The Met's New Tang Wing Is Under Construction, Funded by a $125 Million Gift
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is building a new wing for its modern and contemporary art, paid for by a $125 million pledge from Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang. Construction started in September. The wing will be called the Tang Wing.
The couple's pledge was announced in 2021. According to Town & Country, it is the largest single donation in the museum's history. The new wing will cover 126,000 square feet, or about the size of a few city blocks' worth of floor space packed into one building.
The architect is Frida Escobedo, a Mexican designer. She is the first woman to design a wing for the Met, the museum's name for itself. The building will hold the Met's modern and contemporary works, which are the museum's most recent collections, from the late 1800s onward.
The Tang gift is not the only large recent donation. In May, the museum announced that Ronald S. Lauder and his daughter, Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer, agreed to merge the Neue Galerie New York into the Met. Mr. Lauder founded the Neue Galerie in 2001. It is a small museum on Fifth Avenue known for early 20th-century German and Austrian art. Under the merger, it will be renamed the Met Ronald S. Lauder Neue Galerie.
The Neue Galerie holds Gustav Klimt's Woman in Gold, a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The Lauders plan to donate 13 outstanding 20th-century Austrian and German paintings to the Met as part of the deal, according to a museum press release.
Another gift came in the spring. Jennifer Rubio and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, pledged more than $23 million to the Met. Their money supports a new program that will pay undergraduate and graduate students for internships. The museum said the gift will fund those internships in perpetuity, meaning the money is meant to last indefinitely. Students will be paid for the work, which is not always the case in the arts.
Max Hollein is the museum's director and chief executive. Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer serves as a trustee, the member of the board that oversees the museum's finances and direction.
For most visitors, the practical result will be more space. A new wing takes years to plan and build, and the Tang Wing has only just started. The museum has not announced an opening date.
For donors and museum staff, the three gifts show how the Met's largest projects are now paid for. Private families are covering big building projects, collections, and student jobs. Each family's name now sits on a part of the museum, and the public will walk through those names every time it visits.
