Here’s a bit of refreshing news: The Miami Art Museum, aka the Pérez Art Museum Miami, received an anonymous gift worth $15 million the other day. Not only did the donor not ask for anything to be named after him or her, or acknowledged publicly — a bit of a slap to Perez considering the controversy over the naming conditions of his gift — but also the museum is allocating it well.
Museum Director Thom Collins told the Miami Herald that “This money will go into the endowment,†because the capital campaign to pay for the cost of the bricks and mortar museum now under construction is mostly completed. Since the donor gave art worth $3 million, the endowment just jumped by $12 million — which is, according to my sources, about what the value of the museum’s endowment was at the end of its last fiscal year. So, the endowment just doubled.
Still and possibly forever unclear: how exactly the gift came about, whether the giver has an established relationship with the museum, what the donated art is and why the benefactor wants to remain anonymous.