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 197