Is Sarah Arison Her Generation's Agnes Gund? (2024)

Sarah Arison remembers clearly the very first time she attended the Party in the Garden at the Museum of Modern Art. It was June 2006, and she was 21 and wide-eyed, an undergrad at Emory. The courtyard was full of Tisches, Bloombergs, and Bronfmans. She accompanied her grandmother Lin Arison, an honorary trustee at the museum. She spent time with film curator Raj Roy, with Todd Bishop, then a senior development executive, and, especially, with Agnes Gund, a friend of Lin’s who would become, over the ensuing years, “like a second grandmother.”

“I wore a Carolina Herrera black-and-white co*cktail dress, and I was not in the art world at all,” Arison tells me. “Never in a million years did I think that 18 years later this would happen.”

“This” is Arison’s ascent to the presidency of MoMA’s board of trustees, one of the most important positions in the art world, a post usually assumed at an age notably greater than 39. Yet it’s precisely her age that signals a fresh start for a body that has been marked by some recent controversy. “I’m excited and also terrified,” she says, sitting on a sofa in the Tribeca apartment she shares with her husband, financier Thomas Wilhelm, and their two young daughters. Works by Deborah Roberts, Mel Chin, and Titus Kaphar are interspersed with toy kitchens and decals of Elsa from Frozen.

“There’s this incredible legacy. It’s a lot to live up to.” Those who have been watching Arison since that garden party say she has been quietly preparing to do just that, and follow in the footsteps of predecessors Nelson Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, Blanchette Rockefeller, Bill Burden, Bill Paley, Donald Marron, and Gund.

“She was a baby, there with Grandma Lin. But I could tell right away that she was a force,” says Bishop, who has since transitioned and is now Kat Bishop, and recently left the museum after 24 years to start her own consultancy, Campfire. “She is that rare person, like Aggie Gund, who has a warmth and empathy but also a drive and clarity of purpose.”

“She’s dazzling,” says Darren Walker, who, like so many art world power brokers, was introduced to Arison by Gund and has collaborated with Arison in his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation. “Whip smart, dynamic, so much charisma. She is the pathbreaking arts philanthropist of her generation.”

Indeed, Arison is the type of person who seems to find more than 24 hours in a day. She has her hands in dozens of projects at any given time, answers emails immediately, crisscrosses the city for meetings and exhibitions, but also manages to get to Avenues the World School just in time for pickup. She concedes that she “came out of the womb type A, the kind of kid who never has to be reminded to do her homework.”

Growing up largely in Miami, Arison was close to Lin and her late grandfather Ted Arison, the Israeli-American founder of Carnival Cruises (which is now chaired by Ted’s son Micky, who also owns the Miami Heat) and of the Israel-based Ted Arison Family Foundation, which is run by Ted’s daughter Shari. Sarah is the daughter of a third Arison child who did not enter any of the family pursuits. Sarah herself was headed in a different direction, studying to be a geneticist, but then: “I was home from college on holiday break, and I went to the YoungArts gala in Miami, not so much because I was interested but just to spend time with my grandmother.”

Ted and Lin founded YoungArts in 1981 to pair talented high school–age artists from a range of disciplines—including theater, music, and dance—with financial awards, mentorships (from the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov), and professional opportunities. The more than 20,000 alumni of YoungArts include Viola Davis, Kerry Washington, and Nicki Minaj, all of whom were inducted as teenagers.

“We joke that there’s a special sauce,” Arison says of that impressive track record, which relies on the expertise of world class talents to review auditions and submissions. “We will get an Irish step dancing application and find the best Irish step dancing instructor to assess it.” Of that gala she attended on college break, Arison says, “My grand­father had passed by this time, and no one else in the second or third generations of my family was involved. I just had this moment of, ‘If I don’t get involved, this will die.’ ”

CRUISE CONTROL

At 19 Arison became involved in YoungArts and the Arison Art Foundation (set up to support the family’s arts philanthropy). After college she moved to New York, where she took some day jobs in the fashion industry. (“I worked at W magazine, and my first photo shoot was the Madonna one in Brazil. On my first day I sorted through 300 men’s Speedos.”) But soon her ambitions for YoungArts and the networking required to achieve them became a full-time career.

“I was beginning to see the whole ecosystem,” Arison says. “I started to think about what artists need in five pillars: mentoring, a network, physical space, funding, and professional development.” She set out to grow YoungArts into an even more expansive endeavor that, through partnerships with arts organizations like the Sundance Institute and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, would give a generation of emerging talents their first shot, setting them up for self-­sustaining careers. In the last decade the beneficiaries have included Timothée Chalamet, Amanda Gorman, and Hunter Schafer.

“She has changed YoungArts, made it so much more important,” says Gund, who remembers when Lin Arison (“a great lady and a pivotal figure for me”) introduced her to 18-year-old Sarah. “I thought she was beautiful, but I didn’t really focus on her, because she was so young.” Gund soon found that the upstart was game for any challenge in a field that was shifting beneath her generation’s feet. “When I was president of MoMA, it was a wholly different art world. It was small. You knew everyone in it. Now it’s a big, big world.”

Arison, thanks in no small part to the tutelage of her grandmother and Gund, took to that big world. She was tireless about attending openings and fundraisers and joining the boards of arts institutions throughout the city: Lincoln Center, New York Live Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, and American Ballet Theatre, where her grandmother had served in the 1980s; Sarah would eventually become chairman.

“Part of me still feels like the 22-year-old in the boardroom with people decades older and more experienced and polished,” Arison says. “But I listened. I probably spent years just listening, to understand the dynamics and the role of a board member. And, largely because of YoungArts, I’ve spent time with artists, from when they are very young, and I have a deep understanding of what they are going through.”

