What Are This Year’s Most Important Museum Donations?

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation allocated some 63 artworks to three institutions. The Brooklyn Museum received 29 of these works, the Museum of Modern Art in New York received 28, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art received six. A number of modernist treasures figure into the donation, including paintings by Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent van Gogh, and Édouard Manet. An exhibition dedicated to the gift is slated to open at LACMA in July 2026, before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum

International investment banker Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation, which runs exhibition spaces in New York and Germany, donated more than 6,500 photographic works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past May, one of the most significant gifts of its kind in the institution’s history. The collection ranges from 19th-century vernacular photography to contemporary photography and video, representing artists from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, and boasts images by the likes of Malick Sidibé, Zanele Muholi, Ai Weiwei, Thomas Struth, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Australian collectors Simon and Catriona Mordant gifted 25 artworks to Newcastle Art Gallery in Newcastle, Australia. Highlights from the donation include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive digital work Make Out (Shadow Box 8), 2008, comprising thousands of internet videos of kissing couples that prods the idea of surveillance; Janet Laurence’s Liquid green (2003), which condemns the effects of human action on the environment; and two works on paper by Ngarrindjeri painter Ian Abdulla, who depicts vivid childhood memories on the Murray River. Slated for 2026 is an exhibition commemorating the donation and a celebration of the gallery’s expansion that doubles its footprint.

Chicago-based Top 200 Collectors Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbitt donated Julie Mehretu’s Femenine in nine, part 6 (2023) to Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa this past February. “For the past 35 years, Marty and I have built an art collection including African and African diaspora artists who self-define in their practice and who build complex understanding and appreciation of Black identity,” Blanchard said. “We are so proud to contribute to a contemporary art museum located in Africa and for Julie Mehretu’s work to in many ways return to the continent.”

Real estate developer Jorge M. Pérez and his wife, Darlene, donated a major gift of artworks to Tate Modern in London, among them, Joan Mitchell’s monumental triptych Iva (1973). The 20-foot-long painting, dedicated to Mitchell’s dog, is one of the artist’s most significant works, featuring her signature use of bold color fields and gestural brushwork. The Pérez donation also includes a multimillion-dollar endowment for Tate’s curatorial research and a forthcoming gift of works by artists from Africa and the African diaspora, such as Yinka Shonibare, El Anatsui, and Malick Sidibé.

Vancouver-based real estate magnate Bob Rennie gifted some 61 works, worth $16.8 million, to the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa. Among the most notable is Yinka Shonibare’s American Library (2018), made of roughly 6,000 books wrapped in Dutch wax printed cotton, some 3,200 of which identify immigrants or their descendants who have impacted the culture of North America. Other of the pieces are works by Mona Hatoum—made in the 1980s while in residency at Vancouver’s Western Front—that speak to the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as 40 works spanning nearly four decades by the late Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham. This gift tops Rennie’s previous $9.6 million donation to the NGC in 2017, bringing the total of his gifts since 2012 to 260, with a valuation of $25.7 million.

Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz gifted the Art Institute of Chicago around 2,250 works of French art made between the 16th and 19th centuries—touted by the museum as the largest collection of its kind from that period in private hands in the United States. The gift comprises 2,000 drawings, 200 paintings, and 50 sculptures. Included in the gift are works by Rococo painter François Boucher, Romantic painter Théodore Géricault, and Neoclassical painter Jacques- Louis David. The Horvitzes pledged additional funding for the care of these pieces.