The Aardt Foundation is a nonprofit foundation operating out of a former industrial warehouse in Birmingham, Alabama. The Foundation maintains a highly diverse art collection accessible both onsite and online for education, research, exhibitions and programming.
The Aardt Foundation’s collection encompasses works dating from the early Renaissance to the present, reflecting a broad spectrum of distinct cultures and forms of expression, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, book-making, decorative arts, and new media.
The Foundation supports partnerships with cultural institutions, students, artists, educators, and curators to cultivate an appreciation and understanding of artistic and literary expression. These activities include hosting visits to and didactic engagement with the Foundation’s art collection. The collection is also accessible through an interactive website, which includes detailed descriptions of the works themselves along with essays, scholarly analysis, and artist interviews.
The Foundation has its genesis in the collection of its founder, Michael Straus, which began with an unsigned Picasso lithograph he bought for $25 when he was 13. Initially centered on drawings (which are still a significant portion), the collection has expanded both as to time periods and media and now includes painting, sculpture, installations and other varied forms of expression. In addition to maintaining information about the works themselves, Dr. Straus — who holds graduate degrees in law, classics and theology — has been actively involved in writing and researching their art historical contexts. In that connection, he has written reviews of exhibitions, been involved in court cases on the part of artist foundations concerning the scope of artists’ freedoms, and published interviews with a number of artists in the collection. Many of these are available now via links in the Interviews & Articles section as well as in the “more information” entries for given works in the Collection.
