The Benton Museum at Pomona College, Yale Art Gallery, Colby College Museum of Art, Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art and the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art all received major gifts of artwork in 2023.
From a tax standpoint, it doesn’t matter if you donate a work of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or to the art gallery or museum of some small, out-of-the-way college. As long as the gift is accepted by the nonprofit institution and fits within its mission guidelines, donors receive the same charitable tax deduction when they file their returns with the IRS.
However, most prospective donors want more than just a tax deduction, and satisfying that need can determine where they donate artwork. If they provide enough money to the institution, perhaps they can have a gallery or wing or whole building named after them. There may be bragging rights to the claim that their artwork is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan or Whitney or Guggenheim or wherever.
However, if their goal is for their donated artworks to be seen and experienced, a Metropolitan or Whitney or Guggenheim may be the wrong place to donate. That is because, in most cases, the gift is swallowed up in the massive permanent collection, much of which is stored in the basement or somewhere off site, rarely if ever to be displayed as there is only so much gallery space and a lot of competition for those walls. Your Claude Monet may mean the world to you, but the Met already has 137 of them.
Word is getting around that the college museum might offer a better deal, and a growing number of donors of artwork and other objects are giving significant individual pieces or whole collections to museums at colleges and universities. This year, for instance, Purdue University in Indiana received seventy-four bronze Edgar Degas sculptures donated by Chicago businessman Avrum Gray—including a copy of La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans valued at around $21 million—while Colby College in Marin received twenty-eight lithographic prints by John Marin from the estate of his widow, the most recent in a series of donations of the artist’s work by one or another member of his family. These gifts have made the Colby College Museum of Art a principal focus for those studying the art of John Marin and, according to Jacqueline Terrassa, director of the museum, “exemplify how those with no formal ties to Colby as alumni or as parents have shaped our holdings in important ways.”
Last year, Miami area-based diagnostic radiologist Gamaliel R. Herrera donated thirty works by contemporary artists from Puerto Rico to the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University. Two years ago, Bennington College was gifted 500 works of contemporary art from the collection of art patron and curator Melva Bucksbaum, and investment advisor Peter Lynch donated twenty-seven paintings and three drawings (including works by Pablo Picasso, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, and Jack Butler Yeats) valued at $20 million, to Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. These artworks would seem to be natural fits at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Whitney, but they went instead to college and university museums.