Tag: The Guggenheim

A Collector’s Guide to Non-Cash Museum Donations

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Crypto philanthropy is emerging as a meaningful funding stream, particularly among younger and wealthier donor demographics. Photo by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the past year, the Toledo Museum of Art received several dozen works on paper by the Pop artist Marisol, a series of black-and-white photographs by Brett Weston, two sculptures by Roxy Paine, a painting by Richard Diebenkorn, four sculptural works by Martin Puryear and a linoleum-cut print by Kara Walker, among other artworks. Most donations to the museum, of course, came in the form of cash—such as the gift from one local family that funded free parking for visitors for 10 years—but not all. Other gifts included shares in startup businesses (a pharmaceutical and a tech company among them), an estate and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Solana, and others.

“There is a lot of flexibility in the kinds of donations we will accept,” Adam Levine, the museum’s director, told Observer. The museum’s board determines the types of gifts the institution will accept, and it becomes the development department’s job to figure out what to do with donations that aren’t artworks or cash. “We don’t have people on staff with expertise in real estate and crypto and startup companies,” he said, adding that the museum can “accept a variety of things, generally liquidating them immediately.”

The estate, for instance, was turned over to realtors who sold the house and property for $800,000, while the crypto was deposited in an account at The Giving Block, a Pennsylvania-based platform that helps nonprofits convert cryptocurrency donations into usable cash. The Toledo Museum of Art began accepting crypto in 2023, with donations amounting to more than $100,000 in 2025, “and that amount has been growing every year,” Levine said.

A growing percentage of gifts to museums arrive in the form of “real estate, pension plans, life insurance payouts, boats, cars, crypto—you name it,” said Ken Cerini, managing partner of Cerini & Associates, which helps not-for-profit groups value and make use of non-cash donations. “I tell people who want to donate crypto to a nonprofit to reach out to the organization to see if they will take it. Most organizations will find a way to make it happen, particularly if it will be a sizeable donation.”

Among high-profile museums that accept non-cash donations are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which accepts cryptocurrency; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which accepts appreciated securities; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which accepts real estate. All three, along with others such as the Guggenheim, accept donations of stock.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, according to a spokesperson, accepts stock (“several times each month”) and real estate (“that’s a bit more rare”), as well as wine donations from winemakers for its annual wine auction. “But at this time we don’t accept Bitcoin,” the spokesperson added. As one might expect, the online-only Museum of Crypto Art does.

Receiving a crypto or other non-cash donation requires more than simply deciding to accept it. The Giving Block, a crypto fundraising platform, works with close to 30 museums and cultural institutions across the U.S., including the Smithsonian Institution and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Over $1.2 million in crypto was donated to museums and cultural institutions in 2025—a nearly 50 percent increase from 2024. “When a crypto donation is received, we instantly convert the crypto to U.S. dollars to capture the full donation value and then send the U.S. dollars directly to the organization’s bank account,” a spokesperson told Observer. Unsurprisingly, crypto donors tend to “skew younger than traditional major donors”—millennials and younger Gen X—“but they also tend to be meaningfully wealthier than the average online donor.”

Making non-cash gifts offers tax benefits to donors, Cerini said, noting that “with the uptick in the stock market and cryptocurrencies realizing significant gains, there is real value in the donation of these assets, as donors get the benefit of a charitable contribution for the fair market value of the asset” without having to sell it and incur capital gains tax.

Chris Haydon, founder of Crypto Appraisal Pro, which provides IRS-compliant appraisals for cryptocurrency donations, stated that more than 70 percent of the top charities in the U.S., as ranked by Forbes, accept cryptocurrency donations. “That’s up from just 12 percent in 2020.” Donations of crypto have more than tripled in the past year, driven by the fact that cryptocurrencies have “created enormous wealth. Bitcoin alone has gone from under $1,000 in 2017 to over $90,000 today. Early holders are sitting on massive unrealized gains.” He added that “five years ago, accepting crypto was a novelty. Today, for major charities, universities and hospitals, it’s becoming standard practice.”

As with any other non-cash charitable donation—such as artwork or an antique—donors may receive a tax deduction (usually 30 percent of the item’s fair market value) if the asset has been held for more than one year, with the value assessed at the time of the gift. According to IRS rules, if the charitable contribution deduction claimed exceeds $5,000, a qualified appraisal is required.

