Just two months after becoming a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jennifer Rubio, along with her husband, Stewart Butterfield, have pledged $23 million to the New York museum. Rubio is an entrepreneur who founded the ubiquitous travel brand Away, and Butterfield, who is on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Art Foundation, is a software executive who co-founded Flickr and Slack.
The gift is earmarked for the Met’s internship program and will be used to ensure that all undergraduate and graduate internships are fully paid positions. The pledge, said Met director Max Hollein in a statement, will support “a continuous pipeline for new voices and innovative ideas to enter the field.”
Since 2021, the Met has offered over 100 paid internships across 40 departments each year, partially supported by a $5 million gift from collector and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. With the Rubio Butterfield Foundation pledge, the museum will be able to support this program in perpetuity.
“Internships are often the first meaningful point of entry into this field,” Rubio noted. “Yet too often that pathway depends on circumstance rather than talent. Stewart and I are proud to support The Met in making that entry point more equitable, ensuring that emerging voices, perspectives, and expertise help define the future of the Museum and the broader cultural landscape.”
Rubio and Butterfield have been on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list since 2022, the year they left their longtime home in San Francisco; they currently live in New York with their children. They have supported health, education, and social justice initiatives around the world, and as top collectors, have supported artists like Simone Leigh, Claire Tabouret, Mickalene Thomas, and Alicja Kwade.
