Vogel 50x50

The exhibition is organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Bruce Guenther, curator of modern and contemporary art. Gilkey Center programs are supported in part by the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Endowment Fund.

This exhibition celebrates a recent gift of art from the renowned collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. Starting in the 1960s, the couple amassed an outstanding collection of more than 4,000 works, staying within a modest budget (he was a postal clerk and she was a librarian) and extraordinary space constraints (a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan). While they are particularly known for collecting the minimal and conceptual art of Sol LeWitt, Richard Tuttle, and Robert Barry, the Vogels also collected a wide range of post-minimal, figurative, and expressionist work produced between the 1960s and the 1990s.

Fifty Works for the First State is made possible, in part, by grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by the Emily du Pont Memorial Exhibition Fund and a group of the Delaware Art Museum’s individual donors and Members.

Beginning in the 1960s, New York couple Dorothy and Herbert Vogel spent 45 years collecting contemporary art including paintings, sculpture, and works in many other media. Over that time, their collection grew to nearly 5,000 works, and reflected the Vogel's close relationships with the artists whose work they acquired. In 1992, the Vogels pledged more than 2,000 works to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Staff at the National Gallery then worked with them to make plans for the further dissemination of their collection. In 2008, the Fifty Works for Fifty States initiative was announced, giving 50 works of art to one institution in each of the 50 states. The Birmingham Museum of Art received the gift for Alabama, owing to its "importance as an educational and cultural institution in our region." This exhibition features all 50 of the donated works by an international roster of well- and lesser-known artists. This is a great opportunity to see the work of a number of contemporary artists whose work has never been exhibited in the Southeast.

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection is notable both for the character and breadth of the objects and for the individuals who created it. Herbert Vogel (b. 1922) spent most of his working life as an employee of the United States Postal Service, and Dorothy Vogel (b. 1935) was a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. Setting their collecting priorities above those of personal comfort, the couple used Dorothy's salary to cover the expenses of daily life and devoted Herbert's salary to the acquisition of contemporary art. The couple began collecting in the early 1960s, with a focus on minimal and conceptual art, though they also embraced a wide range of post-minimal practices as well as new figurative directions that emerged in the 1980s. As the first collectors to buy work by many artists who were then unknown to a wide audience, the Vogels offered encouragement at the start of the careers of several figures—artists like Robert Barry, Edda Renouf, and Richard Tuttle, among many others—who went on to achieve considerable acclaim. Many works in the collection were given to the Vogels as gifts, a testament to the Vogels’ close and longstanding relationships with many of the artists they supported. The exhibition is drawn from the Vogels’ recent gift of fifty works to the Museum of Art, donated as part of The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a national initiative to place fifty works from the collection in a selected art institution in each of the fifty states.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the Friends of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.