Finding an appraiser with crypto expertise who is qualified to submit an IRS-compliant valuation is not easy. None of the members of the two largest appraiser associations—the Appraisers Association of America and the American Society of Appraisers—list crypto as a specialty. While some nonprofit staff may suggest a name, most follow Adam Levine’s policy: “We don’t recommend appraisers for art or crypto or anything. That’s something for the donors to take care of… we don’t want to get embroiled with the IRS.”

Linda Selvin, executive director of the Appraisers Association of America, recommends seeking out individuals identified as “business appraisers” to conduct qualified crypto appraisals. Some companies that offer appraisal services for non-cash assets include Charitable Solutions, Havenwood Holdings, AppraiseItNow.com and Sickler, Tarpey & Associates. Platforms that enable crypto donations—such as The Giving Block, Dechomai and Fidelity—can also provide recommendations. Appraisal fees vary with the value of the gift: Randy Tarpey, a CPA and partner at Sickler, Tarpey & Associates, charges $120 for donations in the $5,000 range and $995 for donations above $500,000. Joe Kattan, owner of AppraiseItNow.com, said his fees range from $400 to $2,000.

Perhaps one of the defining features of crypto is its volatility, rising and falling in value rapidly since—unlike the U.S. dollar—it is not pegged to other currencies or backed by a central bank. Still, Haydon argued, “crypto is easier to appraise than art or collectibles. With a Picasso or a rare antique, you’re making subjective judgments about condition, provenance and comparable sales that may be years apart. With Bitcoin or Ethereum, you have transparent, real-time pricing market data across multiple exchanges, 24 hours a day. The asset’s value at any given moment is publicly verifiable.” CNBC provides daily pricing data for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies; no one can tell you what that Picasso is worth today versus tomorrow.

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Daniel Grant

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February 7, 2026
The Best Holiday Gifts for the Art Lovers and Artists On Your List

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When it comes to gifts for art lovers, wrapping original art is the ultimate power move. But here’s the catch: collectors pour their hearts—and usually their bank accounts—into curating deeply personal collections. If you know your giftee very, very well, a piece of art can be a very, very good gift. You could also treat the collector in your life to a gallery outing or surprise them with a session with an art advisor. But if adding to their collection feels too ambitious, there are plenty of artsy presents for everyone on your list, from the absolute obsessive to the casually cultured. Whether you’re working with a shoestring budget or aiming for extravagance, there’s no shortage of options that are thoughtful, stylish and primed to impress. Enjoy our guide to the gifts guaranteed to thrill any art enthusiast.

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Christa Terry

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November 28, 2025
How Jenny Holzer Questions Today’s Truths in Her Soon-to-Close Show at the Guggenheim

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An installation view of Jenny Holzer’s “Light Line,” closing soon at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2024 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Filip Wola k

In her thirty-year career, Jenny Holzer has explored the power of words in public spaces and their impact on individuals, examining the relationships between truth, belief, bias, power and control. Her highly anticipated and widely attended presentation at the Guggenheim showcases her deep engagement with signs and symbols and their social, political, and commercial implications. As this major exhibition, “Light Line,” concludes on Sunday (Sept. 29), it’s an ideal moment to reflect on its significance within today’s complex societal and political context.

With her incisive voice, Holzer addresses pressing issues such as climate justice, women’s rights, political corruption and the violence of war. Her return to the Guggenheim takes place in an increasingly polarized political landscape and amid global instability, making the show a timely exploration of the responsibilities tied to power—whether wielded by governments or individuals. The exhibition underscores the ever-relevant dynamics between words and truth, which have only been further complicated by emerging communication technologies. Here, the artist adopts and manipulates mass communication strategies to confront the politics of public space, using language as her primary medium to respond to sociopolitical realities and reveal how we acquire—or lose—information about the world around us.

Jenny Holzer installing an exhibition in December of 1989 at New York’s Guggenheim.
Photo: Michele Perel © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

In 1982, the Public Art Fund invited Holzer to present her work on a monumental urban scale with a sign in Times Square, creating something akin to a billboard. Electronic signs have been central to her practice ever since. One of the most iconic is her 1989 LED artwork for the Guggenheim, which has been reimagined for this new exhibition using the latest technology, including artificial intelligence, to create graphics behind the scrolling text. Climbing all six ramps, the central installation features texts from her “Truism” series (1977-1996) and is the result of a complex reverse-engineering process by Guggenheim conservators, raising intriguing questions about the durational nature of digital messages and words.

