You knew that the poet Wallace Stevens was a lawyer for the Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut, right?
It’s fascinating, the double lives many creative people live. In this post, for example, I mentioned Kyan Bishop, a colleague with a pretty businesslike job, who turns out to be an accomplished conceptual artist.
Today I have two gentlemen from the financial-services industry, which whatever else one might say about it, pays enough for a guy to indulge an artistic bent.
Consider first Geoff Hargadon, now showing at the Kayafas Gallery in Boston.
Art critic Cate McQuaid writes in the Boston Globe, “Bring up conceptual art, and some people’s eyes glaze over. So before we dive into the conceptual underpinnings of the work of … Geoff Hargadon now up at Gallery Kayafas, let’s say this: It’s funny, wry, and self-mocking — accessible on many levels.
“Hargadon’s ‘Dealers Protected!’ features signs that he has put up, first around Boston and then during the Frieze Art Fair in London in October, and during Art Basel Miami Beach earlier this month. Perhaps you have seen them. They read ‘Cash for Your Warhol.’ This show features the signs themselves, and photos of them in situ.
“The artist, who is an unlikely hybrid of street artist and senior vice president at the financial services company UBS, was inspired by the ‘cash for your house’ signs he saw on telephone poles during the worst of the economic collapse. He hilariously posted his first ‘Cash for Your Warhol’ sign outside the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis in 2009, after the museum announced controversial — and later canceled — plans to close and sell off its collection.” Read more here.
Second is the late Warren Hellman, Wall Street financier and devoted banjo player. “After nearly 20 years at Lehman in New York, he started several money management businesses, including Hellman & Friedman in San Francisco, one of the country’s most successful private equity funds. More recently Mr. Hellman focused on philanthropy, bestowing millions of dollars on cultural, educational and medical charities in the Bay Area. The three-day concert he founded, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, held each year in Golden Gate Park, has been financed entirely by him.” Read about Hellman in the NY Times obit.
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