Tag: Paul Allen

Paul Allen’s Foundation Puts $10M Toward Arts and Culture in Washington

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Seattle Opera’s youth opera project performs Rootabaga Country. Photo: Sunny Martini

The philanthropic legacy of Paul Allen lives on through the foundation established by the Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder in 1988, and now, more than 800 arts and culture nonprofits across Washington, Allen’s home state, are set to receive a total of $10 million in grants from his eponymous foundation.

“From the Olympics to the Palouse, every corner of our state is brimming with diverse and rich cultural activity, and we are incredibly heartened by the extensive reach and continued impact of this program,” said Lara Littlefield, the Paul G. Allen Foundation’s executive director of partnerships and programs, in a statement. Its most recent round of grants ranges from $2,500 to $25,000 and follows $10 million given last year to Washington arts and culture organizations during the pilot edition of the Community Accelerator Grant program, which is funded by the foundation and administered by the Seattle nonprofit ArtsFund.

The grant program was created to aid sectors that saw audiences, workforces and revenues negatively impacted by the pandemic and economic inflation. The most recent round of grantees cited programmatic funding as a top need, followed by funds for salaries and labor, rent, mortgage and facility upgrades, and communications and marketing.

Mariachi Noroeste performs at Icicle Creek Center for the Arts. Photo: Robert Inn/Courtesy Icicle Creek Center for the Arts

This year’s recipients of Community Accelerator Grant funds include the Seattle Opera, Icicle Creek Center for the Arts, Spokane International Film Festival, Ballyhoo Theatre and Indigenous Performance Productions. The various organizations are spread across thirty-seven counties in Washington and represent disciplines like music, cultural heritage, theater and visual arts. Around 70 percent of grantees reported annual budgets of less than $500,000, according to the Paul G. Allen Foundation.

Paul Allen’s wide-ranging philanthropy

Co-founded by Allen and his sister Jodi, the Paul G. Allen Foundation has long invested in arts and culture across the Pacific Northwest with an emphasis on underserved populations and youth initiatives. Allen, who died in 2018, was an avid patron and collector of art—his holdings spanning 500 years sold for more than $1.6 million in 2022 at a Christie’s auction that stands as the largest private collection sale in history. The late billionaire also founded cultural initiatives like the Seattle Art Fair and Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, which recently received thousands of cultural artifacts—including musical instruments, movie props and memorabilia owned by David Bowie and Prince—from Allen’s estate.

Allen, who had an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death, donated more than $2.6 billion to initiatives in the arts, wildlife conservation and medical research during his lifetime. He gave $500 million to the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which he founded in 2003 in Seattle to catalyze brain research, and $125 million to establish the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2018. The philanthropist’s other major contributions included separate $100 million gifts to support the fight against Ebola, aiding the Allen Institute for Cell Science and funding the bioscience research initiative Allen Frontiers Group.

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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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May 23, 2024
Art from Microsoft founder Paul Allen sells for $1.5 billion

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NEW YORK — Works by artists including Cézanne, Seurat, and van Gogh sold for a record-breaking $1.5 billion during the first part of Christie’s two-day auction of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s masterpiece-heavy collection.

All 60 of the artworks put up for auction Wednesday night in New York sold, and five paintings sold for prices above $100 million.

Georges Seurat’s pointillist “Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version)” sold for $149.2 million, the evening’s highest price. The larger version of “Les Poseuses” is at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.

Christie’s experts said that pointillism, a revolutionary technique when it was developed by Seurat and Paul Signac involving dots of color that combine to form an image, was of particular interest to Allen because of his computer background.

The auction house quoted Allen saying he was “attracted to things like pointillism or a Jasper Johns ‘numbers’ work because they come from breaking something down into its components — like bytes or numbers, but in a different kind of language.”

Other highlights from Wednesday’s sale included Paul Cézanne’s “La Montagne Sainte-Victoire,” which sold for $137.8 million, and van Gogh’s landscape “Verger avec cyprès,” which sold for $117.2 million.

