I admire everything that is useless, frivolous, and whimsical. I hate functionalism, post-modernism, and almost everything else [...] the house, and its objects, is supposed to be some crazy place that make you laugh.
Pedro Friedeberg
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.”
Pedro Friedeberg b. 1936
Born Pietro Enrico Hoffman Landesman in Florence, Italy to German-Jewish parents, Pedro Friedeberg fled the war with his family to Mexico at the age of three. He describes his childhood as an unhappy one, and recalls being forced to learn the violin and several foreign languages. Artistic from a young age, Friedeberg was enthralled with the Gothic architecture of Florence and later, by the Aztec ruins in his adopted home-town of Mexico City. In 1957, he enrolled in the Universidad Iberoamericana to study architecture, however his studies were short lived. He found traditionalist Modernist designs boring and was more interested in creating fantastical structures than functional buildings. Encouraged by his friend and sculptor Mathias Goertiz, Friedeberg left university to pursue a career as an artist full time. He had his first solo exhibition at the age of twenty-two at Galería Diana in 1960 and began associating with other Surrealists and Neo-Dadaists, including Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon, who also called Mexico City home. Together, they formed the group Los Hartos (The Fed-Up Ones) which was steeped in absurdist Dadaist traditions and focused singularly on making art for art’s sake. His most famous work, the Hand Chair came about almost as a joke after he was asked to give some work to Goertiz’s woodcarver in his absence. The resulting form has sold more than 5,000 copies since its inception. Aside from furniture design, Friedeberg is also an accomplished painter, his two dimensional works meld Op Art with Surrealism to create an aesthetic all his own. Known as one of the last great eccentrics, Friedeberg has exhibited widely in his time and his works reside in many public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.
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