Herb and Dorothy are poised to become household names. Not because they made some popular baby-naming list, but because of their ongoing gift to the art world.

Herbert Vogel, 87, is a retired postal clerk; wife Dorothy, 74, a retired reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. In the 1960s, the couple preferred minimalist and conceptual art to the pop art and abstract expressionism of the time, and, with Herb’s modest salary, they began buying works by unknown artists; Dorothy’s salary covered their daily expenses.

The artwork, they determined, had to be affordable and small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Over the years, they befriended many of the artists—Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close—well before the rest of the world knew who they were. The Vogels never sold any of the work for profit.

Thirty years later, artwork filled every corner of their living space, from the bathroom to the kitchen. The collection grew to 4,000 pieces of art and had grown in value as well, as the artists become world renowned. In 1992, the Vogels decided to donate the multimillion-dollar collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. And then they started collecting all over again.

Filmmaker Megumi Sasaki heard about them and wanted to tell the story about this “ordinary couple of modest means who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.”

Sasaki at first found it difficult to film the Vogels as art collectors because they didn’t speak in lofty terms about what it was that drew them to the art. “Whenever I asked them why they liked certain artists or artworks, they answered only, ‘because we liked them,’ or ‘because they are beautiful.’ How could I make a film about art collectors who cannot articulate their approach to that art?”

Her eyes were opened, she said, when artist Lucio Pozzi told her, “Why should you explain art? What’s the need to verbalize art? Herb and Dorothy only look, look and look. That’s their way of communicating with art and artists.” Another artist, James Siena, told her that the Vogels “have the eyes of artists or curators, rather than collectors.”

She completed the documentary in 2008, and Herb and Dorothy has been making the rounds of film festivals ever since. The film earned Sasaki the Audience Award for a Feature at the 2008 Silverdocs: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, where the film premiered. Watch the trailer:

In April 2008, the National Gallery of Art, which is keeping about 1,000 of the artworks, announced a national gift program called “Fifty Works for Fifty States.” It is distributing 2,500 works—paintings, sculptures, photos, and prints by more than 170 contemporary artists—from the Vogels’ collection throughout the nation, with 50 pieces going to a selected art institution in each of the 50 states. The first 10 institutions were announced that month; 20 more received artwork at the end of 2008, and the final 20 art institutions will be given artworks in 2009.

A book, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, was funded and published by the National Endowment for the Arts in conjunction with the program.