Agnes Gund
"I had a magical art history teacher who didn't just give you the artist's name and the date of the picture, she showed you how to look at artwork," Gund said.She is co-founder and Chair Emerita of the Center for Curatorial Leadership and is an Honorary Trustee of YoungArts, Independent Curators International and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland.[6] In 2011, Gund was nominated by President Barack Obama as a member of the board of trustees of the National Council on the Arts.Gund described Michelle Alexander's 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness and Ava DuVernay's 2016 documentary 13th about African-Americans in the prison system as motivators for starting the fund, as well as concern for her grandchildren, six of whom are Black.[16] The goal of the Studio Institute is to expand the organization's mission and impact on the field through research, documentation, and dissemination, and to share its programs with other cities around the country.[17] Agnes Gund's vast collection of modern and contemporary art from the 1940s through the present ranges from modern masters, including Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, James Lee Byars, Vija Celmins, Eva Hesse, Arshile Gorky, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Wolfgang Laib, Roy Lichtenstein, Martin Puryear, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, and Frank Stella; through cutting-edge contemporary artists, such as Teresita Fernandez, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Cai Guo-Qiang, Glenn Ligon and David Remfry.