Land of the rising sum: Collector aids MFA bid
Fred Sharf has come a long way since he began collecting art as a teenager. Now 71 and a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Sharf will celebrate tomorrow’s ground-breaking for the $500 million ‘‘Building the new MFA’’ campaign. He and his wife, Jean, gave $2 million to the fund-raising effort.
‘‘I bought my first painting when I was 12,’’ he said. ‘‘I liked the combination of collecting objects and researching their history.’’
The gift comes after years of contributions to the museum. A dozen years ago, when he first became a trustee, Sharf helped the museum buy some early 20th-century American sculpture. Sharf’s family-owned Sharf Marketing Group, which has been in operation since 1892, manages business affairs of female sports personalities.
When Malcolm Rogers, the museum’s Ann and Graham Gund director, noticed that Sharf was successfully organizing exhibitions of, for example, his collection of Meiji (Japanese woodblock) prints for other museums, Rogers suggested the MFA could do that kind of exhibition. So Sharf gave the prints — all 600 of them — to the museum in April 2001. That spring, the museum sponsored an exhibition using his prints.
‘‘The MFA has done a fantastic job with these prints,’’ Sharf said, ‘‘so much more than I could do by myself.’’
The Sharfs’ most recent gift will enlarge the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Information Center, the refurbishing of which was a previous gift to the museum. The center will move to a more prominent place at the redesigned grand entrance on Huntington Avenue.
‘‘I’m not a financial superstar,’’ said Sharf, who sometimes spends five days a week at the museum. ‘‘I view myself as an example of how ordinary people can give to museums, which cannot exist without philanthropy. Jeanie and I have a huge amount of fun at the museum.’’
The first corporate giver to the new campaign, Bank of America, committed $5 million over the next five years. ‘‘The company has a strong connection to the arts,’’ said Anne Finucane, the bank’s Northeast market president. ‘‘The vibrancy of our city is dependent on its citizens and its cultural organizations.’’
Sophia and Bernard Gordon of Manchester-by-the-Sea have recently given $2 million to Salem State College, the largest gift in the state college’s 151-year history. Their gift was unveiled at a sold-out appearance there of Robert Redford at the end of September.
Redford lectured on the need for art in our culture, on his Sundance Institute, and on environmental protection.
The college’s new Creative and Performing Arts Center, scheduled to break ground by the end of 2008, will bear the Gordons’ names.
Bernard Gordon, who received an honorary degree from Salem State in 1985 for his professional achievements and support of initiatives in the arts, healthcare and education, is founder of Analogic Corp. in Peabody. A member of the team that developed the world’s first commercially available digital computer, Gordon holds more than 200 patents, creating devices such as the fetal monitor and a mobile CT scanner.
E-mail items about philanthropy and charitable events to philanthropy@globe.com.
