Sherry Mallin, Collector Who Built a Sculpture Park in Her Backyard, Dies at 89

Sherry Mallin, who, with her husband Joel, amassed a significant collection of art that landed them on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list for more than a decade, has died at 89.

The Mallins appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year between 2003 and 2014. Works from their collection were notably shown at their home in Pound Ridge, New York, which was put on the market last year for $3.4 million.

The property, known as Buckhorn, contains a sculpture park that features site-specific works, from a Richard Serra commission to an Andy Goldsworthy piece resembling a tree embedded in a stone wall. “We are not supposed to rebuild the wall because you have to have faith that future generations will lay their wall on top of our wall, as we’ve laid ours on top of the past,” Sherry told ARTnews in 2014.

Sherry and Joel met at Bronx High School of Science when they were 14 and were later classmates at Cornell University. Their first relationship ended well before they started it up again during the 1980s.

Joel had begun collecting art solo, buying German Expressionist prints at first and expanding from there. But Sherry, who had been a dancer under the famed choreographer Martha Graham, had no such art experience and leaned on Joel to point the way forward at first.

Together, they would go on to buy a variety of works, from pieces by blue-chips artists with well-established reputations to sculptures by young artists on the rise. Their first major purchase together was a Donald Judd “Stack” sculpture; later acquisitions included works by Huma Bhabha, Robert Gober, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Do Ho Suh, Chuck Close, Yayoi Kusama, and many more.

Their buying behavior would prove prescient. They once purchased a Damien Hirst work resembling a large medicine cabinet for around £1 million. When they sold it at Christie’s in 2007, it went for more than £9 million, setting a record at the time for the Young British Artist.

In the past couple years, the Mallins have begun to sell art from their holdings. Some 1,000 works worth $50 million in total have headed to auction at Sotheby’s.

Meanwhile, they have periodically gifted works to important museums as well. In 2011, they gifted a von Rydingsvard sculpture to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and last year, they gave the Brooklyn Museum a Liza Lou sculpture resembling a full-size trailer whose inside is ornately beaded.

On Instagram, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak called Sherry a “lover of art, friend to artists, and truly good human.”

Sherry seemed to regard her collecting as an educational experience. “We learned a lot about ourselves and our life through what art we have picked,” she said in an interview with Sotheby’s last year.