It's not just us city folk who appreciate the art institutes here. The New Yorker reports that Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art, has received quite a generous donation from a neighbor of his Vermont house who passed away. They say, "Two years ago, when Lowry heard that a man named Michael H. Dunn, from the town of Derby, just across the lake from him, had dropped dead of a heart attack, and that his estate, in excess of ten million dollars, had been left to MOMA, he was flabbergasted."

The donation, which is over $10.5 million, was just announced officially at a small ceremony at the museum, "outside a second-floor gallery that had Dunn’s name on the wall." Dunn is said to have come from a well-off family, increasing his foturnes in the stock market, but later in life lived simply in Vermont (shopping at Wal-Mart and residing in a "ramshackle home").

Lowry says the gift came with no restrictions, and that Dunn “got out of the stock market before the recession, thank God, so those are real dollars. We’ll use some of it for acquisitions, but most of it will go to build up our endowment. And we’re told that there is more coming.” This is the largest "unexpected" gift MoMA has ever received.