These Pictures Tell a Story

Institutions like the about-to-reopen Studio Museum in Harlem have benefited from Raymond J.McGuire and Crystal McCrary McGuire's championing of the arts. The couple's dedication is apparent inside their home as well.

- TANISHA C. FORD

It’s almost too cute. Two decades ago Crystal McCrary McGuire was just beginning to seriously acquire art when Joan, an abstract figurative painting by Norman Lewis, became available. “I bid, and I lost,” McCrary McGuire says now. “Years later, when Ray and I started dating, I saw that piece in his home. We'd gone after the same piece, and he wound up with it. I guess we ended up having it together anyway.”

It’s not the only notable piece shared by McCrary McGuire, an author and filmmaker, and her husband Raymond J. McGuire, president of Lazard, a global asset management and financial advisory firm, and former New York City mayoral candidate. As I walk into the couple’s home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner and an Elizabeth Catlett sculpture greet me in the foyer. I've entered rarefied air, and it’s not just from the Maison Margiela candle burning beside Catlett's Reclining Woman. Ray guides me into the stately living room as we wait for Crystal to join us. Works by Lewis, Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, and others line the walls, arranged as if in conversation with one another. I enter the room tentatively, afraid that my rain-soaked loafers might leave stains on the ivory rug. “Relax,” Ray tells me as I settle on a plush cream sofa. It is an invitation to simply live with the art as they do.

Living with art is something the couple do outside their home, as well. Crystal, a former entertainment lawyer, serves on the board of trustees at the Paley Center for Media and is the coauthor of several books, including the novel Gotham Diaries and Inspiration: Profiles of Black Women Changing Our World. She also reportedly inspired the character Lisa Todd Wexley on And Just Like That..., the Sex and the City sequel. (McCrary McGuire declined to discuss the series, but in 2023 she said to