Agnes Gund, the legendary patron whose lifelong commitment to art and charitable giving transformed institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has died at the age of 87, The New York Times reported on Friday.
Gund first joined MoMA’s international council in 1967, eventually rising to the position of president of the museum from 1991 to 2002. During that time, she oversaw MoMA’s $858 million 2004 expansion into a Yoshio Taniguchi–designed new building as well as the launch of MoMA PS1 in Queens.
Art was a lifelong passion for the Ohio native and graduate of Connecticut College, who, at the time of her death, was listed as a standing trustee at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a life trustee at the Morgan Library and Museum, and an emeritus director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Still, Gund’s philanthropy didn’t begin and end in museums; she also founded the public-school arts nonprofit Studio in a School and the criminal-justice-reform fundraising organization Art for Justice (the latter after seeing, and being deeply moved by, Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th). In 2018, The New York Times’s Jacob Bernstein memorably asked: “Is Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?”
While Gund was met with plenty of acclaim for her commitment to the causes she championed during her life—she received the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1997—her passing will inspire, characteristically, even more opportunity for her legacy to be felt in the art world, with MoMA, the Cleveland Museum, and other institutions, including Oberlin College and Houston’s Menil Collection, set to receive more works from her collection.
Gund is survived by her four children, Catherine Gund (who directed Aggie, a documentary chronicling her mother’s life story, in 2020), Anna Saalfield, Jessica Saalfield, and David Saalfield.
