Former Microsoft exec and wife donate $200M worth of art to Seattle Art Museum

Shirley would later become a Microsoft executive, a prominent Seattle art philanthropist and one of the world’s foremost collectors of work by Calder, perhaps best known to Seattleites for “The Eagle,” his soaring red sculpture at Olympic Sculpture Park. Now, Shirley, 84, and his wife, Kim Richter Shirley, are donating their entire collection of Calder artworks, estimated to be worth $200 million, to the Seattle Art Museum.

“It’s a historic gift,” said Ellanor Notides, West Coast chairman of auction house Christie’s, which provided the estimate. “It’s one of the preeminent collections of Calders in the world.”

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The gift is a bequest, which means that the Shirley Family Calder Collection’s 48 works, assembled over the past 35 years and including multiple hanging and standing mobiles dating from the 1930s to the 1970s, will be officially transferred to the Seattle Art Museum upon Jon Shirley’s death.

But the artworks will be on view before then: SAM will showcase all 48 works from the collection during a nine-month exhibit (supported by an additional $1 million gift from the Shirleys) to open in early November.

And while some of the artworks will return to the collectors’ home in Medina until Shirley’s death, many will regularly show up at SAM in annual Calder exhibits.

To that end, the couple is also creating a $10 million endowment and will be donating $250,000 to $500,000 annually on top of that to support future programs, exhibits, events and research related to Calder’s work, his cultural influences and his impact on modern and contemporary art. The museum’s double-height gallery on the third floor — currently home to large-scale paintings by Anselm Kiefer and a jumbo mouse sculpture — will become a permanent gallery dedicated to Calder and related programming.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity for SAM,” said Amada Cruz, director and CEO of the Seattle Art Museum. “But I also want to say: It’s an extraordinary opportunity for Seattle and for anyone who comes to visit.”

In an interview, the Shirleys echoed Cruz’s sentiment. “I think that this will produce a draw for people to come to the museum,” Shirley said. “[I’m] hoping that this will bring people into the museum when they come in from out of town and put us more on the map on a national basis.”

It may very well: the Shirleys’ collection, which Shirley started more than three decades ago with his wife Mary, who died in 2013, is said to be among the best privately held Calder collections in the U.S. It includes signature Calder works like “Gamma” and “Bougainvillier,” both delicate and slender mobiles from 1947, as well as “Fish,” a rare example of Calder’s fish mobiles made during World War II.

The gift will make SAM, along with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, one of just two major repositories for Calder work on the West Coast, said Alexander S. C. Rower, president of the Calder Foundation and grandson of the artist. Once at SAM, the Shirley collection will be one of the most extensive public Calder collections in the world.

Giving to SAM

The gift comes just two years after another significant donation of modern artworks to SAM: In 2021, the museum received a $400 million collection of abstract expressionist and European masterworks once owned by the late Medina philanthropists Jane Lang Davis and Richard E. Lang.

While the multimillion-dollar art collections of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Seattle travel magnate Barney A. Ebsworth went up for sale at auction after their deaths, the Shirleys felt strongly their collection should belong to SAM.

“We have put a lot of thought into this collection and where it would live,” said Richter Shirley. “It was always intended to go to the museum.”

Ebsworth had once publicly promised a collection of 65 artworks to SAM, including an Edward Hopper masterpiece. But for reasons that remain unclear, the collection was auctioned off shortly after his death.

So how set in stone is this bequest? “We are confident about the details of this generous and comprehensive gift, which are outlined in a legal agreement that includes annual exhibitions and related programs into the future, ensuring that these artworks will be enjoyed by the public for generations,” said SAM’s Cruz.

The Shirleys also have a longstanding relationship with SAM. Both Shirley and Richter Shirley currently serve on the museum’s board of trustees.

Shirley’s relationship with the museum goes back decades: In the early 2000s, he spearheaded the campaign and provided the founding gift to create Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, a 9-acre publicly accessible park full of world-class outdoor art. With Mary, Shirley also seeded an endowment that helps pay for ongoing park operations and provided the funds for the museum to purchase Calder’s “Eagle,” a 38-foot, bright-red steel sculpture made of swooshing interlocking wings punctuating the mountainous skyline as seen from the Sculpture Park.

Jon and Mary Shirley also played an important role in the expansion of the downtown Seattle Art Museum, endowed a curatorial position and have donated more than a hundred artworks to the museum over the years, including glass sculptures by Seattle artists Dale Chihuly, Ginny Ruffner and Preston Singletary.

Calder’s widespread acclaim

But since that MoMA encounter, Calder has taken up a special place in Shirley’s heart and art collection. Like Shirley, Calder was an engineer by training. The Pennsylvania-born artist eventually found his way to a career in the arts but never lost his mechanical touch. He made sculptures come alive with electric toy motors and the currents of the wind. Calder is credited with inventing the now-common mobile: delicate wire sculptures suspended in the air, performing a near-impossible balancing act.

“A lot of what appeals to me is ... just to look at the way these things balance,” Shirley said. “But they balance without any obvious thing causing them to balance, and some of them are quite complex.”

This marriage of mechanics and metaphysics makes Calder’s sculptures vehicles for reflection and joy, Shirley said. “To me, if you’re in a bad mood, just go sit by a Calder for a while.”

Calder — once called America’s most beloved sculptor — won widespread acclaim during his lifetime, with major New York museums like MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney mounting retrospectives when he was still alive. In 1952, Calder represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, the influential international art exhibit, taking home the grand prize for sculpture. Today, you can find his mobiles and nonmoving sculptures (also called “stabiles”) in permanent museum collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art, as well as outdoors in parks and cities across the U.S.

“What is really remarkable about him is that the work is so important” in art history, SAM’s Cruz said. “He was considered the greatest, perhaps, American sculptor. Super innovative. But it’s also accessible. There’s a playfulness in the work.”

To Cruz, this opens up a wealth of possibilities for SAM’s future Calder programming: she envisioned kids coming to the museum to learn how to make mobiles and the museum collaborating with educators on teaching resources and programs. The museum also plans to feature Calder in context with contemporary artists and SAM’s holdings of modern art. And given Calder’s interest in movement and space, Cruz said there are opportunities to collaborate with performing arts organizations as well.

Richter Shirley said the idea is to help provide fresh perspectives on Calder’s work and legacy into the future. “In this way, we can ... help to make SAM a center for Calder on the West Coast,” she said. “We’re particularly excited about what this can mean for Seattle and our region.”

This coverage is partially underwritten by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. The Seattle Times maintains editorial control over this and all its coverage.