Met Museum Secures $23 Million Gift to Fund Internships in Perpetuity
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has received a $23 million pledge from Jennifer Rubio and Stewart Butterfield, a commitment that will fully fund the museum’s internship program and keep it operating in perpetuity. The gift arrives just two months after Rubio became a trustee of the New York institution.
The funding is designated for undergraduate and graduate internships, which the Met says will now be fully paid. In a statement, museum director Max Hollein said the pledge will support “a continuous pipeline for new voices and innovative ideas to enter the field.”
The Met has offered more than 100 paid internships each year across 40 departments since 2021. That program was previously supported in part by a $5 million gift from collector and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. With the new pledge from the Rubio Butterfield Foundation, the museum says it can sustain the initiative indefinitely.
Rubio founded Away, the travel brand, while Butterfield co-founded Flickr and Slack. Butterfield also serves on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Art Foundation. The couple have been on the Top 200 Collectors list since 2022, the year they left San Francisco for New York with their children.
Their philanthropy has extended beyond the arts to health, education, and social justice initiatives. As collectors, they have supported artists including Simone Leigh, Claire Tabouret, Mickalene Thomas, and Alicja Kwade.
For the Met, the pledge underscores a broader shift in museum giving: not only underwriting exhibitions and acquisitions, but also the professional pathways that shape the next generation of curators, scholars, and administrators. In a field where access has often depended on unpaid labor, the promise of fully paid internships carries practical weight well beyond a single institution.
