Graham Gund, an architect who, along with his spouse Ann, collected many formidable artworks and supported notable museums in Ohio and Massachusetts, died on June 6. He was 84, in line with Kenyon School, the Ohio college the place there may be an artwork gallery in his identify that he additionally designed. The New York Occasions reported that he had suffered a coronary heart assault.
Gund ran an structure agency that was primarily based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of his profession, he undertook a selection of initiatives, from resorts for Disney to the previous constructing of the Institute of Up to date Artwork Boston.
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His artwork assortment, too, counts amongst his lasting legacies. He appeared solo on the ARTnews Prime 200 Collectors checklist 5 instances through the Nineteen Nineties and twice alongside Ann through the 2000s. Born in Cleveland in 1940, Gund ranked alongside his sister, Agnes Gund, who’s herself a well known philanthropist within the artwork world.
Gund acquired works by Pablo Picasso, Kenneth Noland, Kiki Smith, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and lots of others. A lot of these items have since entered the gathering of the Gund, a gallery opened in 2011 at Kenyon School, the varsity whose psychology program Gund attended as an undergraduate. (He later acquired graduate levels in structure and concrete design from Harvard College.)
One in every of Richard Serra’s last works, a 60-foot-tall metal sculpture known as Pivot (2021), was acquired for Kenyon’s campus by way of funding from the Gunds.
The Gunds had been additionally longtime patrons of the Museum of Advantageous Arts Boston, whose directorship is presently endowed utilizing their funding. An 8,300-square-foot gallery for particular exhibitions on the museum bears their identify, they usually have gifted numerous artworks to the MFA through the years, together with a 1997 metal bench by Martin Puryear that entered the establishment’s assortment in 2023. Each of the Gunds are presently listed as trustees of the establishment.
Daisy Desrosiers, director of Kenyon School’s Gund gallery, mentioned in an announcement, “His ardour for modern artwork—and for the artists who make it—was palpable. Together with his spouse, Ann, they modeled in numerous methods what it means to help creativity with care and conviction. They believed deeply that artwork is crucial to studying, that it fosters curiosity, crucial pondering and self-discovery.”
