Top Museum Donors in New York City: Who Supports the Arts
New York has more major cultural institutions than any other American city. Keeping them funded takes a lot of donors.
The PatronView database tracks gifts to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and dozens more.
Here are the top donors by contribution count in two groups: individuals and foundations.
Rankings reflect the number of individual gift acknowledgments in the PatronView database. Contribution count captures breadth of giving history, not a single cumulative dollar total. For more information about our data collection and methodology, see Data Sources here.
👥 Top 25 Donors in New York City
Agnes Gund tops the list with 453 recorded contributions. That’s more than any other individual donor in New York by a significant margin. She served as MoMA president from 1991 to 2002 and remained one of the most active arts philanthropists in the country until her death in September 2025 at age 87.
Barbara G. Fleischman ranks second with 251 contributions. She and her late husband Lawrence assembled one of the most important private collections of ancient Greek and Roman art in the United States, much of which they donated to museums over the years. Most of her giving record in the PatronView database is at the New York Public Library.
Samuel C. Butler has 210 contributions, concentrated at the NYPL. He has served as a trustee of the library for many years.
Joan Hardy Clark follows with 187 contributions, primarily at the NYPL. Born in Toronto and having moved to New York in 1960, she has been on the library’s board since 1996, served as chairman of the council of conservators from 1986 to 2001, and has been a Life Trustee since 2011. She has also served on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the World Monuments Fund.
Anne H. Bass rounds out the top five with 184 contributions, primarily at the New York Public Library. A prominent arts patron and collector, she was a longtime trustee of multiple New York cultural institutions.
🏛️ Top 25 Foundation Donors in New York City
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation leads in contribution count with 228 recorded gifts, primarily to the New York Public Library. The Mellon Foundation is one of the largest arts and humanities funders in the US, with deep roots in New York’s cultural sector.
The Starr Foundation has 226 contributions but tops the list on estimated total giving, with roughly $870 million recorded across New York City institutions in the PatronView database. Founded by insurance executive Cornelius Vander Starr, it has long been one of the NYPL’s most significant backers.
The Ambrose Monell Foundation shows 215 contributions, concentrated almost entirely at the New York Public Library. Its consistent presence in the library’s donor acknowledgments goes back many years.
The Leon Levy Foundation breaks the NYPL-heavy pattern with 189 contributions, with the New York Philharmonic as its primary institution. Leon Levy was a financier and serious classical music patron.
May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc. rounds out the top five with 171 contributions, primarily at the NYPL. The Rudin family has been one of the more consistent institutional funders of New York’s cultural organizations for decades.
🏛️ New York City Institutions
Here are all of the New York City organizations we have in our database:
- American Museum of Natural History
- American Symphony Orchestra
- Asia Society
- Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City
- Brooklyn Academy of Music
- Brooklyn Public Library
- Carnegie Hall
- Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
- Children’s Aid New York City
- City Harvest
- Cooper Hewitt
- El Museo del Barrio
- God’s Love We Deliver
- Goodwill NYNJ
- Guggenheim Museum
- Habitat NYC and Westchester
- Intrepid Museum
- Jazz at Lincoln Center
- Lincoln Center
- Lincoln Center Theater
- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Metropolitan Opera
- Morgan Library and Museum
- Museum of Modern Art
- Museum of the City of New York
- New Museum
- New York Botanic Garden
- New York Cares
- New York City Ballet
- New York Philharmonic
- New York Public Library
- NYU Stern
- Orchestra of St. Luke’s
- Public Theater
- Queens Botanical Garden
- Queens Museum
- Roundabout Theater Company
- Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art
- Safe Horizon
- The Bronx Museum of the Arts
- The Frick Collection
- The Jewish Museum
- United Way New York City
- Whitney Museum of American Art
📊 Conclusion
The New York Public Library appears as the primary institution for most donors in both sections. The NYPL’s multi-tier membership structure generates more individual acknowledgment records than any single museum, so its donors show up at the top of contribution-count rankings. That doesn’t mean the Met or MoMA are underrepresented overall. They just structure their donor recognition differently.
All rankings use publicly available donor acknowledgments collected in the PatronView database. Explore full profiles at patronview.com/patrons or browse New York institutions at patronview.com/institutions.
See our other roundups: Boston, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. For the national picture, see our ranking of the Top 100 Museum Donors in America.