Arsht namesake gives $5 million to the Met for paid internships and programming
Adrienne Arsht’s cellphone always rings to the tune of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Sometimes, when she notices the people around her singing along, she lets it ring on. The ringtone, she says, reflects her love for the arts and her belief in its power to energize and sustain people.
The longtime philanthropist and namesake of Miami’s performing arts center has made a $5 million pledge to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it announced Monday. The gift will be used to boost livestream programming for its MetLiveArts series and ensure a fully paid internship program starting in spring 2021.
“What I want people to take from this is to fund an intern somewhere, fund two if you can, fund more. Every person who can now be paid is one person who is a step up they wouldn’t otherwise have had,” Arsht told the Herald Tuesday. “It doesn’t have to be $5 million; it can be whatever it takes to pay one person to have an opportunity.”
The gift has been in the works for more than a year, Arsht said. She worked with the Met to figure out a way of promoting resilience — a topic near and dear to her — at the museum. Making it possible for people from all walks of life to intern at the Met felt like a perfect fit, she said.
The museum world has come under fire in recent years for its lack of diversity. A report commissioned by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2015 found that museum leadership is largely white. Only 11% of those positions were held by people of color — and little progress has been made. A second study, in 2018, found leadership positions had increased by only a single percentage point.
In addition, most museum internships are unpaid, according to the American Alliance of Museums. Unpaid internships create barriers for low-income students and people of color who may not be able to afford to intern for free.
Last year the Association of Museum Directors’ Board of Trustees approved a resolution urging art museums to pay interns. The association, which represents more than 220 museums in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, argued in a statement that the move is “essential to increasing access and equity for the museum profession.”
Arsht’s gift to the Met will make the institution the single largest art museum in the country to offer 100% paid internships to nearly 120 undergraduate and graduate interns in more than 40 departments each year, according to a statement released by the museum.
“These funds will activate a landmark shift in the Met’s expansive and multi-disciplined internship program, enabling greater inclusivity and access while also significantly furthering the museum’s continued dedication to engaging with diverse contemporary performance artists through groundbreaking live arts commissions,” Max Hollein, director of the museum, said in a statement.
Starting in September, Arsht’s donation also will help fund a museum initiative called “Gallery View” that will stream live performances that champion resilience through the arts.
Resilience is a theme for Arsht. Her $30 million gift to Miami’s Center for the Performing Arts in 2008 put it on stable financial footing, creating a base for subsequent years. In 2016, she founded what is known today as the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center to examine solutions for some of the world’s pressing problems including climate change, migration and yes, even pandemics.
“The pandemic is a petri dish for experimenting how to survive,” Arsht said. “It’s brought out so many wonderful things in people.”
She pointed to innovations in delivery and distribution services and the ways people have found to help each other through grim times.
“I think the arts also are inspired by times of change, times of anxiety, times of glory,” Arsht said. “There will be a lot of art that is coming out of this.”
This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 6:22 PM.