Agnes Gund
Agnes Gund is President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, founder of Studio in a School and Art for Justice, and co-founder of the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
Richard’s wondrous, overwhelming piece, Iron Mountain Run, fills a field at my farm. On every trip I take to Connecticut, I love that piece all over again. I love the majestic comment it makes on the soil beneath it, the respect it demands for the built and the unbuilt in our world. Large drunken slabs that come out of the landscape and transform it in the most amazing way possible, now so intrinsically tied to the land that I think of them as one.
Creative individuals gravitate toward activity, toward places where change is happening, where ideas are in discussion. They look for spark, not necessarily for solitude. They want to make contributions to the world, not merely express their own ideas. This portrait of creativity leads to very different ideas about where it comes about, how it happens, whether it can be made to happen.
Last spring I had the wonderful experience of spending time in bucolic Bellagio, in Italy, sequestered away from the multitude of distractions of daily life to think about something I had always wanted to study: the plight of the female artist. In the weeks and months spent in preparation for this fellowship, I read and re-read many classic pieces and I kept coming back to Nochlin’s essay “Why are There No Great Women Artists?” which resonated deeply more than four decades after it was written