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A Corporate Art Collection That's Aimed at Outrage and Enjoyment Progressive's modern pieces are sometimes controversial, and that's just fine with the insurance giant's curator
Lewis, curator of the company's art collection, refused. Instead, she spent a week standing in front of the work, defending it to any employee who stopped to discuss it. Eventually, the artist came to talk to employees. Portrait of an embattled curator about to get her pink slip? Hardly. Far from condemning Lewis for putting up a work that offended many employees, Progressive CEO Peter B. Lewis applauded her for a job well done. "I love it when that happens," he says. "People learn from this. I wish it would happen more often." In the world of contemporary art, the Progressive collection is the stuff of legend. It comprises edgy works by young artists and is designed to surprise, please, and provoke employees. "What I don't want is art that has 'the wallpaper effect,'" Toby Lewis says. "This is a challenging collection." BEST OF ITS KIND. It's also massive. Progressive now owns some 4,600 works, nearly all of them bought by Lewis, and is adding hundreds more per year. Little-known outside the art world, Progressive's is "arguably the best corporate collection of contemporary art in the U.S.," contends Jill Snyder, executive director of the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. Adds New York money manager Arthur Goldberg, a top collector of contemporary art: "It's a terrific collection. It deserves to be a lot more famous than it is." The collection is unusual in several respects. For one, Toby Lewis is CEO Peter Lewis' ex-wife. The two were divorced amicably in 1981 and remain good friends. Since 1985, when Toby Lewis became curator, the company has given her almost total freedom to buy whatever art she thinks is good. Moreover, the collection has been built on a shoestring in art-world terms. Toby Lewis shares a modest office with her three employees. And Peter Lewis says the total investment so far is about $10 million (the collection is probably valued at several times that), while the annual acquisitions budget is only about $500,000. That's what a company collecting well-known living artists might pay for a small handful of paintings.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN. Art is everywhere in the public spaces of the company's sprawling headquarters, as well as in about 200 of the company's 350 branch offices around the country. Employees have the right to have a work of their own choosing in their office. Jan Dolohanty in the tax department chose Cerealism with Bowl, a colorful, childlike work by Rodney Alan Greenblat, because she loved another work called The Faithful Paperboy by the same artist in the hallway near her office. But in the public spaces, Lewis alone has control over what works hangs where. "I've never moved a work because someone has complained about it," she says. "I don't expect everyone to love the art. But if they talk about it, and talk about ideas because of it, it's doing its job." The Bang controversy shows that philosophy in action. Marshall was invited to come and discuss his work. He gave a spirited defense to dozens of upset, mainly black employees, many of whom didn't know that he is African American. Among other things, he challenged the employees to examine their own prejudices toward dark-skinned blacks like the ones in his work. When he left, Lewis recalls, "I would say they didn't like the piece any more than they did [before]. But they loved the fact that they got to meet the artist. We had many requests afterwards: When can we bring another artist in so we can meet him?" The Marshall affair was typical in another respect. Lewis first bought the painter's work in the mid-1990s. Since then, prices of his paintings have shot up. Bang, which probably cost under $10,000 (Lewis won't say exactly), is now worth at least $50,000, according to collectors.
Lewis has a good sense for buying art just before it starts to become hot among the cognoscenti. For instance, nearly 20 of the artists she has bought were recently chosen to appear in next year's prestigious and often-controversial Whitney Biennial show at the Whitney Museum in New York. That's more than one-fifth of the total chosen.
Not all Progressive's featured works are serious. One of Kay Rosen's paintings has the following sentence written twice: "Tom Can Cha." The idea, Rosen says, is to illustrate teamwork. "Tom can cha, but he can't cha cha without the other cha," she explains. Another work, America's Most Wanting, a 1993 painting by Carter Kustera, features silhouettes of characters from daytime TV with labels such as "Bob is Normal" and "Warren: He isn't religious but he loves Christmas bonuses." One of Lewis' innovations is to let artists create installations in the headquarter's huge atrium spaces. These, too, are often quirky and fun. One, by New York artist Beverly Semmes, is four dresses hanging on the wall. The dresses are about a yard wide and several stories long. The winning entry -- chosen by Semmes -- in an employee contest to name the work: Rhonda Lavonda Yolanda Chiffonda. Another work, Rise, by James Hyde, is huge, frescoed styrofoam blocks attached to an 80-foot wall. ANYTHING GOES. Lewis says she doesn't like religious and political themes, but she doesn't shy away from much of anything. As she and I were touring the collection, we came across a work called Grey Moses by Andres Serrano in Progressive's policy-services department. "What is this made with?" I asked slyly, noting the artist's rep for using his own blood and urine. "Well, it was certainly done in liquid," Lewis responded diplomatically. "We don't know what kind." Another work, by Doris Salcedo, a young Colombian artist, consists of shoes in recesses in the wall covered by a cow bladder. The shoes belonged to a woman who disappeared and presumably was murdered.
As long as Peter Lewis is around, however, the collection is likely to keep growing and remain provocative. His ideal is "art that would start a fight in a bar." He likes to tell the story of how, in 1974, with the Vietnam War winding down, the company bought a series of Andy Warhol portraits of Mao Tse Tung and hung them up at headquarters. Nearly all of the company's 324 employees at the time demanded that the art be removed. The only employee who admitted liking the works, he recalls, was a janitor, an avowed Communist. Yet Peter Lewis refused to take them down. What he likes best about the story is its kicker. Gradually, the Warhols became classics. One set of the Mao prints now hangs in his office, another in Progressive's boardroom. "No one bats an eye at them now," he says. The lesson? As controversial art becomes familiar, it becomes acceptable. And for the Lewises, that's just another incentive to keep buying new works on the cutting edge. By Thane Peterson in Cleveland
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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