06-05-2022 Hall of Fame - Flipbook - Page 36
36 Baltimore Sun Media | Sunday, June 5, 2022
BALTIMORE SUN’S 2022
BUSINESS AND CIVIC HALL OF FAME HONOREE
CLAIR
ZAMOISKI SEGAL
P
eople who meet Clair Zamoiski Segal for the first time
might be surprised to learn of her needleworking hobby.
“I have tattoos all over my body,” the petite, 68-year-old
said during a chat at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where
she is concluding her seven-year tenure as chairwoman
of the board of trustees. “They’re tattoos of Jasper Johns’
art. My mother loved him so, and his work is very meaningful to me.”
Ms. Segal’s family, the Zamoiskis, has a long legacy
in Baltimore, founding the city’s first commercial radio
station and giving generously to landmark institutions. Ms. Segal, too, has made
an indelible mark.
“She is an incredibly bold leader,” said Christopher Bedford, the outgoing director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. “She knows Baltimore like the back of her
hand. She has extraordinary values and great bravery, and I met her at exactly
the right time.”
In just six years, Mr. Bedford and
Ms. Segal transformed the BMA,
determined to make the institution reflect the majority-Black city
in which it is located. Many of their
projects made national headlines.
Some — such as an ultimately futile
attempt to sell three masterpieces to
raise $65 million for diversity initiatives — were controversial.
But it was Ms. Segal who came
up with the idea for one of the
BMA’s most acclaimed policies:
During 2020, which marked the
100th anniversary of the passage of
the 19th amendment, banning the
denial of voting rights based on a
person’s sex, the museum acquired
and exhibited only work that
either was created by or focused on
women.
That wasn’t the original plan,
however.
When Ms. Segal saw the BMA’s
initial exhibition list for 2020,
she expressed her reservations
with typical candor: “I said, ‘Over
my dead body are we not putting
together a program that honors
women in 2020,’ ” she recalled.
Mr. Bedford didn’t put up much
of a fight.
And Ms. Segal says now that the
past six years have been the most
rewarding of her philanthropic
career.
“Sometimes, you meet someone and you’re on the same wavelength and you know you’re going
to do wonderful things together,”
she said.
Ms. Segal says things like that a
lot, and about very different people.
Among them: former Baltimore
mayor Kurt Schmoke, for whom
she headed up the Mayor’s Advisory Council for Art and Culture
(MACAC) for 15 years; Michael
Ross, the influential former managing director of Baltimore Center
Stage; and Leslie Shephard, the
charismatic former director of
Baltimore School for the Arts.
When Ms. Segal was at MACAC,
the Artscape budget grew from
$500,000 to $800,000 in 2001,
when it featured 1,000 artists and
attracted 1.5 million visitors, she
said. Until it was shuttered by the
pandemic, Artscape was the world’s
largest free outdoor arts festival.
But Ms. Segal is just as willing to
lend her expertise to small, deserving projects.
In 2019, Jeffrey Kent, chief curator of The Peale Museum, was
trying to raise $5,000 to mount an
exhibit featuring Devin Allen, the
Baltimore photographer whose
shot of the 2015 protests following Freddie Gray’s death made the
cover of “Time” magazine.
The fundraising wasn’t going
well and Mr. Kent asked Ms. Segal
for advice.
“Clair basically mentored me,”
Mr. Kent recalled. “She told me not
to ask for too much. She told me
to match the donor to the project
and to not just call people because
I know they had resources. Under
her tutelage, I had a successful
campaign and we had a successful
exhibit.”
Ms. Segal said her love for the arts
and humanitarian convictions were
instilled in her by her powerhouse
mother, Ellen Zamoiski.
“She was a feminist and she cared
about social justice,” Ms. Segal said.
“I followed in her footsteps.”
Ms. Segal was 8-years-old when
she attended a 1961 Van Gogh
exhibit at the BMA that included
a small painting of a worn pair of
boots. It changed her life.
“The painting was very small
and the boots were very plain, and
I couldn’t get over them,” she said.
“I kept trying to understand what
was so important about them. I had
to come back to the museum every
other day to see those boots.”
After college, she worked for a
year as a curatorial fellow at New
York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum. Though she considered
a career as a curator, she realized
her best talents pointed in a different direction.
“I like putting the pieces of the
puzzle together,” she said. “That’s
where I can make a difference.
I’m old enough by now to know
where all the bodies in Baltimore
are buried — who on this vast list of
people I can go after for a donation
because I know them and they will
not say ‘no’ to me.”
There are people — and institutions — that Ms. Segal has trouble
saying “no” to herself. Earlier this
year, the BMA announced that Ms.
Segal has promised 60 artworks by
Jasper Johns and 47 prints by the
photographer Harry Callahan to the
museum after her death.
“Everything I own is a bequest
to the museum,” she said. “It’s the
right thing to do.”
“She is an incredibly
bold leader. She knows
Baltimore like the
back of her hand.
She has extraordinary
values and great
bravery, and I met her
at exactly the right time.”
— Christopher Bedford,
the outgoing director of the
Baltimore Museum of Art
AT A GLANCE
Age: 68
Hometown: Baltimore
Current residence: Baltimore
Education: The University of
Pennsylvania, joint bachelor’s
and master’s degree; New York
University doctoral coursework.
Career highlights: Executive
director, the Mayor’s Advisory
Council on Art and Culture; founder
of Clair Zamoiski Segal LLC, a
fundraising and consulting firm for
non-profit arts groups.
Civic and charitable activities:
Presently chairwoman of the Board
of Trustees, Baltimore Museum of
Art. She’s also is a member of the
boards of The Associated: Jewish
Community Federation of Baltimore
and the The Baltimore School for
the Arts; and a member of the
Nursing Advisory Council of the Johns
Hopkins University School of Nursing.
Family: Widowed, no children.