The Walker Art Center just landed the kind of money museums dream about: a $7.5 million gift from furniture magnate John Gabbert that creates the Minneapolis institution’s first-ever endowed exhibition fund.
The newly formed John Gabbert and Room & Board Foundation Exhibition Fund is designed to keep the Walker’s galleries humming, providing long-term backing for exhibitions and related programming aimed at a wide range of audiences.
According to an announcement reported by Bring Me The News, the fund will underwrite two Walker shows each year. The first to benefit was “Show & Tell: An Exhibition for Kids,” which opened in late 2025, with Suzanne Jackson’s retrospective What Is Love next in line, scheduled to open May 14. The museum disclosed the gift roughly a week after publicly announcing that it had recently acquired around 40 works through a mix of purchases and donations…