This post was originally published on artnews.com
Elaine Wynn, a cofounder of Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas who put her billions toward arts and education philanthropy, has died at 82. The news was confirmed by her namesake family foundation on Tuesday, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which first broke the news. The foundation reportedly did not state a cause of death.
Once dubbed the “Queen of Las Vegas,” Wynn and her former husband Stephen A. Wynn left an indelible impression on Sin City, opening all along on the Las Vegas Strip, from the Mirage to the Bellagio to the Wynn. As her wealth grew, she not only amassed one of the world’s top art collections but also supported arts and educational causes.
“We are all deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Elaine Wynn, and send our condolences to her daughters, grandchildren, and her many close friends,” Wynn Resorts said in a statement. “As co-founder and one of the largest shareholders of Wynn Resorts, she helped to create and grow the company to become the most esteemed luxury resort brand in the world. Her many talents and special touches are indelibly imprinted on the company and still evident throughout our resorts.”
Her collection features blue-chip names like Édouard Manet, Joan Mitchell, and Lucian Freud. In 2013, at Christie’s New York, she purchased Francis Bacon’s 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud for $142.4 million. When it sold, it set the record for the highest price ever achieved at auction, a benchmark it held for two years.
She first ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list in 2005 with Steve, and then ranked individually for a decade, from 2014 to 2024.
As an arts philanthropist, Wynn has had an outsized influence on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, one of the West Coast’s largest museums. She joined the LACMA board in 2011, and was elected as its co-chair in 2015, a position she held until her death. In 2012, she provided funds to bring Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012) to LACMA from the California desert, where it now stands seemingly precariously over a recessed walkway at the back of the museum’s campus.
As co-chair, she helped spearhead the fundraising drive for the museum’s forthcoming Peter Zumthor–designed building, giving $50 million in 2016. And in 2011, President Barack Obama named her a trustee of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Her support for educational causes was equally as large. From 1985 to 1991, she served as chairwoman of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Foundation, a philanthropic fundraising arm of the university, with the aim to bolster its reputation as a leading research university. Then, beginning in 2011, she held appointments on state educational boards, including the Blue Ribbon Education Reform Task Force and later the Nevada State Board of Education.
“[Elaine Wynn] was a tireless advocate for Las Vegas, for children and their education, and for the arts,” the Wynn Resorts statement continued. “We’re grateful that the enduring sense of philanthropy she instilled in our company continues to this day.”
Wynn always felt that her most important philanthropic cause was the national nonprofit Communities in Schools, where she was a longtime trustee since 1999 and a onetime chairman.
“Kids can come to a school that has great teachers, but if they’re hungry, poorly clothed or have a bad family situation, they are not receptive to learning that day,” she told the New York Times Magazine in 2012. “Children have to be treated holistically to solve these issues.”
Elaine Pascal Wynn was born on April 28, 1942, in New York and was raised there and partially in Miami Beach. She graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1964 with a political science degree. She met Steve Wynn on a blind date during her studies; they were married in 1963, at the end of her junior year. (The couple divorced in 1986, then remarried in 1991 before divorcing for the second time in 2010.)
After Steve took over his family’s bingo parlor in Maryland, according to the Review-Journal, the Wynns had the opportunity to invest in the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, which ultimately spurred their move to the city in 1967. “We decided if we were going to be in the gaming-entertainment-amusement business, why not go to where it really exists in a much greater capacity,” Elaine Wynn once said.
After acquiring a majority stake in the Golden Nugget in downtown Vegas, the Wynns set their sights on the Strip, building the Mirage, a Polynesian-themed, 3,000-room casino resort that cost $630 million to construct. She told the New York Times Magazine in 2012 that it was her idea to push the entryway of the hotel from the sidewalk and add its now famous erupting volcano. “I said that we had to push it back, that people wouldn’t get the benefit of the architectural design if they didn’t have a frame of reference,” Wynn said.
The Mirage was the first new addition to the Strip in 15 years when it opened in 1989, and it would soon set off a mass redevelopment of the Las Vegas Strip, partially fueled by the Wynns’ various additions to it.
