Brood Awakening

Her wild child brothers may steal the spotlight, but allison brant has chosen galleries over gallivanting and in the process become her father’s heir apparent.

- Carol Vogel

Twelve years ago, when the newsprint magnate Peter M. Brant picked his daughter Allison to manage his fabled contemporary art collection, she never imagined she would find herself waking up in the middle of the night worrying about what would happen if the 20 live canaries escaped from one of the galleries, or if the flowers on the right leg of Jeff Koons’s 43-foot-tall Puppy could bloom in limited sunlight, or how the neighbors would react if they discovered that the monumental Paul McCarthy sculpture of Santa Claus installed on the front lawn was clutching not an ice cream cone but rather a giant sex toy.

“I started working for my father years before his foundation opened,” Brant recalls. “Back then I was dealing with loan requests from museums all over the world and issues such as conservation and storage.’’

It seemed like a big job at the time, but in 2009, when Peter opened the Brant Foundation Art Study Center—a 9,800-square foot space in Greenwich with sky-lit galleries, a video viewing room, and a library set in a renovated barn built in 1902 next to polo grounds—his daughter, who studied art history at Union College, found herself in charge of an arts destination that now attracts about 10,000 visitors a year.

“Allison has always been interested in the institutional side of the art world,” Peter says. “She has studied art history, is passionate about arts education, and is terrific working with the artists. She does all the real work. I just come in at the end.”