This summer, the arts world lost not one but five influential benefactors — Wallis Annenberg, Leonard Lauder, Tad Taube, Glorya Kaufman and, on September 18, Agnes Gund.
Their passings come as the visual and performing arts sectors are confronting a perfect storm of revenue-related challenges. Some organizations have yet to see audience numbers return to pre-pandemic levels, and many have had National Endowment for the Arts funding terminated. Some funders have stepped up to fill gaps — but grantmakers were also already withdrawing funding before President Donald Trump took office a second time.
With more federal cuts all but certain, organizations would normally pull out their Rolodexes of “old-world” donors for financial lifelines. But is that still a viable strategy?
The deaths of these five individuals — their average age was 91 — are a stark and long-anticipated reminder that organizations need to diversify their donor bases as an older cohort of patrons cedes the stage to the next generation. They also underscore the philanthropic truism that it’s always risky to paint a donor demographic with too broad a brush.
Agnes Gund was a prime example of how an old-world donor could also evolve with the times — in her case, by bringing the high-flying world of big-money arts philanthropy into conversation with a very different arena: criminal justice reform.
In 2017, Gund used proceeds from the sale of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” to launch the Art for Justice Fund, a time-limited grantmaking initiative managed by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, aiming to reduce mass incarceration in the U.S. The move came at a time when other funders were rolling out support for “artist-activists,” and some grantmakers were hopeful philanthropy could help drive a real shift in the justice system status quo — even working across ideological divides. Art for Justice was especially striking because Gund, a child of privilege who once admitted that “guilt” drove her philanthropy, addressed a charged issue that many of her old-world peers wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.
Two years after the Art For Justice Fund ceased operations — after disbursing over 450 grants totaling $127 million to more than 200 artists and advocacy and arts organizations — Gund’s legacy resonates, but with a note of the bittersweet.
We’re living in a world where concepts like activism and social justice, and efforts to safely reduce the prison population have raised the ire of an administration that appears to be seeking to rein in progressive foundations, including the Open Society Foundations as well as Ford, Gund’s partner in Art for Justice. Administration officials have also taken it upon themselves to ensure that the Smithsonian museum’s exhibitions are in “alignment with American ideals,” as they term it.
The Art for Justice Fund was a unique endeavor in 2017, but now, it’s even more difficult to imagine an old-world donor partnering with Ford to reduce mass incarceration, which Gund referred to as “slavery, just under a different name.”
A quick biography of Agnes Gund
Gund was born in 1938 in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father, George Gund II, was a banker, business executive and real estate investor who established the George Gund Foundation in 1952. When George passed away in 1966, he left Agnes with a “large fortune in the form of a trust,” wrote the New York Times’ William Grimes.
Agnes, who developed a passion for art at an early age, went on to assemble a collection of works from major 20th-century and contemporary artists. Grimes noted that “nearly all of her collection was promised to museums,” and during her lifetime, she donated work to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, where she served as president from 1991 to 2002. A passionate advocate for arts education and a longtime supporter of social programs, Gund served on the philanthropy committee of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and sat on the board of the Cleveland Museum of Art, among other institutions. She also gave through the low-profile AG Foundation, which has focused on the arts in New York City while also backing organizations working in areas like reproductive health, global health and climate. Its assets stood at $38.6 million at the end of 2023.
Gund decided to dive into criminal justice reform after watching the 2016 documentary film “13th,” which explores how the U.S. history of racial inequality drives mass incarceration, and reading Bryan Stevenson’s memoir “Just Mercy” and the work of Michelle Alexander, who penned the acclaimed “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
“I’d never known black people well,” she told Galerie magazine’s Julie Belcove in 2018. “Seeing my two daughters raise black children has made me feel differently about black issues.”
Why the Art for Justice Fund was a distinctive grantmaking initiative
The Art for Justice Fund was very much attuned to the zeitgeist of its time.
In 2011, Shelley Frost Rubin and Deborah Fisher launched A Blade of Grass to support and deepen understanding for socially engaged artists enacting social change. Zooming out to the broader field, prior to 2017, funders were already supporting a variety of “artist-activists” engaged with “the most significant and hotly debated issues of our time,” as artist support nonprofit Creative Capital put it in 2016.
That said, Gund’s approach was distinctive from the jump. While other funders supported artists whose activism spanned a broad spectrum of issues, Gund drilled down on the single goal of addressing mass incarceration. Moreover, in a philanthrosphere where many donors view perfectly legal policy giving as off-limits for being too political, the Art For Justice Fund zeroed in on three policy areas — bail reform, sentencing reform and creating meaningful reentry opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals.
The fund took a page from its more quantitatively oriented peers by aiming to reduce incarceration rates by 20% in 10 states and tracking tangible wins. Reflecting on grantees’ accomplishments in December 2023, former project director Helena Huang wrote that “the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth secured the freedom of 1,000 individuals who were sentenced to life without parole as children, and Youth First Initiative succeeded in closing six youth prisons and redirected more than $50 million to community-based alternatives to incarceration.”
Lastly, Gund recruited other collectors to contribute to the fund, including Glenn Fuhrman and Laurie M. Tisch, who donated $500,000 from her sale of Max Weber’s “1912 New York.” The fund, Huang noted, went on to raise over $27 million “through 300-plus donations from individuals, businesses and artists,” which was used to extend the fund for a sixth and final year to “recoup the time we lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
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Gund’s willingness to address systemic inequities made her stand out
In 2018, the Times’ Jacob Bernstein asked, “Is Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?”
Bernstein was being playfully hyperbolic since — and I fact-checked this — there are at least a handful of “good” rich people walking the Earth.
Nonetheless, his profile presented Gund as a throwback to the fading archetype of the 20th-century socialite heiress who, when not toggling between fundraisers, galas and awards ceremonies, was writing huge checks, donating troves of art and encouraging her friends to support a philanthropic endeavor tackling mass incarceration. Gund, Bernstein wrote, “has masked her renegade leanings behind an old-world exterior.”
Bottom line? Portraying Gund as a character ripped out of the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel makes for great copy and there’s certainly some truth to it, but it doesn’t tell the full story.
Gund was a monied heiress who publicly questioned components of systems that, however indirectly, may have contributed to her life of privilege. She hasn’t been the only one, of course. A couple of years ago, Abigail Disney said, “We’re doing capitalism wrong, and we’re going to kill ourselves in the process unless we rethink it.” But more often than not, major donors of Gund’s stature have a penchant for not rocking the boat with blistering critiques of the prevailing social or economic order.
Megadonors’ reluctance to speak out against unjust federal policies this year has only exacerbated the harm caused by an administration that has set its sights on progressive funders addressing many of these same systemic inequities, and institutions promulgating narratives that don’t comport with its idealized conception of the American experiment.
So while on one hand, Gund embodied an old-world archetype that’s now fading away, her fuller legacy included a refreshing willingness to stake her reputation — and part of her fortune — on tackling mass incarceration.
Given today’s fraught political climate, it’s unlikely we’ll see donors like that come around for a long time.
