As consummate patrons of the arts, Acey and Bill Wolgin did not just live with the art that they collected—they lived alongside the artists who made it. Through their generous support of both individual artists as well as institutions they cherished, the Wolgins became widely celebrated collectors known for their friendships with artists—including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Arman, and Robert Rauschenberg—that were sustained, not least, by legendary parties thrown at their Philadelphia apartment.
Bill Wolgin, who practiced as a urologist, met Acey through her brother with whom he attended medical school. The pair married and made strong roots in Philadelphia—indeed, the Wolgins may be credited for having a significant role in elevating the City of Brotherly Love to the cultural destination that it is today. In the 1960s, Acey was a founding member of the Arts Council at the Young Women’s Hebrew Association, which helped spark the city’s contemporary art scene. In 1974, Acey became one of the first women elected to the board of the Philadelphia Art Museum, where she served as a trustee and trustee emeritus for the rest of her life. When Robert Indiana’s LOVE stamp was released at that museum, Acey’s birthday party doubled as the event after-party. Among the attendees was the artist Arman, who absconded with a piece of the LOVE stamp-themed cake in order to seal it in resin.
The Wolgins would later relocate to Boca Raton, where they became actively involved in the Boca Raton Museum of Art and eventually funded the Wolgin Education Center. After returning to Philadelphia, Bill Wolgin would become involved in the Woodmere Art Museum as a trustee, helping to guide the institution’s expansion. Works from the Wolgin Collection are now held in all three of the institutions where they became involved, including Yves Klein’s Portrait Relief I: Arman at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fletcher Benton’s Donut with Balls and Half Moon at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and a group of large-scale sculptures by Sam Maitin at the Woodmere Art Museum.
Surrounded by his parents’ collection from a young age, Richard Wolgin recalls meeting many of the artists whose works he knew intimately—especially memorable was the flaming red hair of Jeanne-Claude when she and Christo dropped in one weekend. (When they weren’t celebrating together, the Wolgins kept correspondences with many of their artist-friends, who sent postcards and, sometimes, drawings.) As kids, Richard and his sister would, naturally, delight in playing with one of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures. When Richard was twelve years old, Acey gave him his first work: Roy Lichtenstein’s CRAK!, which he affixed to his bedroom wall with thumb tacks—inadvertently bringing the work back into the realm of mass media and pop cultural detritus that so inspired Lichtenstein.
The works featured in The Acey and Bill Wolgin Collection represent a life lived through, and for, art—“It’s not just buying something to hang on the wall,” says Richard, “it’s a piece of their lives, that are now part of our lives.”
Roger Brown 1941–1997
Roger Brown was born in Hamilton, Alabama in 1941. He showed an early aptitude for artistic pursuits and his parents encouraged him to develop his talent. He took art classes and won awards in high school, including a statewide poster competition. For college, Brown attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which exposed him to a wide range of influences, such as early Italian Renaissance art, Surrealism, American artists like Edward Hopper and Grant Wood, and tribal art from various cultures. Brown's professors, particularly Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, played significant roles in shaping his aesthetic sensibility.
In the late 1960s, Brown's career began to flourish and he became associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists, which included Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, and others, who rebelled against the contemporary art trends of New York City. Rejecting minimalism and conceptualism, the Imagists embraced figurative art and drew inspiration from popular culture. Brown's painting explored several themes, for instance, urban isolation, natural disasters, political events, and gay culture. Brown and his partner, architect George Veronda, began to split time between Chicago and New Buffalo, Michigan until Veronda died from lung cancer in 1984. After moving to Southern California in the late 1980s, Brown continued to explore similar ideas within his oeuvre and expanded his practice to encompass sculpture, set design for theater and opera productions, and mosaic murals.
Brown's work was exhibited extensively during his lifetime. He was represented by the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York. Major retrospectives were organized by prestigious institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. Although Brown was diagnosed with HIV in 1988, and lived with AIDS subsequently, he was quite productive until his passing in 1997. Today works by Brown are featured in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and elsewhere. Brown's first Chicago residence and studio, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, is now maintained by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the Roger Brown Study Collection, showcasing works by Brown and many items from his personal collection of folk and tribal art.
Auction Results Roger Brown
