By Sky Pinkett
Staff Writer
Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keefe. These may be some names you recognize as part of history’s most renowned artists.
How about Alice Walton, David Geffen, Leonard A. Lauder and Agnes Gund? If you’re like me, then you’ve probably never heard of these names, even though you’ll likely find them etched on plaques in various art museums across America. These are art philanthropists, and they’re a dying breed.
This type of philanthropy includes donating money to maintain museums, giving valuable art pieces to these institutions and supporting individual artists and art research financially.
Philanthropists such as Lauder and Gund dedicated their entire lives to contributing to art institutions. Gund was a proponent for contemporary female artists and artists of color in an industry that exclusively showcased old, white and male artists at the expense of everyone else. Her millions donated to the Museum of Modern Art was a big incentive for the institution to start pushing more diverse perspectives.
Lauder’s $131 million donation, among many others he would make to art museums throughout his life, helped keep the Whitney Museum of American Art afloat during the 2008 recession.
Gund and Lauder both recently passed away, which prompted the New York Times to ask, “Where are the next giant art patrons?” In the egregious class disparities that exist in our modern day, one way we try to cope is by pretending like the money dealings of the one percent among us don’t matter. But they do matter — probably now more than ever, in fact.
A Guardian article reported on a study released by the American Alliance of Museums that said one-third of American museums have lost government funding since President Trump took office earlier this year. In a survey they conducted among these museums, two-thirds of them reported a lack of sponsors or donors to replenish that funding.
We talk about funding loss all the time, but what exactly does that mean for museums? Employees are laid off, construction or expansion projects are canceled, certain exhibitions close indefinitely and proposed programming never comes to fruition.
As the current administration is setting plans in motion to remove certain exhibits and works from the Smithsonian Museum, the Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of Asian Art, the National Museum of American Latino and the American History Museum, interest in starting up nonprofits independent of the government has increased. But the same problem remains: who will fund these nonprofits?
“Most collectors give a big gift and then it’s over,” Lauder told the New York Times last year. “I never stop.’’
Museums are unable to survive on one-and-done donations. As a new tax law to take effect in 2026 is set to cap the deduction benefit on donations for possible high-income art philanthropists, the incentive for the wealthy to consistently contribute to museums is sinking.
However, all hope is not lost. Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer, newly appointed president to the Whitney Museum of American Art, told the New York Times that it takes years for philanthropic leaders to emerge over time. “You’re not born a legend.”
Younger philanthropists such as Sarah Arison, president of MoMA’s board of trustees, Blair Effron, board member for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Lincoln Center, and Agnes Hsu-Tang, who has worked with her husband to give millions of dollars to the Met, the New York Historical and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, are all leading the pack as this era’s philanthropic batch.
Art philanthropy goes all the way back to ancient Rome and the Renaissance era, to the Carnegies, Astors and Guggenheims of the Gilded Age, up to our recently passed Lauder and Gund. Art philanthropy has always mattered, but it doesn’t mean that the wealth gap that exists today is any less important.
We can have our cake and eat it too. Because who says you can’t eat the rich while admiring a pretty painting their money helped support?
