What the Fisher Collection Tells Us About Art Donations

As someone who came to the art world from the outside, I spend a lot of time asking questions. One of the privileges of working at Museum Exchange is that there are people here who really know the answers.

Michael Darling, Museum Exchange's co-founder and Chief Growth Officer, is one of them. Over the past two years that I’ve worked here, I've learned more about how art donations actually work—the unwritten rules, the negotiations, the politics—from conversations with Michael than from anything I'd read before. 

But sometimes those two intersect, such as earlier this month when the New York Times called Michael to help explain the nuances of the Fisher family's extraordinary arrangement with SFMOMA.

Geometric Apple Core by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on view in “Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10” at SFMOMA. Photo: Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times.

The deal is worth understanding. The Fisher family, founders of the Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy, negotiated a 100-year loan with SFMOMA that delivered 735 works by 100 artists along with a $250 million cash gift to grow the museum's endowment and gallery space. But there was a catch: the museum was required to present a dedicated exhibition of the collection every ten years.

As Michael put it in the piece: "Donors hate giving, then have their works sit in storage, and most museums bristle at donors imposing rules."

The Fisher family had the kind of relationship and leverage that made an exception like this possible. Donald Fisher sat on the museum's board for 26 years and the family’s collection of post-war art was among the most significant in the country. Those possibilities aren’t available to most collectors. Donors without decades-long relationships and substantial cash gifts rarely get to negotiate exhibition terms. That's not a criticism of the process. It's just the reality of how leverage works in this space. 

For collectors who want their work to find a meaningful home, without needing a dynasty-level arrangement, there are options. In 2025, Museum Exchange facilitated 562 donations placed across 86 institutions in 33 states. 93% of those works went to institutions outside the donor's home state, and 59% landed outside major metropolitan areas entirely—places where a single gift can reshape what a community has access to. That's the world Michael moves in every day. Which is why many people call him for insight, including the Times...and me.