This post was originally published on artnews.com
Richard Kramlich, a Bay Area venture capitalist who used his wealth to amass one of the most significant collections of video art worldwide, died on February 1 at 89. His death was announced by the firm that he founded, New Enterprise Associates, which did not specify a cause.
With his wife Pamela, Kramlich repeatedly ranked on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, appearing each year between 1999 and 2011. Together, they bought a wide array of ambitious videos, films, and photographs, many of which were shown in a San Francisco house designed especially for the technically complex art they owned by the starchitect firm Herzog & de Meuron.
They did not shy away from difficult subject matter. At their house, they exhibited works such as Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990), a video installation that considers how the media disseminated images of a famed 1989 series of protests in China. They acquired the entirety of Joan Jonas’s 2015 US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, as well as a Richard Mosse video about upheaval in the Democratic Republic of Congo that showed at the 2013 Irish Pavilion.
Together, the Kramlichs showed that money accrued from venture capital was not fundamentally incompatible with adventurous art-making, inspiring many others to follow in their wake. “Art and venture capital are both about judgment, style, the message, and moving a cause forward,” Richard told ARTnews in 2016.
Richard “Dick” Kramlich was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1935. His father ran a grocery store chain, and his mother was an aeronautical engineer. He attended Northwestern University as an undergraduate and attended Harvard University as a graduate student.
Having begun as an investor in Boston, he moved to California, where he launched the firm Arthur Rock & Co. in 1969. Then, in 1977, with Chuck Newhall and Frank Bonsal, he formed New Enterprise Associates, a firm that is now believed to control around $25 billion in assets. Kramlich did all this when venture capital was not yet an established career path; he helped ensure that it would become one. His early investments included one in Apple Computers, which was then not the technology giant that it is today.
Pamela, whom Richard married in 1981, was the initial driving force behind the couple’s collecting. In 1987, she saw The Way Things Go, a famed film by the Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss in which tires, chairs, tables, and other objects are used to set off a chain reaction that runs nearly 30 minutes, and decided to try her hand at purchasing it. Realizing it only cost $350 to own a videotape of the piece, she bought it from Sonnabend Gallery in New York, kickstarting a passion that would remain with the couple for decades.
Their collection currently includes works by a spread of artists, from Nan Goldin to Bruce Nauman, from Ai Weiwei to Robert Mapplethorpe, from Cheng Ran to Ryan Trecartin.
Recognizing that they were collecting a kind of art that most major institutions had yet to fully explore, the Kramlichs created the New Art Trust, which they ran in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Pamela is currently a trustee. The fund continues to help these institutions add video art to their holdings. The Kramlichs would also pave the way for other major collectors who focused on this medium like Julia Stoschek in Germany and Vincent Worms through his Kadist Collection, which operates in Paris and San Francisco.
Collectors are not always known for stewarding the art they own in the same way that an institution might, but the Kramlichs cared so deeply about the work they bought that they constructed a house with museum-like conditions. Of their home, Chrissie Iles, a Whitney Museum curator who has frequently worked with moving-image art, once told the New York Times, “What makes Pam and Dick’s house and collection unique is the way they integrated it.”
That Times piece labeled their home “the ultimate video art retreat.”