Inside the Mind of a Foundation CEO

The retired chief of the George Gund Foundation puts his daily life, and hundreds of nametags, on view

To most Americans, foundations are private and somewhat mysterious places. David Bergholz, who

retired in January after 14 years as president of the George Gund Foundation here, hopes to dispel some of the mystique through a whimsical one-room art exhibit he named “The Archaeology of Philanthropy.”

On display, as his wife, Eleanor Mallet, puts it, is “the detritus of philanthropy.” Mounted at Spaces, a nonprofit gallery supported by the Gund Foundation, the exhibit includes 1,002 name badges from meetings Mr. Bergholz attended, 2,451 cards showing his schedule each day, 21 stenography pads containing memos he dictated to his secretary, 27 desk calendars, and 13 of the foundation’s annual reports. The items, he writes in the text accompanying the exhibit, provide “a window on philanthropy’s fragile inner workings, at least as I practiced them in a job I loved.”

The schedule cards show everything from the mundane events of his personal life — appointments with his dentist and grocery lists — to the big challenges of his job, like meetings with trustees, the foundation’s investment advisers, and civic committees he chaired. Opening a daily calendar to the public is not without its risks: One visitor remarked to Mr. Bergholz, “You had lunch with my wife a lot.”

In the exhibit, he makes fun of his own inability to keep a schedule. He writes that he often had “cryptic notations on my calendar, such as ‘lunch,’ but no clue as to where or with whom. Because I could not read my own illegible writing, we had mystery guests appear in the office. I was forced to perfect the question, ‘So why are we meeting today?’”

Mr. Bergholz, who enjoys puncturing what he calls the “piousness of philanthropy,” says he dreamed up the exhibit when he got bored at a meeting of nonprofit officials. He was sitting next to Susan Channing, the director of Spaces, who agreed to put his work in the gallery’s SpaceLab, which features pieces by new artists.

Though the exhibit closed here last week, the Mattress Factory, a Pittsburgh contemporary-art museum, wants to remount it. That should give Mr. Bergholz a reason to continue calling himself a conceptual artist, instead of a retired foundation president.