ABT principal dancer Misty Copeland says that Arison’s insight is unique among benefactors. “A lot of trustees are fans, people on the outside,” she says. “She doesn’t come at it from that place. There is an empathy for artists within her. All of her decision making comes from that perspective.”

“There are very few people who are respected equally by CEOs and artists,” says Clive Chang, a former vice president at Lincoln Center, whom Arison met while on the board before hiring him in 2023 to be president and CEO of YoungArts. “It’s funny that gravitas is associated with age, because Sarah is a center of gravity. She has a magnetism and such vast knowledge, to the point where I think sometimes even the curators are intimidated by how much she knows and her personal relationships with artists. But savvy leaders see that not as a threat but as an advantage.”

Arison’s MoMA journey began when she joined the board of MoMA PS1, the Queens-based contemporary art center that merged with MoMA 24 years ago. “When Sarah moved to New York, we would go look at art together and drink champagne and talk about boys,” Kat Bishop says. “Then one day she asked if we could have an actual business meeting in my office, and I said, ‘Sure, we’ll be serious today.’ She told me she was ready to get more involved. And I said, ‘Would you consider joining the board of PS1?’”

MO’ DRAMA

Arison soon became vice chair of that board, lieutenant to then chair Gund. She succeeded Gund in October 2020, deftly navigating a challenging period for arts organizations, especially at the epicenter of the Covid crisis.

“An incredibly tough time, and she led PS1 with clarity and passion,” says MoMA director Glenn Lowry. “She rallied her trustees to provide additional support, she had a steady hand, and she never panicked.”

Incidentally, Gund says, Arison also managed to unite the PS1 board on such divisive issues as the institution’s relationship to “big” MoMA and the selection of a new director, curator Connie Butler, who had left MoMA years earlier to serve as chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

“As soon as I met Sarah, the job became compelling to me,” Butler says now. “It’s so impressive to watch her move through the art world. Artists clearly love her. She’s remarkable with staff. She’s transparent, but at the same time she’s a very smart political person, and I’ve seen her navigate very complicated situations.” The morning of the appointment’s announcement, Arison was taking her older daughter to the bus stop. “The baby was strapped to me, I was walking the dog, and I was in sweats with my hair a mess, and somebody on the street grabbed me—I still don’t know who it was—and said, ‘Oh my god, you got Connie Butler back?’ ” she says. “It’s one of the crowning achievements of my career.”

The PS1 chair came with a seat on the MoMA board, on which her grandmother had served decades earlier. “I felt honored just to be in the room. I saw myself as a lifer on that board. I said they were going to have to carry me out of that boardroom horizontally,” Arison says. But to lead it? “It was the ultimate dream. Something that I could have maybe hoped for in 15 years.”

She didn’t have to wait nearly that long. “They skipped over a few people to get this to happen,” Gund says. “It was a surprise to some, but not to me. [Board chair] Marie-Josée [Kravis] had the idea, and she brought it to those of us she knew would be in favor of it. And it’s true Sarah is younger than anyone else who had the job before, but that’s one reason she was picked: She has young friends and a young network, but she isn’t new to this. She knows MoMA very well. She had the support of a lot of people.”

Kravis, the wife of billionaire Henry Kravis, had served on the board since 1994 and was president for more than a decade before becoming chair in 2021, succeeding Leon Black, who gave up the post after his financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein were exposed and some 150 artists, such as Nan Goldin and Xaviera Simmons, called for his resignation. The scandal dragged the museum into a broader debate over toxic philanthropy and the controversial funders who sometimes make up the graying boards of major cultural centers. In Arison, Kravis and allies saw a bridge to the next generation of patrons.

“Sarah has combined Aggie’s engagement and compassion for artists with the strategic thinking of Marie-Josée,” Lowry says. “She has watched these two remarkable mentors and absorbed the best of both of them.” One prominent collector adds, “MoMA has had some rocky times recently in terms of leadership. Sarah makes sense. She is someone who will lead with dignity.”

THE INHERITANCE

It’s a good thing, because the art world and leading organizations like MoMA face no shortage of challenges: rapidly evolving technologies, a deeply fractured political landscape, questions about artificial intelligence, and shrinking government funding for cultural programming and education. Arison will be tackling the tasks at hand armed with the lessons from her years of service on a long list of boards, some of which she’ll roll off to focus on the “full-time-plus job” that will be MoMA.

“Yes, she’s young, but she’s had a long career—because she’s been doing this since she was 19,” says her friend Michi Jigarjian, a developer and YoungArts trustee. “She’s intergenerational, and her credibility is backed by a deep understanding of what it takes to run an institution.” András Szántó, the author of two recent books on the future of museums, says arts organizations are justifiably worried that tomorrow’s wealth holders won’t be as generous as their predecessors. “At the same time, these institutions have an international audience, they are diversifying demographically, and they are catering to digital-first generations,” he says. “They have to revitalize leadership.”

Today, anyway, Arison’s main task is packing up her family for their home in Aspen, where they spend summers. She also maintains a home in Miami, in the same building where her grandmother, now 87, still resides. Arison brings the girls down every month so their great-­grandmother can sit in the shade and watch them play in the pool. Does the matriarch who started her in all this realize where it has led?

“I think yes. She’s very quiet, but when I was there last I said, ‘Grandma, I just want you to know, I was voted in as new president of the Mo.’ I totally cried,” Arison says, tearing up even now. And what about her grandmother, who was never surprised that her kindred spirit ended up on this path? “She just chuckled.”

This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Town & Country, with the headline "Madame President." SUBSCRIBE NOW