NFL Team Owner Gives National Gallery $116 Million to Mark Nation’s 250th Anniversary

Justin Chiet

Billionaire businessman and art collector Mitchell Rales gave $116 million to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to endow Across the Nation, the museum’s program to lend major artworks to regional museums across the country. Rales said in a news release that he was endowing the program to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“I am thrilled and humbled to support a program that will deepen access to the nation’s collection for Americans throughout the country in perpetuity and to honor this remarkable moment in our country’s history — our 250th anniversary,” said Rales.

Rales co-founded Danaher Corporation, a manufacturing and medical-technology company in Washington, D.C., and he is part owner of the Washington Commanders NFL team. Rales is a significant collector of post-World War II art, and in 2006 he and his then-wife, Emily Wei Rales, founded Glenstone, a $3 billion foundation and art museum in Potomac, Md., that is free and open to the public.

He has been a member of the National Gallery’s Board of Trustees for the past 20 years and served as president from 2019 to 2024. He provided early support to the museum’s art-loan program last year, and so far Across the Nation has reached nearly 900,000 visitors across 10 partner museums since the first loans were installed last spring. This most recent gift was given through his Mitchell P. Rales Family Foundation.

Other Recent Big Gifts Include:

Providence Saint John’s Health Center

Stanley Lucas left an estimated $100 million to advance prostate cancer research and care at the Santa Monica, Calif., hospital. Some of the money will be used to establish the Stanley H. Lucas Endowed Chair in Urology, which will support research, disease prevention, diagnostics, and treatment programs for prostate cancer and other urologic diseases. Lucas was a real estate investor and antique car collector who founded Lucas Automotive Engineering in 1957. The company produced specialized parts for early Fords. He died last year at 86.

National Public Radio

Billionaire philanthropist Connie Ballmer gave $80 million to expand public radio’s use of digital technologies and ensure it is reaching audiences regardless of the platforms or devices listeners use. The gift comes after Congress voted to eliminate all federal funding for public media last summer. 

Ballmer is married to Steve Ballmer, who served as CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014 and now owns the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. The couple are longtime donors who have appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of biggest donors three times. They conduct most of their charitable giving through their Ballmer Group.

Scripps Health

Ernest and Evelyn Rady pledged $75 million through their Rady Foundation to support the construction of Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla’s North Tower, an inpatient building that will be named for the Radys. Ernest Rady founded American Assets in 1967, which later became a publicly traded real-estate investment trust. He also founded Insurance Company of the West, and he led Westcorp, a financial-services firm that is now a part of banking giant Wells Fargo. The Radys have given extensively to San Diego-area nonprofits and have appeared six times on the Philanthropy 50 list over the last two decades.

University of California at Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine

Kathy Chiao and Kenneth Hao gave $75 million to help pay for the construction of the university’s new small-animal hospital, which will be named for the donors. The money will also be used to support scholarships, animal-human translational medicine, and programs for those unable to afford veterinary care for their pets. Hao is chairman and managing partner of Silver Lake, a Menlo Park, Calif., private equity firm focused on technology companies.

University of California at San Diego

Taner Halocioğlu pledged $50 million to establish the Halocioğlu School of Data Science and Computing, which will unite the Halocioğlu Data Science Institute and the San Diego Supercomputer Center into a single integrated school. Halocioğlu earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the university in 1996 and went on to work for the technology companies Loudcloud and eBay. He joined Facebook in October 2004 as its first full-time hire, serving as a software and operations engineer. 

He left Facebook in 2009 and later taught at the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering in the computer science and engineering department. He gave the university $75 million in 2017 to launch the Halocioğlu Data Science Institute and appeared on that year’s Philanthropy 50 list.

Rhode Island School of Design

Delle Maxwell and Patrick Hanrahan gave $20 million through their Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation to establish the Maxwell Scholarship Fund, which will add eight new, full-tuition scholarships for undergraduate students. The gift will also support the Maxwell Global Perspectives Faculty Fund, which will endow two new faculty positions and one rotating visiting residency for scholars, artists, designers, and architects. 

Delle Maxwell, who graduated from RISD in 1974, is a retired animator and computer graphics designer who worked in television. Patrick Hanrahan is a computer-graphics researcher who co-founded Tableau Software, a data-visualization and business-intelligence platform. He is the Canon Professor in the School of Engineering and a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.