamic shifts, there are rare individuals whose presence defines an entire era. The passing of arts patron and philanthropist Agnes Gund on Friday, September 19, at the age of 87, marks just such a definitive moment. Her death, reported by The New York Times, signifies not merely the departure of a single figure, but the closing of a chapter, leaving a profound void and prompting reflection on who will step forward to sustain a cultural system that has grown vast and complex.
Gund was a relentless supporter of art and culture, consistently ranked among the most influential U.S. patrons of the past half-century. As president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, an institution she helmed for more than 11 years, her influence was nothing short of transformative. She did not just collect art; she channeled immense resources and an unwavering vision into expanding the museum’s reach and collection, directly spearheading the fundraising efforts that made its most recent, monumental expansion a reality. Her legacy extends far beyond institutional walls, encompassing generations of artists, pioneering arts education, and championing art as a potent instrument for education, equity, and systemic societal change.
1. **A Transformative Force at MoMA** Agnes Gund’s relationship with the Museum of Modern Art was not merely one of patronage, but of profound, sustained leadership that spanned more than five decades. Joining MoMA’s international council in 1967 and taking a seat on its board in 1976, she ascended to the presidency in 1991, a role she held until 2002. During her tenure, Gund served as the chair from 1993 to 1995, guiding the institution through a period of immense growth and strategic repositioning that solidified its status as a global art-world behemoth. Her leadership was characterized by a forward-thinking vision that profoundly shaped MoMA’s trajectory into the 21st century.
Her most conspicuous and widely recognized achievement at MoMA was undeniably her instrumental role in shepherding the museum through its ambitious $858 million expansion, designed by the acclaimed Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. This colossal undertaking, completed in 2004 shortly after her presidency, effectively doubled the museum’s exhibition space, transforming its physical footprint and its capacity to display art. Gund was crucial in rallying the necessary financial support, directly helping to raise the staggering funds that brought this architectural marvel to fruition and dramatically enhanced MoMA’s visitor experience and scholarly reach.
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. **Founding Studio in a School: Arts Education for All** Beyond her transformative work at MoMA, Agnes Gund harbored a deep conviction in the democratizing power of art education, particularly for young people. This conviction materialized in 1977 with the founding of Studio in a School, an innovative nonprofit program that emerged directly from a critical moment for New York City’s cultural landscape. After reading in The New York Times that the city, grappling with a severe fiscal crisis, intended to drastically cut back on arts classes in public schools, Gund posed a fundamental question to herself: “How could children not have art?” Her response was not merely rhetorical but profoundly actionable.
Studio in a School was established with a clear and ambitious mission: to bring professional artists directly into New York public schools, thereby ensuring that even the most underserved students had access to high-quality visual arts instruction. Over the decades, this program has engaged a roster of distinguished working artists, including figures like Mark di Suvero, Jeff Koons, and Fred Wilson, to teach visual arts to tens of thousands of children. The program’s enduring success is evident in its vast reach, having provided visual art instruction to over one million students in more than 800 schools and community-based 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. **The Art for Justice Fund and the Lichtenstein Sale** Agnes Gund’s philanthropy transcended the traditional boundaries of art patronage, venturing boldly into the realm of social justice with an impact that reverberated far beyond the art market. In 2017, she made a headline-grabbing decision that underscored her unwavering commitment to systemic change: she sold her beloved Roy Lichtenstein painting, *Masterpiece* (1962), for a staggering $165 million. This monumental sale was not for personal gain but to provide the seed funding for the Art for Justice Fund, a catalytic six-year initiative aimed at combating the racial inequities of mass incarceration in 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.
One compelling instance of her advocacy highlights this commitment. In the 2020 documentary *Aggie*, directed by her daughter Catherine Gund, Agnes recalled passionately urging MoMA to acquire Adrian Piper’s video installation *What It’s Like, What It Is #3* (1991). The museum had exhibited the work in the year it was made but initially declined to acquire it. Gund’s persistence eventually prevailed, though it took until 2017 for MoMA to rectify this oversight. Piper’s high-impact artwork, featuring a Black man directly addressing stereotypes to the viewer, ultimately became the centerpiece of MoMA’s retrospective for Piper the following year, underscoring the critical importance of Gund’s vision.
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. **Her Extensive and Generous Art Collection** Agnes Gund’s private art collection was nothing short of legendary, a sprawling testament to her keen eye and deep passion for modern and contemporary art. What began with an inheritance and the purchase of a Henry Moore sculpture soon burgeoned into an encyclopedic collection of some 2,000 works, spanning the breadth of contemporary art across media and styles. Her holdings included masterpieces by towering figures of the past century, artists she not only admired but often knew personally. The list is extensive, featuring 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, among many others.
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 began in 1966, after her father’s death, when she inherited a substantial trust. Initially, she harbored aspirations of collecting Old Master drawings, a path favored by many top collectors of her era. However, a pragmatic realization steered her towards contemporary art. “I wanted to collect Old Master drawings, but I realized I couldn’t live in the low-light conditions those works required,” she explained to ARTnews in 2018. “I needed natural light for my life. That’s why I was stuck with contemporary art, which I haven’t regretted.” Her first significant acquisition was a sculpture by the British modernist Henry Moore, *Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer* (1964), though she later gave it to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1970, citing “guilt” and noting her children had begun sitting atop it as if it were a horse. This early act of giving foreshadowed a lifetime defined by an extraordinary fusion of collecting and philanthropy.
