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Collecting Art Is Easy. Running a Museum, Not So Much.

Every single-collector museum ultimately faces the same uncomfortable truth: a fixed collection, however extraordinary, can make a place feel like a one-and-done destination.

At some point this fall, a new art exhibition space devoted to contemporary Native American art will open in Katonah, New York, with the name of the place yet to be determined. “We’re in brainstorming mode,” Laura Phipps, the recently named director of the as-yet-unnamed space, told Observer. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this art space—beyond the fact that there will be no admissions, café, gift shop or other typical revenue producers—is that the entire 750-piece collection of paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, installation, film, textiles and wearable art comes from a single collection: the Gochman Family Collection. The Gochmans join Albert Barnes, Henry Clay Frick, Eli Broad, Peter Brant, Norton Simon, Christian Levett, Henry Walters, Raymond Nasher, David and Carmen Kreeger, Sterling and Francine Clark, Emily and Mitch Rales and quite a few others who chose to erect their own museums to display their collections rather than donate the works to an existing institution.

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The Gochmans could have followed the example of New York Historical board of trustees chair Agnes Hsu-Tang and her husband Oscar Tang, who donated 150 works of contemporary Native American art to that museum. Donations solve a problem for aging collectors whose children may not want what their parents collected and do not want to pay a substantial inheritance tax; selling everything generates a capital gains tax that may reach 40 percent. (Donating works to eligible nonprofits also allows collectors to deduct a substantial portion of their value from their taxable income and estate, keeping many accountants and museum officials busy around this time of year.) But the family decided to keep their collection together, refusing to let museum curators pick and choose what they wanted or thought important to display, leaving other objects—perhaps most—to languish in storage. Their vision and support of contemporary........

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