Now Rowman & Littlefield has published the book “Democracy’s Medici: The Federal Reserve and the Art of Collecting.”
The art historian Mary Anne Goley was the founding director of the Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. From 1975 through 2006, she led its 15-member advisory panel and liaisoned with the Fed’s powerful board members and 36 system-wide bank presidents.
Goley and her staff acquired works of art for the Fed’s permanent collection and organized more than 110 exhibitions on subjects ranging from New York graffiti artists to the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Particularly notable were her collaborations with central banks and museums in Austria, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, which brought to Washington an array of shows on such previously overlooked topics as the Hague School and its American legacy, the paintings of Edward Steichen, Austrian Biedermeier, and Polish constructivism.
In “Democracy’s Medici,” Goley offers an insider’s view of the Fed’s institutional culture, the larger-than-life personalities she met, and the significance of the Fine Arts Program in this unique context. For details, visit rowman.com.
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