With $125 Million Gift, Met Museum Jump-Starts New Modern Wing

The donation from a trustee, Oscar L. Tang, and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, reinvigorates the long-delayed project and is the largest capital gift in the Met’s history.

Seven years after announcing ambitious plans to rebuild its wing for Modern and contemporary art — which then had to be put on hold because of financial problems — the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday announced that it had finally secured a lead donation of $125 million, the largest capital gift in its history, from its longtime trustee Oscar L. Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, an archaeologist and art historian. The wing will be named after them for a minimum of 50 years.

“It is coming from within the Met,” said the museum’s director, Max Hollein, in a telephone interview. “It shows the confidence the museum has in this very important project.”

With their donation, the Tangs join a rarefied group of philanthropists who have made game-changing gifts of $100 million or more to underwrite cultural building projects (and secure naming rights). These include the oil-and-gas billionaire David H. Koch, benefactor of New York City Ballet’s renovated Lincoln Center home, in 2008; the private equity billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, for the New York Public Library, in 2008, and a new cultural center at Yale, in 2015; and the entertainment mogul David Geffen, whose 2015 gift went toward the gut renovation of the former Avery Fisher Hall.