The High Life

Yasumasa Morimura Damien Hirst Paul McCarthy Andy Warhol Jake and Dinos Chapman Roy Lichtenstein Glenn Ligon Frank Stella

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Nancy, born and raised in New York City, possesses a Manhattanite’s urbanity. Her father was the late Jack Parker, who founded the company that owns Le Parker Meridien hotel, in New York, and the Parker Palm Springs, in California, among other real estate (and which is now run by her son from her second marriage, Adam Glick). Despite the decades she’s spent collecting, art was not part of her upbringing. "My parents were interested in golf, period," she says, adding that it was when she was living in New York with her first husband, Michael Gross, a civil rights attorney who grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in New Jersey, that she developed what became her lifelong passion. "Every weekend we would go to the Museum of Modern Art, and I fell in love with the act of looking at art, the quiet, the peace it brought me."

Nancy met Bob, her third husband, through mutual friends in the early 1970s, when they were both recently divorced and living in Miami with two children each. Bob, a tall, unassuming man who leaves most of the collecting decisions to Nancy, grew up in Miami Beach. His sportsmanship is on proud display in his home office, where a poster commemorating his record-setting victory in a 1974 powerboat race from Miami to New York is tacked up beside a cluster of trophies from similar competitions. As for art, once Nancy started "dragging him to museums, he got the bug too," she says.

It was upon her move to Miami that Nancy established herself as a serious collector. She worked there for the dealer Dorothy Blau, who is now in her 80s and still runs a gallery in Bal Harbour, Florida. Blau, says Nancy, "loved Andy Warhol long before anyone had heard of him," and in 1979, the artist came to the gallery to create several commissioned portraits, including one of Nancy that today graces a small sitting area in the master bedroom. "He said to me, ‘What color background do you want?’ " she recalls. "And I said red and purple, so I got blue and green." Warhol charged her $25,000 for the pair, and Nancy notes that one of the women who had her portraits done at the same time just sold them for $800,000.

While at Blau’s gallery, Nancy became involved with the Miami Art Museum and befriended one of its curators, Louis Grachos, who is now the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York. Grachos inspired her to rethink her collecting strategy, which to that point had favored established postwar artists such as Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella and Warhol. "One of the trips we took was to the Rubell Family Collection, and it just blew me away. From that point on, I made up my mind to just collect young artists," says Nancy, who still owns a few of her first acquisitions, including Roy Lichtenstein’s Mirror, 1970. A gift from her father, the work hangs to the left of the fireplace, beside a Damien Hirst butterfly painting.

Many of Nancy’s pieces are showcased in the house’s large, airy ground floor and the exposed second-floor atrium overlooking it, where they are shielded somewhat from the sunlight pouring in through the enormous windows that frame the downstairs. One of the most eye-catching works in the upstairs space is Yasumasa Morimura’s Futago, 1988-90, a photographic reconstruction of Manet’s Olympia in which the Japanese artist poses as both the nude odalisque and her black handmaid.

The furniture throughout the white-walled house is minimal, but some pieces are as collectible as the art. Among these are examples by such important 1940s French figures as Serge Mouille, Jean Prouvé and Jean Royére, including, in the kitchen, Prouvé chairs that came from an old schoolhouse, which the couple bought from the New York dealer Cristina Grajales.

When the Magoons decided to live-full time in Colorado, 18 years ago, they hired the Aspen architect Stan Mathis to build over the small, Western-style bungalow that had been their vacation home. "We love to entertain and to live with art, and we wanted to take advantage of the views, which are spectacular," says Nancy. "Stan listened to us — the design is about us and not him."

The couple’s hosting commitments encompass functions both for family and on behalf of the Aspen museum, to which they have strong ties. Nancy is close to Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, the institution’s director and chief curator, who has exposed her to such emerging artists as Pawel Althamer and Simon Evans. And the Magoons are on the committee for the museum’s annual summer artCRUSH benefit, which is sponsored by Sotheby’s. The couple has made purchases through the event’s charity auction and also enjoy making the rounds at art fairs, such as Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, where they frequent the booths of New York dealers like Andrea Rosen and Barbara Gladstone. It was Gladstone who beckoned Nancy into her gallery 15 years ago and introduced her to the work of the then-unknown Matthew Barney; Nancy purchased the artist’s rare early drawing Envelopa, Drawing Restraint 7, Achilles, 1992, for $5,000.