Democracy's Medici - by Mary Anne Goley (Paperback)

About the Book

Democracy's Medici: The Federal Reserve and the Art of Collecting is a profile of the central bank seen from the perspective of the author's unorthodox art-historical career as founding director of the Fine Arts Program of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC.

Book Synopsis

Democracy's Medici: The Federal Reserve and the Art of Collecting is a profile of the central bank seen from the perspective of the author's unorthodox art-historical career as founding director of the Fine Arts Program of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC.

Review Quotes

Goley offers an insider's view of the Fed's institutional culture, the larger-than-life personalities she met, and the significance of the Fine Arts Program in this unique context.

Learn about one of America's great institutions and how a strong-minded, talented and independent woman worked to guide the policy of supervisors for what she believed to be the betterment of a wonderful and useful art program at the Fed.

Mary Anne Goley is a remarkable woman with a career to match. In Democracy's Medici she offers an insightful analysis of her leadership of the Federal Reserve Board's Fine Arts Program from 1975 to 2006. It is a must for those with interests in the politics of arts administration, collecting, and curation.

With a connoisseur's acumen, a diplomat's finesse, and a juggler's dexterity, Mary Anne Goley spent three decades assembling an art collection and organizing exhibitions at the Federal Reserve Board. In this fascinating account of her singular career, we meet the world's top bankers, European royalty, and art-world characters as colorful as the Fed's Frankenthaler painting.

About the Author

Mary Anne Goley was the founding director of the Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board (1975-2006). She led a fifteen-member advisory panel and liaisoned with Federal Reserve board members and the thirty-six system-wide bank presidents and their Directors advising on Board art policy.

Organizing over 110 exhibitions (many catalogue essays were authored by Goley), the strategy at the Federal Reserve complemented that of local museums as well as made contributions to the field. Beginning in 1988 Goley worked with central banks and museums in Austria, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. Scholarly contributions have included the exhibitions: The Hague School and Its American Legacy, Gerald Murphy, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, The Paintings of Eduard J. Steichen, Samuel Halpert, Austrian Biedermeier, Polish Constructivism, and The Influence of Velasquez on Modern Painting, The American Experience, among others. Two exhibitions resulted in foreign decorations from The Netherlands and Luxembourg. In 2006 she organized The Face of Contemporary Art in China and traveled an exhibition of the Board's collection to the European Central Bank.