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Featuring the stories of extraordinary art collectors, the Vogels and Agnes Gund, these three documentaries will inspire you to consider how anyone can appreciate, love and buy art, no matter your background. And that there is more than one way to be an art collector. 

Filmmaker Megumi Sasaki turns her lens on the Vogels in Herb & Dorothy (2008) and its follow-up Herb & Dorothy 50x50 (2013) during a critical period of transition for the couple and their cherished collection. A love affair with art and with each other, a retired postal worker (Herb) and librarian (Dorothy) built one of the most important contemporary art collections in history on very modest means. In 2008, they launched a national gift project that would constitute one of the largest gifts in the history of American art: to give a total of 2500 artworks to museums in all fifty states. The third film in our series is Emmy-nominated director Catherine Gund’s Aggie which looks at the life and career of her mother, the collector and philanthropist Agnes “Aggie” Gund, through conversations between Aggie and artists, family, and friends. Focusing on when she sold a painting from her collection to fund criminal-justice reform, this film demonstrates the power of art to transform consciousness and inspire social change as well as the unique role and potential of collectors to use art to fight injustice.

Herb & Dorothy (2008)

Director: Megumi Sasaki

He was a postal clerk. She was a librarian. With modest means, this couple managed to build one of the most important modern art collections in history. Meet Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, whose shared passion and commitment defied stereotypes and redefined what it means to be an art collector. In the early 1960s, when very little attention was paid to Minimalist and Conceptual Art, the Vogels quietly began purchasing the works of unknown artists. Devoting all of Herb's salary to purchase art they liked, they collected guided by two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Within these limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries; most of those they supported and befriended went on to become world-renowned artists, including Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, Robert Mangold, Lynda Benglis, and Lawrence Weiner. Herb & Dorothy provides a unique chronicle of the world of contemporary art from two unlikely collectors, whose shared passion and discipline defies stereotypes and redefines what it means to be a patron of the arts.