Graham Gund, an architect who, with his wife Ann, collected many ambitious artworks and supported notable museums in Ohio and Massachusetts, died on June 6. He was 84, according to Kenyon College, the Ohio school where there is an art gallery in his name that he also designed. The New York Times reported that he had suffered a heart attack.
Gund ran an architecture firm that was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over the course of his career, he undertook a spread of projects, from resorts for Disney to the former building of the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.
His art collection, too, counts among his lasting legacies. He appeared solo on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list five times during the 1990s and twice alongside Ann during the 2000s. Born in Cleveland in 1940, Gund ranked alongside his sister, Agnes Gund, who is herself a well-known philanthropist in the art world.
Gund acquired works by Pablo Picasso, Kenneth Noland, Kiki Smith, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and many others. Many of those pieces have since entered the collection of the Gund, a gallery opened in 2011 at Kenyon College, the school whose psychology program Gund attended as an undergraduate. (He later received graduate degrees in architecture and urban design from Harvard University.)
One of Richard Serra’s final works, a 60-foot-tall steel sculpture called Pivot (2021), was acquired for Kenyon’s campus via funding from the Gunds.
The Gunds were also longtime patrons of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, whose directorship is currently endowed using their funding. An 8,300-square-foot gallery for special exhibitions at the museum bears their name, and they have gifted various artworks to the MFA over the years, including a 1997 steel bench by Martin Puryear that entered the institution’s collection in 2023. Both of the Gunds are currently listed as trustees of the institution.
Daisy Desrosiers, director of Kenyon College’s Gund gallery, said in a statement, “His passion for contemporary art—and for the artists who make it—was palpable. With his wife, Ann, they modeled in countless ways what it means to support creativity with care and conviction. They believed deeply that art is essential to learning, that it fosters curiosity, critical thinking and self-discovery.”
