We’re sitting together at Joy Cafe in the Spring Garden neighborhood with birds chirping, the condenser unit hums and bits of conversations from other diners drift by. We drink pressed juice and smoothies and talk about ArtPhilly, her organization focused on amplifying artistic voices in the city, and its latest endeavor, a biennial titled “What Now: 2026.” While the citywide multidisciplinary festival’s theme investigates the 250th anniversary of the founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the double entendre shows Sachs pivoting to build a festival that invests in the Philadelphia arts ecosystem.
At a very young age, she sang, which inspired in her a lifelong love of art and culture. When it was time for her to go to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a degree, she thought she would be a music or math major, but she switched her major after encountering art history. Something clicked, she tells Observer—the memorizing of dates and charting of important moments through history just made sense. That newly discovered passion carried her through her studies; she met her late husband, Keith L. Sachs before graduating in 1969. Post-grad, she became a docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she would go on to work for more than 40 years. When she rejoined the museum after having kids, she became a curator in the European Paintings Department, where she put together an exhibition on Paul Cézanne, on whom she had written her college thesis. In 1988, her husband became a trustee at the institution.
The couple’s involvement with the museum changed her outlook on the public dialogue art can spark and on the impulse to share art experiences with others. “For an artist we owned, we would always lend to any exhibition if it was requested, because we felt that’s our responsibility. Sharing it meant a lot, but sharing it with people who also cared meant the most,” she says. The couple began collecting in 1980, initially focusing on works by artists who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, Sachs is quite modest about her art collection, casually dropping that she donated an Anselm Kiefer to the museum. For her, collecting is not about wealth-building or even prestige; what drives her as a collector is the importance of acquiring work by artists of her generation and otherwise supporting people. In 2013, she and Keith gifted $70 million worth of their collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which subsequently renamed the contemporary art wing after them. As for the rest of the collection, she plans to bequeath it to the museum posthumously.
When Keith died unexpectedly in 2018, she took a role on the board. She describes losing a life partner like in Pixar’s Up, where the protagonist’s wife gives him a book before she passes. For most of the movie, he can’t bring himself open it because it causes him grief, but at the end, when he opens it, he finds blank pages waiting to be filled by him. Two years after her husband died, COVID hit, and Sachs decided that she was ready to usher in a new phase of her life. “That’s where I am—I’m filling up the blank pages,” she explains, alluding to her decision to found ArtPhilly.
“I’ve spent my whole career at the museum, and now I’ve come off the hill and met amazing people. It’s been fabulous,” she adds when asked what building the festival has been like. Initially, she assembled a team whom she met with weekly: Bill Adair, John McInerney and Thom Collins. They talked about how Sachs was disappointed in the bicentennial in 1976 and wanted to do better. When she approached the 250th anniversary team, they initially offered to put her on an arts committee, but, according to her, they also made it clear that art would be an afterthought in the celebration. That’s when she decided to create something on her own. “Philadelphia is not a kid brother to any other city. Philly is a world-class city on its own,” she asserts. The original team of four expanded to include seven art executives from institutions across Philadelphia; they met six times and together built a list of more than 80 artists that was then winnowed down to 17 artists who’d create 45 projects.
They looked at several biennial models while creating what would become ArtPhilly. One example that was similar in scale Art and Design Chicago, sponsored by the Terra Foundation. The founders of that initiative invested $5 million and made $30 million—a six-to-one economic boost to the city, especially on the South Side. More important to Sachs, however, was the demonstrated cultural investment in a neighborhood that has long been neglected. She views art as an essential vehicle for wellness and public good as much as an economic driver.
The 2026 theme, “What Now,” emerged out of conversations among the four members of the original team. At a moment when people are both reckoning with and commemorating the Declaration of Independence, a resounding question emerged: Who are we? American identity has always existed in relation to its mythmaking, and the world has also drastically changed. At this point in our conversation, Sachs hands me a pen from the Haverford College exhibition “Bicentennial City” (2020), which considered the fraught 1976 bicentennial celebration. On it is a quote by Leonard Cohen that guided their early thinking of the show: “There is a crack in everything, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Sachs sees this moment 50 years later as a rupture for artists’ luminosity to shine through.
Legacy is at the forefront of Sachs’ life. Major art collectors amass objects quietly over the course of their lives or create large named collections like the Guggenheim Museum, Glenstone and the Menil Collection. Sachs says she was not particularly interested in that type of legacy but more so in a legacy built by tending relationships in real time. With ArtPhilly, she has taken on the role of collector-convenor, thereby putting community first. She responds with urgency to contemporary artists around her, rather than simply passively acquiring new works. “Artists are our guiding light, and they are the best interpreters of any moment in time,” she says. “And how much do we need them right now? But artists also have the ability to not only make us aware of where we are, but they also give us hope, and they’re the light.”
More art collector interviews