A Gift That Keeps Giving -- Bagley Wright Puts His Money Where His Heart Is: The Arts
Fifty years ago when he was a newly minted English literature major from Princeton University, Bagley Wright aspired to be a writer of fiction.
"I was writing some fiction, though not very successfully," he said. "I've also written some television plays, which were bad. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have a talent for writing."
Wright, 71, obviously has a talent for making money, however, and a habit of giving it away. Yesterday every arts organization in Seattle was buzzing with the news that Wright has put $20 million of his personal fortune into what he is calling the Bagley Wright Fund, a foundation that each year will give a total of $1 million in large chunks to Seattle-area visual-arts and performing groups.
In deference to his passion for literature and particularly for poetry, Wright says he also has broad plans to spend an additional $25,000 annually to bring in one poet or writer of international stature for a public lecture. And, the fund will make an additional once-a-year $25,000 grant to a Northwest painter or sculptor who, in the view of Wright and his children, has done extraordinary work over the year.
Wright said his fund will be given only for capital campaigns and endowments, beginning late this year or early next year - not for the daily operations of arts groups, or for outreach or community activities. His interest is in supporting the actual presentation of top-quality art, whether it is symphonic music or a dazzling art exhibition.
"I think with diminished government support, endowments are about the only way these arts groups can keep going," he said.
Faye Sarkowsky, a former Seattle Art Museum president, longtime arts patron and friend of the Wrights, said she expects Wright will award his fund money for "excellence."
"He won't give it for something that's too cutting-edge or weird," she said. "He'll reward excellence and beauty. He's really a romantic."
Though Wright said he will consider requests from smaller fringe and alternative arts groups, he has long associations with some of the city's largest and most established cultural institutions. He also noted that the bylaws of the fund require that a grant may not exceed 15 percent of the annual budget of the recipient group. That would seem to eliminate from consideration some of the small arts presenters.
Wright said he plans to make no more than four grants each year from the estimated endowment income of $1 million, so each would be $250,000 or more. Thus a group's annual budget would likely need to be about $1.7 million or more to qualify.
Yesterday he was vague on exactly which groups might qualify for a grant and why.
He said he probably would limit his support to organizations based in Seattle and possibly also in Bellevue, and doubted that he would consider making grants to organizations in other parts of the state.
His fund will "mainly support the major cultural institutions in Seattle," Wright said, though it will occasionally make grants to groups in New York and San Francisco, where two of his children live.
Wright and his wife Virginia, who is extremely well-known in national as well as regional visual-arts circles as a patron and collector, have four adult children. Two live in Seattle, and Wright said he hopes one or more of them will want to take over the administration of the fund someday. In the meantime, he said he will administer it on his own.
"I don't want to be blanketed with a lot of paperwork and I don't want a staff," he said.
What makes Bagley Wright run?
Wright likes a good challenge, whether it's figuring how to raise $100 million for a new symphony hall - he's chairman of the capital campaign - or what to do about what was once SAM's embarrassing lack of a decent Japanese textile collection.
Bill Rathbun, curator of Asian art at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, recalls the year in the early '80s when Wright stepped in as acting director and, at Rathbun's suggestion, decided to build a first-rate Japanese textile collection.
"Bagley wasn't particularly interested in Asian art," recalls Rathbun. "But he and Ginny took on the task of building a Japanese textile collection as an expression of a medium that had been overlooked. He saw it as a doable project and he became very disciplined about studying Japanese textiles and he immersed himself in books . . . I think it's to his credit that he saw the opportunity and made it work."
The result was that the Wrights acquired an impressive collection of 18th-to-20th-century Japanese folk textiles and in 1989 donated them to SAM. Rathbun organized them into a nationally touring show that will return to Seattle and be on view at the downtown art museum later this year.
Wright's enthusiasm for rolling up his sleeves and jumping feet first into a big, difficult project also partly explains his financial success. After several years as a newspaper reporter and editor in New York, he and his new wife moved to Seattle in 1956. He started his own real estate company, and within a few years had built the Logan Building in downtown Seattle. He and partners later built the Space Needle and went on to build the Bank of California Building. He was later chairman of Physio-Control Corp. in Redmond, a manufacturer of heart defibrillators.
