The Museum of Modern Art announced today that it has received a landmark $100m donation from the entertainment mogul and art collector David Geffen.
The donation will go toward the museum’s renovation and expansion. Three floors of new galleries in MoMA’s westward expansion on 53rd street will, consequently, now be named the David Geffen Wing. (The expansion project in general will add 50,000 sq. ft of exhibition space to the museum.) The fourth floor galleries in the current building will also now be named the David Geffen Galleries.
The $100m donation stands among one of the largest cash donations in museum history, rivalled only by Leonard Lauder’s $131m gift to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2008 and the $100m donation made to MoMA in 2005 by David Rockefeller, formerly the museum’s chairman. At the time, the 2005 donation was the largest the museum had ever received.
The Brooklyn-born Geffen made his fortune (valued at $6.5bn) as a music and film producer, and he has been a generous philanthropist on the West Coast. In recent years, he’s made his way back East, selling his home in Malibu and buying a 20-room Fifth Avenue penthouse and a house in East Hampton. With him have come his philanthropic dollars: last year he gave $100m toward a renovation of Avery Fisher Hall, home to the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. It is now called David Geffen Hall.