Treasure Island came next in 1993, built on the site of the Mirage’s former parking lot. Sited on the former Dunes hotel and its golf course, the Monte Carlo (now called the Park MGM) opened in 1996, as part of joint venture between the Wynn’s Mirage Resorts and Circus Circus. That culminated in the opening of the Bellagio, with its iconic dancing water fountain, in 1998, for $1.6 billion, then the priciest resort even built.
Among the Bellagio’s amenities was the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, which showed the masterpieces owned by the company and the Wynns, with works on view by Monet, van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, and more. The gallery was an extension of what was already present at the Wynns’ other properties, where pieces by Picasso, Degas, and Giacometti were on view. The Gallery was also able to secure major loans from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In 2000, MGM Grand Inc. acquired Mirage Resorts for $6.4 billion. Two years later, the Wynns launched their eponymous Wynn Resorts, with the Wynn Las Vegas opening in 2005 on the site of the former Desert Inn. That would be followed by the Encore in 2008, a sister resort that is connected to the Wynn. And Wynn Resorts would ultimately become more international than Mirage Resorts; the company would open three Wynn Resorts properties in Macau, China, between 2006 and 2016, with a planned one for Al Marjan Island in the United Arab Emirates, set to open in 2027.
In her 2012 New York Times Magazine interview, when asked about her contributions to the companies, she rebuffed a claim that her billions merely came from her divorce, responding, “Did I create an environment that allowed him to thrive? Did I create an anchoring to the personality that made us have good equilibrium? That’s what I’d say I hope my contribution is. Is that worth a billion dollars? I have no idea how to quantify that.”
As part of the second divorce settlement, Elaine, who at the time was the third largest shareholder of Wynn Resorts, did not have voting rights of the company, according to the New York Times. Instead, Steve held the voting rights of her shares. She sued in 2012 to reclaim them but was unsuccessful. Then in 2015, she was not reelected to the company’s board.
Her involvement with the company changed, however, in 2018, after the Wall Street Journal reported on Steve’s alleged pattern of sexual misconduct, which included a $7.5 million payment to a manicurist after she filed a report with the company that she had forced to have sex with Steve in 2005. That incident was revealed through another lawsuit from Elaine, who had filed suit to lift restrictions on her ability to sell her stocks in the company. (In the suit, she said she had learned of the payment in 2009.)
In the aftermath, Steve resigned from his role as CEO of Wynn Resorts, and he sold his 12-percent stake in the company. He also paid Elaine $25 million and restored her voting rights. Elaine then became the company’s largest stakeholder, owning a 9 percent stake, at the time worth around $2 billion, according to the New York Times. (According to Forbes, which continually ranked her on its list of “America’s Self Made Women,” she owned 8 percent at the time of her death and was worth $1.9 billion.)
In the months following, Elaine started a proxy campaign to remove members from the company’s board, whom she believed were still loyal to Steve. “This is the only megaphone I have,” she told the Times. “It’s the only way I can send a signal to the board and the investor community that the largest shareholder wants changes made.”
She added, “My mission is to resurrect the integrity of this extraordinary company that is really the capstone of my professional life. I could just quietly sell my shares and go off into the sunset and pursue philanthropy. But my mantra is, it’s not where you start in life, it’s where you end up. And I’m not about to go off and leave this company that I helped build as tarnished as it has become.”
But Wynn also wanted to leave her mark on the arts in Las Vegas. In December 2023, the city approved an agreement for the Las Vegas Museum of Art, with Wynn and LACMA, where she was co-chair, serving as partners on the project. Then in September 2024, the forthcoming museum, estimated to cost $150 million, was given a 1.5-acre parcel in downtown Vegas. (The site is located across from the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, where Wynn had established the Elaine Wynn Studio for Arts Education in 2011.)
According to the Art Newspaper, the museum, which will occupy 90,000 square feet over two floors and operate as a kunsthalle, had a $50 million endowment and Wynn was subsidizing its operations, including the salary of its director. As of 2024, it was scheduled to open in 2028.
“My days are numbered,” