As I drove along the I-10 West from Santa Fe to Los Angeles in August 2000, I wondered what the future might hold. I had just been hired as the curator of visual arts at the Autry, then a young museum with a small but impressive collection of historic Western American art. While eager to work with examples by some of the best-known artists of the frontier era, I was also uncertain. How to build a collection that transcended the West as a historical moment? How might the Autry, from its origins as a Western heritage museum, become a destination for art within a city already brimming with world-class institutions? 

Answers to these questions have taken many forms over the years, but few have been as transformational as the generosity of Calvin and Marilyn Gross. Approximately three years into my tenure, I was introduced to the Grosses by then-director John Gray. Already donors, the Grosses suggested purchasing promised gifts to build the collection, acquiring paintings by Olaf Weighorst, Hanson Puthuff, and William Shepherd. They became enthusiastic patrons of the Autry’s Gold Spur Collector’s Committee events, in which curators would present desired acquisitions and attendees would cast votes, often drumming up such enthusiasm that multiple works were added to the collection. In this way, the Grosses also purchased several sculptures by the New Mexican santero Luis Tapia and, separately, an important example by famed Taos painter Oscar Berninghaus. 

Over the years, their generosity has manifested in many other ways. In 2007, Calvin joined the Board of Trustees and became an ardent supporter of the Autry’s annual fundraiser, Masters of the American West, serving as co-chair alongside fellow trustee John Geraghty. He also served on the museum’s executive board while chairing both the Visitor Experience Committee and the Development Committee. And in 2015, he was part of a visionary group of trustees and patrons that joined together to support the acquisition of the estate of the iconic Maidu painter, Harry Fonseca. 

On a personal level, Calvin and Marilyn have also significantly impacted my life and career. In 2006, shortly after opening my first major Autry exhibition, I decided to pursue a lifelong dream of obtaining a PhD and enrolled in the Visual Studies program at the University of California Irvine. Not only did Calvin and Marilyn support my choice, but they endowed my position, allowing me to focus on my studies while maintaining my role as the Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Arts. I will never forget how they sat alongside my parents a few years later, beaming with pride as my advisor lifted the doctoral hood over my head. Thanks in part to this achievement, in 2019, I was promoted to executive vice president of research and interpretation, a position I currently hold alongside the curatorial post that bears the Grosses’ name. 

Calvin and Marilyn’s passion for the Autry is, in many ways, a reflection of their personal journey, which begins long before they arrived at the museum’s doors. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, Calvin’s father worked in Boston as a distributor for Monogram Pictures Corporation (later transitioned into Allied Artists Pictures Corporation), which produced B movies starring figures like John Wayne, Bela Lugosi, Tex Ritter, and Buck Jones. Captivated by the mythic West portrayed in the films he sold, his father would regale his son with stories of frontier adventure. When Calvin was seven, however, tragedy struck when both his parents (along with Jones) were killed in Boston’s 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, which remains the deadliest nightclub fire in US history. 

Raised by his paternal grandmother, Calvin attended Harvard University, where he majored in political science before joining the military as a communications instructor. He was soon stationed at a training facility near Barstow, California, and spending weekends in Los Angeles. In May of 1959, he met Marilyn Barbara Lazarus at a folk music party at UCLA; by the end of the year, they were married. Like Calvin, Marilyn had been raised in the East, in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, she moved with her family to Caracas, Venezuela, where her father was a representative for Nabisco, before returning to the United States in 1954, where she graduated from the University of Miami in Florida. Soon thereafter she moved to Los Angeles, met Calvin, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Thus began a sixty-five-year partnership that would embrace and support a wide range of philanthropic causes, artists and museums chief among them. One of their first connections was with the astronaut-turned-artist Ed Dwight, who they met in a Scottsdale gallery early in his artistic career. Charmed by the man and his work, which includes bronze sculptures of jazz musicians, buffalo soldiers, and rodeo riders, they formed a relationship that would last for decades, with Calvin and Marilyn donating works to major institutions, including the Smithsonian, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the California African American Museum, and the Autry. In 1986, Calvin retired from EZ Storage (which he co-founded in 1974). That year, Marilyn also began volunteering at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, cycling through different departments before ending up in decorative arts, where she stayed until 2021, becoming LACMA’s longest-serving volunteer. Throughout, Calvin has also supported scholarship programs at both Harvard and UCLA. Together with his high school friend (and former presidential candidate) Michael Dukakis, Calvin established a fellowship endowment at Harvard Kennedy School that sends master’s students to work in governors’ offices across the country, where they generate non-partisan solutions to specific administrative problems, and, more recently, a scholarship program through the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. They also continue their work at the Autry, where, in recent years, they have launched a trustee giving challenge with the lead gift; endowed the Autry’s top position, the Calvin and Marilyn Gross President and CEO; supported the naming of the art storage room at the museum’s resources center and the rededication of the Autry’s primary gallery for rotating exhibitions. 

Calvin and Marilyn have been instrumental in the evolution of the Autry from its historical roots to a nationally recognized destination known for important collections and groundbreaking exhibitions. It is an honor to know them, and we at the Autry are forever grateful. 

Amy Scott, PhD

Vice President of Research and Interpretation

Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Arts