After Pat Johanson gave her talk at the Curiosity Forum, I walked her to her car.

She had come with almost nothing. A computer bag, a fanny pack, and the clothes she was wearing. She told me this was how she traveled, whether she was going to a dinner or to a site where she might have to walk through mud, look at drainage, think about water flow, plants, animals, erosion, construction, access, use. The same clothes. The same body. The same attention.

That is what stayed with me. Not just the work, though the work is remarkable, but the way she carried herself in relation to it. She did not seem to arrive anywhere with an idea to impose. She came prepared to look.

In a moment when so many conversations about art circle around markets—prices, auctions, returns—it feels grounding to remember Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, a retired postal worker and a Brooklyn librarian who built one of the most remarkable collections of postwar art on a pair of modest civil-service salaries. Their story is often told as a charming oddity, but it is something far more instructive: a long, sustained act of devotion that reshaped the lives of artists, the stability of galleries, and the cultural map of this country.