As Reported by The Seattle Times (Sheila Farr), collectors Dorothy (72yrs) and Herbert (85yrs) Vogel will divide part of their collection in order to enrich the displays of 50 American institutions. From Spring 2008 these donations will be distributed democratically, which means one institution in each state.
From the collection of 4,000 works by more than 170 artists, with work dating from the early ’60s, the Vogels will give a total of 2500 artworks.
The first museum to benefit from this extraordinary generosity is the SeattleArt Museum, which will receive pieces by American masters like Lynda Benglis, Michael Lucero, Robert Mangold, Richard Tuttle, Tony Smith and beloved friend Sol LeWitt.
As it stands the other lucky museums to receive gifts are the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, the Blanton Museum of Art and University of Texas, Austin.
The project, coordinated with the assistance of Ruth Fine, curator at the Washington National Gallery of Art, which is helping the Vogels together with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is in the process of finalizing the rest of the museums that will benefit. Twenty more institutions are going to receive gifts by the end of 2008, and then a final twenty in 2009.
These brave donators, who have been collaborating with the National Gallery of Art since 1991 (with 832 accessioned works and 268 promised gifts), already shared their purchases in 1994 on the occasion of “From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection,” which was on view at the National Gallery of Art and then at the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in Austin, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland. In 2002, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Vogel Collection” was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
