Agnes Gund

The philanthropist, art collector and education advocate Agnes Gund is President Emerita of New York's Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she fell in love with arts as a child and earned a master's degree in art history at Harvard. Beneficiary of a substantial inheritance, she has built an encyclopedic collection of modern and contemporary art, from the 1940s to the present. In 1977, when a budget shortfall forced New York City to cut art classes in its public schools, Gund founded Studio in a School, a non-profit organization that recruits professional artists to lead classes in drawing, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, and works with teachers to link art with other academic subjects. Forty years later, Studio in a School has reached more than 600,000 students in 120 schools throughout the city; an estimated 90 percent of all children who participate in Studio programs come from low-income households. Gund first joined the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, and served as the Museum's President from 1991 to 2002. Over the years, she has donated more than 250 works to the Museum from her own collection, as well as lending and donating pieces to other museums around the United States. In 1997, President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to Americans in the arts. This podcast was recorded the following year, at the Academy of Achievement's 1998 Summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Gund tells the Academy's student delegates about the curiosity she felt as a child and her lifelong love of art and learning. She recalls the influence of her art history teachers and her belief in the importance of arts education.