At the same time, he and his wife have earned reputations as, in the view of many, the patron saints of Seattle arts. Much of their impressive private art collection has been promised to SAM, and he hopes his latest philanthropic venture will inspire others - particularly the area's many young, wealthy people, including the so-called Microsoft millionaires - to support the arts. He said he is concerned that in Seattle as elsewhere, most support for arts organizations seems to come from older patrons.
`The Medici of Seattle'
Though yesterday's announcement was stunning because of its largesse - Seattle has relatively few arts-supporting foundations compared with other large, sophisticated cities - Wright is by no means a novice philanthropist.
The Seattle Repertory's Seattle Center theater is named after him because he spearheaded the founding of the organization more than 30 years ago and the construction of its theater. Along with his wife, he has given generously over the years to the Seattle Art Museum, where he also has served several times as the board chairman and president.
Daniel Sullivan, longtime artistic director at the Rep, said Wright "has always reminded me of some sort of Renaissance duke - the Medici of Seattle. Even his manner is very measured and thoughtful."
Indeed Wright's philanthropic streak seems to stem from a strong sense of civic duty and a love of the arts. Years after he helped found the Rep, Wright still attends plays and likes to discuss them, Sullivan said, though he doesn't attempt to interfere with Sullivan's artistic decisions.
Chris Bruce, former senior curator at the Henry Art Gallery and now artistic director of the soon-to-opened Meyerson & Nowinski Art Associates gallery, says that both Bagley and Virginia, or Ginny as she is known to almost everyone, seem to be guided by a sense of civic motivation.
"I really think Ginny and Bagley feel that art is good for everybody and that it adds to the community," said Bruce. "Somewhere along the line they've really gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it and want others to share that excitement."
Virginia, heiress to the Bloedel and Merrill timber fortunes, administers her own arts fund, the Virginia Wright Fund. With it she has financially supported the acclaimed outdoor sculpture garden at Western Washington University in Bellingham, her hometown, and numerous other visual arts programs.
Money from her fund and from her husband recently went to purchase Mark di Suvero's sculpture "Schubert Sonata" now located on Harbor Steps across from SAM; the Wrights then donated it to the museum. The couple also recently gave a significant portion of the $1 million donated to SAM in honor of the departing Patterson Sims, SAM's former curator of modern art.
Friends say that Virginia is the one who originally was interested in art. But, in the many decades of their marriage, Bagley has also honed an eye for cutting-edge contemporary art. The collection in their Highlands home is considered one of the most outstanding private collections of contemporary art in the nation. Indeed, their palatial home has the feel of an art museum, with long high walls and windows relegated to the ends of major rooms. Art - including large, unwieldy sculpture - takes center stage in the house.
There are works by the pantheon of influential, now old-guard contemporary artists on the walls, such as pieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko. But there are also works by such "challenging," up-to-the-minute contemporary artists as Anselm Kiefer.
Given that level of interest in the arts, and their sense of civic duty, Sarkowsky said she wasn't all that surprised to hear about the Bagley Wright Fund.
"They both just get in there and figure out what the job is, get support, and get it done," she said. "Nothing's better than that. Those are perfect donors."
Seattle Times arts writers Melinda Bargreen, Misha Berson, Donn Fry and Jean Lenihan contributed to this article.
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A WISH LIST FOR DONATED FUNDS.
Philanthropist Bagley Wright's announcement yesterday that he will give about $1 million a year to arts groups for capital campaigns and endowments thrilled arts groups facing declining government support. A selected wish list:
Seattle Symphony: a contribution for the new concert hall downtown (Wright chairs the $100 million fund-raising campaign).
Seattle Opera: help to reduce its deficit; grants that would enable the company to develop two new productions a year, a goal targeted in the Opera's five-year plan; a "Ring" fund to produce the Wagnerian four-opera epic for which Seattle Opera is internationally famous again in 2001.
Seattle Repertory Theatre: contribution to its 284-seat, $8.7 million second theater now under construction next door to its Seattle Center theater named for Wright (he is the founding president of the Rep, and a longtime contributor).
A Contemporary Theatre: $5 million still to be raised of the $30 million cost of converting the old Eagles Auditorium into a new downtown facility.
On the Boards: contribution to a $2.5 million capital campaign it likely will mount to renovate ACT's lower Queen Anne facility and make it more flexible for OTB's varied productions.
Pacific Northwest Ballet: contribution to the campaign it expects to launch in 1997 to increase its $800,000 endowment.