The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey is now richer by more than 70 artworks after a donation from the collectors Anne and Arthur Goldstein that includes pieces by established figures such as Tauba Auerbach, Darren Bader, Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman, Kunié Sugiura, and John Waters, as well as emerging artists like Ever Baldwin, Troy Lamarr Chew II, and Lamar Peterson.
“Anne and Arthur are visionary collectors who have long championed artists of color, women artists, and members of the LGBTQ+ community,” director Maura Reilly said in a statement. “This gift represents their enduring relationship with the museum and a remarkable synchronicity with the values that are at the heart of our mission to reflect the nation’s most diverse public university.”
The gift will be featured in the upcoming exhibition “Mashup: New Acquisitions from the Zimmerli,” opening in February 2027.
Arthur Goldstein had studied law at Rutgers and first visited the Zimmerli in the early 1990s. He and Anne began collecting two years later, first focusing on photography. They were committed to supporting living artists, many before they were widely recognized, says the museum. They previously donated more than 160 works to the institution, including examples by Vito Acconci, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, and others. They have also donated to larger institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Founded in 1966 as the Rutgers University Art Gallery and renamed the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in 1983, the museum boasts a collection of more than 75,000 works of art. It notably houses an extensive collection of work by nonconformist artists from Moscow, Leningrad, and the former Soviet republics, donated by Norton and Nancy Ruyle Dodge in 1991, and also has strengths in American, European, and Eurasian art as well as original illustrations for children’s literature.
Below are some highlights from the gift.