Holzer began writing her Truisms (1977-79) while a student in the Whitney Independent Study Program, conceiving concise, often paradoxical statements that mimic the language of advertisements and propaganda to question the relative nature of truth. Playing between public and private, institution and street, legal and illegal, Holzer deployed these sharp aphorisms in both temporary and enduring formats such as posters, electronic signs, stone benches and paintings. By moving between intimate existential claims and societal commentary on an urban scale, Holzer has used language to explore how truths can be silenced, distorted or manipulated by authority figures, media and governments. Her work reveals communication strategies that lead people to mindlessly internalize ideas and ideologies shaped by those in power. Echoing Paulo Freire’s ideas in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it addresses the ways people often uncritically accept answers from external authorities instead of engaging with the complexities of thought as multidimensional beings who exist simultaneously as individuals, family members and members of society.

This problematization of language and media relations is clear in the very first room, featuring Inflammatory Wall (1979-1982)—a series of vibrant, thought-provoking posters covering all the walls and forming a chaotic, abstract and pixelated grid. While the posters’ sharp assertions raise pointed observations that challenge societal norms and perceptions, the message is also submerged in the overwhelming multitude and distracting color composition, creating a continuous tension between content and context.

Jenny Holzer’s work deploys text in public spaces across an array of media, including ephemeral ones like posters. © 2024 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ariel Ione Williams and David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

As one moves further into the show, a new version of Truism from 2023 features these inquisitive and provocative statements carved into six solid Carrara white marble benches, standing as unsettling monuments to a shared failure to decode the truth. “A positive attitude makes all the difference in the world. Ambition is just as dangerous as Complacency. Confusing yourself is a way to stay honest,” reads one. This statement encapsulates the core message Holzer seems to convey: embracing confusion and ignorance, in the spirit of thinkers like Plato and Susan Sontag, as a way to navigate an increasingly complicated reality while continuing to question it. Ignorance, rather than a way to ignore reality, becomes a catalyst for deeper learning and engagement.

Further up the ramp, starkly contrasting the permanence of the solid marble, are about forty irregular metal fragments mounted on the wall as part of Holzer’s Cursed series. Looking like degraded versions of ancient steles, these plaques bear tweets posted by Donald Trump during his presidency. With their wrinkled surfaces and ripped edges, they manifest their ephemerality, rusting almost as soon as tweeted—worthy of only the fleeting attention they receive in the relentless internet stream.

One level higher in the rotunda, the exhibition expands to include a wide range of political and military document-based works, showcasing Holzer’s deeper exploration into propaganda, factual information and manipulated messages. Declassified government documents are transformed into ghostly, sometimes silvery-shining painted versions of the originals. The intentional occultation of the original messages with scribbles, leafed metal and gestural watercolor compositions complicates the viewer’s relationship with the truth, prompting a painstaking process of decoding each piece’s relevance, aided only by the scanning of QR captions. Upon closer inspection, these seemingly abstract compositions actually conceal transcriptions of U.S. military records, discussions surrounding post-9/11 detainees and government reports on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Holzer’s interplay of color, paint and light becomes both a trap and a test—challenging the viewer to either succumb to a superficial appreciation of the work’s aesthetic appeal or take on a more investigative approach.

As the exhibition continues along the ramp, viewers encounter bronze and aluminum plaques that Holzer created in the early 1980s. Mimicking the aesthetics of permanent labels on historic buildings, these works hold the same authority as warnings, directions or quiet observations while conveying existential advice from her Living (1980-1982) and Survival (1983-1985) series.

To celebrate the exhibition, the artist’s projection For the Guggenheim, originally commissioned in 2008, has once again illuminated Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic curving architecture. © 2024 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Filip Wola k

Amid this endless interplay of signs, semiological traps and traces staged along the Guggenheim’s ramps, the raw reality of violence abruptly emerges through a series of cast replicas of human scapulae affixed to the building’s wings. As Heidegger might suggest with his notion of “Being-towards-Death,” these elements serve as stark reminders of mortality, confronting viewers with the unavoidable philosophical and existential truth no one can escape. In this way, Holzer’s work appears to align with the Heideggerian belief that facing death is not merely a personal concern but a fundamental ontological condition, revealing the nature of Being as perpetually incomplete and “in question.”

