Met Announces $23M Gift from Jennifer Rubio and Stewart Butterfield
Just two months after becoming a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jennifer Rubio, along with her husband, Stewart Butterfield, have pledged $23 million to the New York museum. Rubio is an entrepreneur who founded the ubiquitous travel brand Away, and Butterfield, who is on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Art Foundation, is a software executive who co-founded Flickr and Slack. The gift is earmarked for the Met’s internship program and will be used to ensure that all undergraduate and graduate internships are fully paid positions. The pledge, said Met director Max Hollein in a statement, will support “a continuous pipeline for new voices and innovative ideas to enter the field.” Related Articles Since 2021, the Met has offered over 100 paid internships across 40 departments each year, partially supported by a $5 million gift from collector and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. With the Rubio Butterfield Foundation pledge, the museum will be able to support this program in perpetuity. “Internships are often the first meaningful point of entry into this field,” Rubio …
