In Memoriam: Wallis Annenberg (1939–2025)

We are saddened to notice the passing of longstanding LACMA trustee Wallis Annenberg this morning. A real luminary who eternally modified the face of Los Angeles along with her generosity and imaginative and prescient, she leaves a legacy that will likely be felt within the metropolis and county for generations to return.

Annenberg’s affect as a philanthropist is extensively identified and celebrated. As chair of the board, president, and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation, she reached hundreds of nonprofits by innumerable presents concentrated within the areas of the humanities, group, training, world points, and extra, largely in her adopted, longtime residence of Los Angeles. Last 12 months, she acquired the National Humanities Medal for serving to to rework and bolster the humanities and humanities in public life.

Her affect 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 spouse, Lenore, who collectively made a number of very important presents to the museum. Annenberg led the Annenberg Foundation in endowing the Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellowship, a two-year place providing rising curators skilled coaching at LACMA, which has since grow to be a cornerstone of our curatorial departments in addition to a significant launchpad for leaders and students within the arts. She and the Annenberg Foundation established the Director’s Endowment Fund to endow the directorship, proceeds of which proceed to help core museum applications together with particular exhibitions, artwork acquisitions, and artwork training actions.

Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, present of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin © 1925, 2013 Imogen Cunningham Trust

Annenberg additionally made a groundbreaking donation in help of images, enabling LACMA to amass the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. A bunch of greater than 3,500 prints that types one of many premier histories of images and collections of masterworks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it represents essentially the most important and precious present of images in our historical past. Highlights embrace works from images’s earliest years by pioneers resembling William Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron; European and American pictorialists and modernists together with Edward Weston; and main artists working in subsequent many years resembling Man Ray, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams, amongst quite a few others. With its exceptional breadth and depth, this assortment has allowed images to play an necessary position all through the museum ever since, serving as a basis for a number of exhibitions and attracting students and curators from around the globe. In 2008, LACMA’s images division was renamed the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department in her honor.

Edward Weston, Nude (Anita Brenner), 1925, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, present of The Annenberg Foundation, and promised present of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin, © 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Alongside her deep generosity to LACMA, Annenberg was the drive behind a bunch of different initiatives which have improved the lives of thousands and thousands of Angelenos—The Wallis Annenberg Community Beach House, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, amongst others—in addition to its animal residents, along with her championing of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the world’s largest wildlife hall that’s set to open subsequent 12 months.

“Wallis Annenberg blessed the Los Angeles community not only with her philanthropy,” stated 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.”