Ohio-Natives Ron and Ann Pizzuti collection requires a warehouse

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Ron and Ann Pizzuti with Marina Abramovic’s “Artist Portrait With a Candle (C),” left, and “Artist Portrait with a Candle (B).” At bottom left is Sofie Lachaert’s “Shunga Candleholder” atop Ron Arad’s “Paved With Good Intentions Table 44.”CreditMarina Abramovic and Sean Kelly Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Sofie Lachaert, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

“Without Frank Stella, we wouldn’t be collecting art,” said Ron Pizzuti, who fell in love with a small Stella painting in Paris in the early 1970s but couldn’t imagine spending $10,000 on an artwork. The Ohio native, then working in retail, got his initiation buying a Karel Appel print for $900 on installment in 1974 from a gallery closer to home, in Columbus. After he founded the Pizzuti Companies, a real estate and development concern, in 1976, he soon found he could buy Stella as well as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly. Numbering some 2,400 pieces, the collection is installed in their homes here; in Sarasota, Fla.; and in Columbus, also home of the Pizzuti Collection — an 18,000-square-foot, nonprofit public space with rotating exhibitions. [More]