By the time one reaches the end of the show, Jenny Holzer’s position becomes unmistakably clear: at some point, the collision with reality and truth is inevitable. This idea is underscored by three broken marble benches titled Broken (2024), lying shattered on the floor. The truth remains present, but only in disjointed fragments, reflecting a moment of rupture that exposes the fragility of any illusion. It suggests that the only truth we can hope to grasp is a scattered puzzle of elements that we must painstakingly piece together to find meaning. Ultimately, Holzer succeeds once again in sparking a dialogue about the nature of truth and its fragility—whether objective, subjective or entirely constructed by societal power structures.

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Elisa Carollo

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September 27, 2024
Pioneering Internet Artist Shu Lea Cheang Receives the 2024 LG Guggenheim Award

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Shu Lea Cheang is the second recipient of the award. SMITH © SMITH, Paris, 2024

Shu Lea Cheang, an early pioneer in the field of digital art, is the second recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award, as announced today (March 5). Selected by an international jury of art, culture and technology experts, she will receive an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000.

The prize is given by the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, a five-year partnership established in 2022 between New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the South Korean company LG that promotes artists working at the intersection of art and technology. “Shu Lea Cheang was one of the first to recognize the liberatory potential of the digital realm,” said Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s chief curator and deputy director, in a statement. “We celebrate her bold explorations of bodies, and their desires, in our digital and analog worlds, and are thrilled, alongside LG, to recognize her necessary work.”

SEE ALSO: Artist Barbara Earl Thomas On Creation, Contemplation and Bringing People Together

Cheang, 69, is a Taiwanese, American and French multi-hyphenate artist whose work has engaged myriad new technologies since the 1990s. She has produced and directed four feature-length films—1994’s Fresh Kill, 2000’s I.K.U., 2017’s Fluidø and 2023’s UKI—and her art is in the collections of institutions like the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou.

Shu Lea Cheang, UKI, 2023. Digital color video, with sound, 80 min. Courtesy Guggenheim

Shu Lea Cheang: trailblazer in internet and digital art

Cheang has long been at the forefront of exploring the impact of technological change on society. Her 1998 piece Brandon, for example, made history as the first-ever web art commissioned by the Guggenheim. The work, which explored the legacy of Brandon Teena, a transgender man who was murdered in 1993, was restored in 2017 by a team of computer-based conservationists at the Guggenheim.

Decades later, Cheang’s contributions to digital culture remain relevant. In 2019, she represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale with 3x3x6, a mixed-media installation whose title alludes to industrial imprisonment (the title refers to a 3×3 square-meter cell monitored by six cameras). Focused on surveillance in the digital age, it referenced ten different cases of imprisonment incited by gender, sexual and racial nonconformity.

Shu Lea Cheang, Baby Love (from Locker Baby Project), 2005. Networked media installation, dimensions variable. Installation view: Baby Love, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, December 8, 2005– January 8, 2006. Photo : Florian Kleinefenn

The artist’s oeuvre also includes experimentations with technological themes ranging from alternative currencies to movement sensors. More recent works like 2017’s Mycelium Network Society examined the nature of biotechnologies, while her 2023 installation Utter focused on the societal implications of machine learning.

In their jury statement, panelists for the LG Guggenheim Award praised Cheang’s “fascinating overview of advanced technologies.” Jury members included Eungie Joo, head of contemporary art the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Koyo Kouoh, executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art; Noam Segal, LG Electronics Associate Curator at the Guggenheim; Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Art Contemporanea; and Stephanie Dinkins, the recipient of the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award.

Cheang is set to discuss her practice and future works in a May 2 public program at the Guggenheim’s theater. “The LG Guggenheim Award revives an honorable tradition of the electronic industry’s support for art and technology,” she said in a statement. “To be recognized by an assembly of diverse jury members grants me tremendous confidence in continuing and expanding my art practice.”

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Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly

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March 5, 2024