[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/MarciaVilcek_VilcekFoundation.jpeg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tMarica Vilcek, an art historian who, with her husband Jan, cofounded the grant-making Vilcek Foundation, died on Monday in New York. She was 89, according to the foundation, which said she died peacefully at her home.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Vilcek Foundation is an unusual one, since it funds endeavors in both art history and biomedical science, the respective fields of Marica and Jan. Just like the foundation\u2019s creators, both of whom moved from Czechoslovakia to the US, many of the grantees were immigrants\u2014a purposeful choice on the part of the organization, whose mission statement mentions that its activities are meant to raise \u201cawareness of immigrant contributions in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tCountless artists and art historians have benefited from these prizes, whose unrestricted cash purses vary in size. Carmen C. Bambach, the Chilean-born curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s soon-to-open Raphael retrospective, received a $100,000 prize in 2019, and Guadalupe Maravilla, a Salvadorian-born artist who will appear in this year\u2019s Venice Biennale, received a $100,000 one in 2025.<\/p>\n
\n\tAlso among the winners of the foundation\u2019s largesse are artists Iman Issa, Nari Ward, Felipe Baeza, and Meleko Mokgosi; Pierre Terjanian, the current director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Matthew Bogdanos, whose work for the Manhattan District Attorney\u2019s office has led to the return of many looted artworks previously held within the US.<\/p>\n
\n\tVilcek said the decision to form the foundation in 2000 came easily. \u201cJan and I came to realize that our greatest pleasure in life had always been in helping others,\u201d she recalled in a memoir published earlier this year. \u201cWhether I was helping curators with art-historical research, assisting newly arrived immigrants with adjusting to life in America, or encouraging my interns to discover the joy of museum work, I had always felt best when aiding, sharing, and mentoring\u2026 So we discussed starting a foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tShe was born in 1936 in Bratislava, in what was then Czechoslovakia, and studied art history in both her birth city and Prague. After graduating from Charles University, she started at the Slovak National Gallery, working in the prints and drawings department.<\/p>\n
\n\tThrough a friend, Marica met Jan on Easter in 1961; the encounter did not leave a lasting mark, but when he met her again at the Slovak National Gallery, they became closer. The year afterward, they married.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1964, while at a performance of Mozart\u2019s opera The Magic Flute<\/em> in Vienna, the two decided to defect from Communist Czechoslovakia and promptly left for West Germany, where they received US visas awarded to political refugees. \u201cWe left illegally,\u201d Marica told Metropolis<\/em>. \u201cWe didn\u2019t tell my father because the secret police would visit him and it was better for him not to know.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTheir actions meant that they could never come back, because if they did, both would face incarceration\u2014they had received prison sentences in absentia. Their families also suffered greatly, with Marica\u2019s brother subsequently sent to work in the salt mines. \u201cThat\u2019s how Communism worked\u2014they took it out\u00a0on your family,\u201d Marica said.<\/p>\n \n\tIn 1965, the Vilceks came to New York, where Jan set up a lab at New York University. Marica, who was able to speak multiple languages, took a role at the Met, working in the department of accessions and catalogs. She stayed on at the museum for 32 years, telling Metropolis<\/em> that her coworkers helped her feel at home in a country where she was not born. \u201cThe museum was a tight-knit place and I never considered myself an immigrant or a refugee,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the museum, it didn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn the coming decades, she served as a consultant to the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Jordan National Gallery in Amman. She also supported NYU\u2019s Institute of Fine Arts, joining its board in 2013 and, with Jan, underwriting a curatorial program there in 2018.<\/p>\n \n\tSince 2021, the IFA\u2019s Great Hall has been named after Marica. At the time, NYU president Andrew Hall said of her, \u201cMarica has steadfastly supported the Institute\u2019s mission: excellence in scholarship, and development of the next generation of leadership in art history and curation, archaeology, and conservatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/marica-vilcek-art-historian-foundation-dead-1234779015\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/MarciaVilcek_VilcekFoundation.jpeg?w=1024″] Marica Vilcek, an art historian who, with her husband Jan, cofounded the grant-making Vilcek Foundation, died on Monday in New York. She was 89, according to the foundation, which said she died peacefully at her home. The Vilcek Foundation is an unusual one, since it funds endeavors in both art history and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1849342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1849342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1849342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1849342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1849342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}