MFA Boston gets $25m gift to renovate galleries and add staff

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) has received $25m from the Wyss Foundation to fund a major renovation of its modern art galleries and create two new staff positions. The revamp will create four new galleries and more than 5,000 sq. ft of extra space for the MFA’s 20th-century art collection. The staff positions are for a curator and a conservator for the newly displayed works.

“We’re incredibly grateful to Hansjörg Wyss and his foundation for their generosity,” outgoing MFA director Matthew Teitelbaum said in a statement. “Hansjörg’s late wife, Rosamund, frequented the MFA as a child and throughout her life—it was for her, as for many of us, a place of learning and wonder.”

The gallery renovations will be designed by the Boston-based firm Annum Architects. A new sculpture gallery linking the modern and contemporary galleries—featuring works by artists like Jean Arp, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, Simone Leigh, Pablo Picasso and Kiki Smith—is scheduled to open next spring. The other three galleries will open the following autumn, one of which will be devoted to a single artist (such as Josef Albers, Paul Klee or René Magritte) on a rotating basis.

The curatorial staff position was recently filled by Claire Howard—formerly a curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas—who will work on exhibitions in the new galleries. The MFA has posted a job listing for the second position, the modern and contemporary art department’s new conservator, with a yearly salary of between $81,000 and $90,000 and an application deadline of 15 June 2025.

Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who made his money manufacturing medical devices, founded the Wyss Foundation in 1998 to fund environmental conservation efforts around the world as well as journalism, education and the arts, among other causes—including left-leaning political advocacy groups in the US. Wyss serves as board president of Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, and he is one of the MFA’s honorary advisers. (Since 2022, Wyss is also a part-owner of London’s Chelsea Football Club.)

“Promoting the arts and enabling discovery has been at the core of the Wyss Foundation’s mission,” Wyss said in a statement, “and I’m grateful to the MFA for their support in expanding those efforts to a museum with deep significance for myself and my late wife, Rosamund Zander. I know she would be overjoyed that a new generation will be able to experience the same collections that sparked her lifelong love for the arts.”