The Vogel Collection: A Selection

At the end of 2008, the Academy Art Museum was selected to receive fifty works of art from New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel as part of a national gifts program entitled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. The Vogel Collection has been characterized as unique among collections of contemporary art, both for the character and breadth of the objects and for the individuals who created it. Herbert Vogel (1922 – 2012), 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. The Vogel gift, and the resulting exhibitions such as this, was many years in the making. The National Gallery of Art has worked closely with Dorothy and Herbert Vogel since 1991, when it acquired a portion of their collection, through partial purchase and gift from the Vogels. “Gifts such as this and its subsequent display are energizing to the community,” says Academy Art Museum Curator Anke Van Wagenberg, “As our audience well knows, the Vogel gift changed the future of the Academy Art Museum and other recipient institutions by strengthening its collection of contemporary holdings.” 

The best-known aspects of the Vogel Collection are minimal and conceptual art, such as the numerous sheets by Richard Tuttle or the sculptural work of Cheryl Laemmle and John Francis Torreano. But as this exhibition makes clear there are many figurative and expressionist works by artists such as Lucio Pozzi, Mark Kostabi, Peter Hutchinson, and Moshe Kupferman to name just a few. These works blend nicely with the Museum’s other strong contemporary holdings.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website