Margrit Mondavi makes $2 million pledge for UC Davis art museum

•  Pledge launches fundraising drive

•  ‘Margrit Mondavi's continued altruism is surpassed only by her great personal zeal and spirit of life’

Margrit Biever Mondavi has pledged $2 million to help the University of California, Davis, plan and build a new art museum that will house and display some 4,000 works that the university has collected over the past 40 years.

The pledge marks the start of a $30 million fundraising initiative for the project. The new museum will serve as a teaching and cultural resource for the university and the public.

Ms. Mondavi is an artist and supporter of the arts. She and her husband, the late Robert Mondavi, in 2001 gave UC Davis the largest single gift it had ever received, $35 million to support the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, and the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

"The excellent teaching artists of the past and the prominent faculty at UC Davis today deserve a great home for art, which is an ongoing love affair of my life.

says Ms. Mondavi.

The art museum is planned for a site between the Mondavi Center and Maurice J. Gallagher Jr. Hall, the new home of the university's Graduate School of Management.

The new museum will display and hold most of the university's Fine Arts Collection, much of which has been stored for years in the Art Building. In addition, the museum will be used to carry out the university's teaching and research mission.

"Margrit Mondavi's continued altruism is surpassed only by her great personal zeal and spirit of life," says Wayne Thiebaud, a UC Davis professor emeritus of art. "Once again she helps to advance the university's ongoing progress toward creating a rich environment for us all."