Who is Mimi Gardner Gates? Meet ‘the woman in the hat’

Hats off to her!

Monthly bill and Melinda Gates’ eldest daughter, Jennifer Gates, might be the major spectacle at her lavish Westchester County wedding ceremony to fellow equestrian Nayel Nassar on Saturday, but the twenty five-year-previous Stanford grad may perhaps have some opposition in the design and style office.

On Thursday, Mimi Gardner Gates — a 79-year-previous revered artwork historian who’s also the stepmother of billionaire Monthly bill Gates — arrived in New York for the weekend’s celebrations donning a striking jester-like cap.

Gardner Gates will be amid the 1-percenters at the 124-acre, $sixteen million farm in North Salem that Jennifer’s mother and father acquired her in 2018.

Gardner Gates accompanied sixty five-year-previous Monthly bill on a helicopter to New York Town immediately after landing in Newark in her stepson’s personal jet — and beamed underneath a black beanie with a flower-formed topper.

(Gates, meanwhile, wore a much more modest polo shirt and khakis for his arrival.)

Gardner Gates, a Stanford graduate who attained her Ph.D. in artwork background at Yale, married Monthly bill Gates Sr. — an legal professional and philanthropist who died very last September at age ninety four — in 1996.

She was the director of the Seattle Artwork Museum from 1994 to 2009, and now serves as director emerita overseeing SAM’s Gardner Center for Asian Artwork and Ideas. Prior to that, she put in two a long time at Yale College Artwork Gallery as an Asian artwork curator just before starting to be its director in 1987, according to her bio on the Gates Cambridge Scholarship web site.

Amongst her other achievements in Seattle, she co-made a nine-acre waterfront sculpture park in the downtown neighborhood of Belltown — a plot that reportedly would have usually been bought to condominium developers. She also extra much more than two,five hundred will work of artwork to SAM’s collection and boosted its endowment from $24.five million in 1994 to $75.five million in 2005.

Gardner Gates was divorced when the elder Gates requested her to supper.

“I did not believe, ‘He’s inquiring me out.’ I thought he required to get much more associated in the museum,” she previously explained to the Seattle Write-up-Intelligencer. 

The two shared a silent courtship, and she identified as him a “prince of a guy.”

“I hardly ever imagined I’d be so joyful in my own life,” she explained to the publication.

Messages sent to the Seattle Artwork Museum and Yale searching for to contact Gardner Gates were being not returned by press time.