We are saddened to note the passing of longstanding LACMA trustee Wallis Annenberg this morning. A true luminary who forever changed the face of Los Angeles with her generosity and vision, she leaves a legacy that will be felt in the city and county for generations to come.
Annenberg’s influence as a philanthropist is widely known and celebrated. As chair of the board, president, and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation, she reached thousands of nonprofits through innumerable gifts concentrated in the areas of the arts, community, education, global issues, and more, largely in her adopted, longtime home of Los Angeles. Last year, she received the National Humanities Medal for helping to transform and bolster the arts and humanities in public life.
Her impact on LACMA has been profound. A member of the museum’s board of trustees since 2001, she continued the work of her father, Walter, who was a LACMA life trustee, and his wife, Lenore, who together made several vital gifts to the museum. Annenberg led the Annenberg Foundation in endowing the Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellowship, a two-year position offering emerging curators professional training at LACMA, which has since become a cornerstone of our curatorial departments as well as a meaningful launchpad for leaders and scholars in the arts. She and the Annenberg Foundation established the Director’s Endowment Fund to endow the directorship, proceeds of which continue to support core museum programs including special exhibitions, art acquisitions, and art education activities.
Annenberg also made a groundbreaking donation in support of photography, enabling LACMA to acquire the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. A group of more than 3,500 prints that forms one of the premier histories of photography and collections of masterworks from the 19th and 20th centuries, it represents the most significant and valuable gift of photography in our history. Highlights include works from photography’s earliest years by pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron; European and American pictorialists and modernists including Edward Weston; and major artists working in subsequent decades such as Man Ray, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams, among numerous others. With its remarkable breadth and depth, this collection has allowed photography to play an important role throughout the museum ever since, serving as a foundation for multiple exhibitions and attracting scholars and curators from around the world. In 2008, LACMA’s photography department was renamed the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department in her honor.
Alongside her deep generosity to LACMA, Annenberg was the force behind a host of other initiatives that have improved the lives of millions of Angelenos—The Wallis Annenberg Community Beach House, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, among others—as well as its animal residents, with her championing of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the world’s largest wildlife corridor that is set to open next year.
“Wallis Annenberg blessed the Los Angeles community not only with her philanthropy,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, to the Los Angeles Times, “but also with her guidance about how to improve our community, from public access to our beautiful beaches to the livelihood of local animals, and the importance of the arts to our daily lives.”