“Never before have more than two paintings exceeded $100 million in a single sale, but tonight, we saw five,’ Max Carter, vice chair of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, said in a news release.

Eighteen works sold for record prices for the artists, who ranged from the 17th century Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Younger to the 20th century photographer Edward Steichen.

All proceeds from the sale will benefit philanthropies chosen by Allen’s estate.

Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2018. During his lifetime, he donated more than $2 billion to causes including ocean health, homelessness and advancing scientific research.

The previous single-evening auction record of $852.9 million was set at Christie’s contemporary art sale in New York in 2014.

The Paul Allen estate sale continued on Thursday.

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November 10, 2022
Ex-housekeeper sues Jeff Bezos, claims discrimination

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SEATTLE — A former housekeeper for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says she and other employees suffered unsafe working conditions that included being forced to climb out a laundry room window to get to a bathroom anytime the Bezos family was home.

In a lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court in Seattle this week, Mercedes Wedaa, a longtime housekeeper for wealthy Seattle-area residents including the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, claims she was discriminated and retaliated against when she complained about a lack of rest breaks or an area where staff could eat.

Harry Korrell, an attorney for Bezos, called the claims absurd and said Wedaa filed the lawsuit against Bezos and two companies that manage his properties and personal investments, Zefram LLC and Northwestern LLC, only after her demand for a $9 million payout was rejected.

“Ms. Wedaa made over six figures annually and was the lead housekeeper,” Korrell said in an emailed statement. “She was responsible for her own break and meal times, and there were several bathrooms and breakrooms available to her and other staff. The evidence will show that Ms. Wedaa was terminated for performance reasons.”

According to the lawsuit, Zefram hired Wedaa in September 2019 as “house coordinator” and she was initially the only housekeeper on staff, though contract employees were brought in occasionally. Another housekeeper was added about a year later, and by late last year, Wedaa was the lead housekeeper, supervising a handful of others.

Wedaa contends in the lawsuit that she sometimes worked up to 14 hours a day but was never told she was entitled to rest breaks. She also says there was no room designated for the housekeepers to rest in and that they sometimes ate meals in a laundry room.

When the Bezos family was home, the housekeepers were allowed to enter the house only to perform cleaning functions. According to the complaint, that created situations in which housekeepers could not exit the laundry room because its only door led into the residence. Instead of going out that door, housekeepers for a period of 18 months would sometimes have to climb out the laundry room window onto a path that led to a mechanical room, enter through the mechanical room, and go downstairs to a bathroom.

“Because there was no readily accessible bathroom, Plaintiff and other housekeepers spend large parts of their day unable to use the toilet even though they needed to,” the complaint says. “As a result of this, the housekeepers frequently developed Urinary Tract Infections.”

It isn’t clear in the complaint how the housekeepers entered the laundry room to begin with, how long they were expected to remain in there if the family was home or whether they could use a restroom when they entered the house to perform cleaning tasks. Wedaa’s Seattle-based attorney, Patrick Leo McGuigin, said he didn’t have further details at this early stage of the lawsuit.

“I did not question my client ad nauseum,” he said. “She had to climb out a window. That’s the key fact. … I can’t explain every circumstance and every piece of evidence there is. There’s a lot of discovery to take place.”

Wedaa “has worked hard all her life, she is a very credible person and compelling evidence supports her claims,” he said.

According to the complaint, Wedaa, who is Hispanic, reported to house managers who were white. She said she complained about undocumented workers being brought in on a contract basis, a lack of rest breaks and unsafe working conditions. She also complained that an assistant house manager treated the Hispanic housekeepers differently from white staff on the property and retaliated against her by demoting her and installing a white housekeeper as the lead housekeeper.

Though Wedaa was never disciplined over her job performance, she was eventually fired over the complaints, the lawsuit says.

“Defendants cited the ridiculously concocted reason that she appeared ‘unhappy’ and that this was having a negative effect on the housekeeping team,” it states.

The lawsuit against Bezos, who is one of the world’s wealthiest people, seeks damages in an amount to be determined at trial.

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November 3, 2022