Graham Gund, an architect who, together with his spouse Ann, collected many formidable artworks and supported notable museums in Ohio and Massachusetts, died on June 6. He was 84, in accordance with Kenyon Faculty, the Ohio faculty the place there’s an artwork gallery in his title that he additionally designed. The New York Occasions reported that he had suffered a coronary heart assault.
Gund ran an structure agency that was based mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of his profession, he undertook a ramification of initiatives, from resorts for Disney to the previous constructing of the Institute of Up to date Artwork Boston.
His artwork assortment, too, counts amongst his lasting legacies. He appeared solo on the ARTnews Prime 200 Collectors record 5 instances in the course of the Nineteen Nineties and twice alongside Ann in the course of the 2000s. Born in Cleveland in 1940, Gund ranked alongside his sister, Agnes Gund, who’s herself a widely known philanthropist within the artwork world.
Gund acquired works by Pablo Picasso, Kenneth Noland, Kiki Smith, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and plenty of others. Lots of these items have since entered the gathering of the Gund, a gallery opened in 2011 at Kenyon Faculty, the college whose psychology program Gund attended as an undergraduate. (He later obtained 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 have been additionally longtime patrons of the Museum of Positive Arts Boston, whose directorship is at present endowed utilizing their funding. An 8,300-square-foot gallery for particular exhibitions on the museum bears their title, and so they have gifted varied 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 at present listed as trustees of the establishment.
Daisy Desrosiers, director of Kenyon Faculty’s Gund gallery, stated 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 considering and self-discovery.”
