Among her other major philanthropic endeavors is Studio in a School, which she founded in 1977, when the New York City budget crisis virtually eliminated art education from the public schools. Some 30,000 children participate each year. “If she accomplished nothing else,” Close says, “that would be big. There’s really no limit to her generosity.” Adds Johns, who sits with Gund on the board of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, which he cofounded, “Her importance to the contemporary art world has been enormous.” And beyond art, to humanitarian initiatives, he notes, “I frequently hear things that hint at the involvement of Aggie.”
Gund admits she’s a softy when it comes to a good cause. After growing up with extreme affluence and inheriting a fortune at a young age, she says, “I had a deep sense of guilt about having money.”
Whether it’s guilt or good old Midwestern practicality, Gund to this day has very specific ideas about how to spend that money. There remains, for instance, the matter of the dining room rug. McGinnis found what Gund concedes was a “wonderful Swedish rug,” turn of the last century, but the price tag was not so wonderful. Gund declines to reveal the dollar figure for publication because, she says, “I was embarrassed to even look at a rug like that. I can’t afford that. I just can’t—we don’t spend that type of money.” (Suffice it to say a middle-American family could buy a comfortable home for less.) Gund facetiously accuses McGinnis and Ogilvie-Makari of being “in cahoots” to get her to trash the rug she’s long had in the room and pony up for the Swedish number. “My life is being visual; that’s what I do,” Gund says. “I know the rug is bad.” When it came time to replace a rug in the hallway, her thrifty-gal side took over again: She schlepped to a sale in Queens and bought one there. McGinnis, she notes wryly, “has not mentioned it.”
