New York Music and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust
When Mary Flagler Cary inherited a great deal of money from her wealthy parents, there was no doubt but that she would use much of it for the flourishing of Read more…
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Business Committee for the Arts
Esquire magazine began giving annual Business in the Arts awards in 1966. A year later, David Rockefeller launched a national task force of CEOs dedicated to increasing arts philanthropy. In Read more…
Masterpiece Theatre
In 1967, a 26-part BBC adaptation of “The Forsyte Saga,” John Galsworthy’s book series following an upper-middle-class British family, premiered on American television. Stanford Calderwood, president of the Boston PBS Read more…
Worthy Art at the Kimbell Museum
Kay and Velma Kimbell were among Texas’s first major art collectors, and it all happened virtually by accident. They attended a 1935 exhibit of paintings at Fort Worth’s downtown library, Read more…
Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival
Featuring cellist Pablo Casals as honorary president, the inaugural Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival launched in 1973, with 14 artists performing a handful of Sunday concerts. Today, its six-week season Read more…
Hirshhorn Museum of Contemporary Art
Joseph Hirshhorn’s parents brought him to America from Latvia in 1907, as an eight-year-old. When he reached 13, he dropped out of school to get a job, and by 15 Read more…
Spoleto Festival USA
Gian Carlo Menotti was a Pulitzer Prize-winning, Italian-American composer who had a passion for introducing popular audiences to opera. In 1958, he had founded the Festival of Two Worlds in Read more…
YoungArts
Ted Arison knew something about building small chances into big successes. He had grown Carnival Cruise Lines from a single ship into the largest and most profitable cruise line in Read more…
Sundance Institute
In 1981, the actor Robert Redford gathered a group of his friends and colleagues in the Utah mountains to think through ways of encouraging high-quality independent filmmaking in the U.S. Read more…
The New Criterion
The founding of The New Criterion is a case study in how foundation philanthropy has changed. Two art critics, Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman, wanted to start a conservative journal Read more…
Mystic Seaport Museum
Mystic Seaport, in Mystic, Connecticut, had been an active seaport since the 1600s—filled with ships either being built or sailing in and out on merchant business. Between the late-eighteenth and Read more…
Museum of Modern Art
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John Rockefeller Jr., fell in love with Modern art quite early. Though her husband had entirely different tastes, and indeed actively disliked most Modern art, Read more…
Severance Hall
The Cleveland Orchestra, today one of the top symphonies in America, had humble beginnings. It was founded in 1918 by a group of local citizens led by Adella Prentiss Hughes, Read more…
Folger Shakespeare Library
In 1879, Henry Folger was a senior at Amherst College, which he attended with financial aid from generous private individuals. That year he attended a lecture on Shakespeare given by Read more…
Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago
One of the favorite places that Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald ever visited with his family was the Deutsches Museum in Munich—which (then as now) was the world’s foremost exhibit of Read more…
The Walters Art Museum
William Walters and later his son Henry made a great deal of money in railroads, and beginning in the 1860s poured much of it into collecting art in Europe. In Read more…
Creating a Cultural Village
Members of the Clark family, heirs to much of the Singer Sewing Company fortune, have resided in the bucolic village of Cooperstown, New York, since the mid-1800s. When the Depression Read more…
The Guggenheim
Solomon Guggenheim was born into a wealthy mining family, and expanded his fortune through his own mining ventures. He turned primarily to philanthropy after the First World War. The Solomon Read more…
National Gallery of Art
Under the influence of his friend Henry Frick, Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon had begun collecting art in the 1910s. During years of great instability in Europe, he acquired a remarkable Read more…
The Cloisters Museum and Gardens
One of the most unusual museums in New York City, or anywhere in America, is The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art located in far northern Manhattan. Read more…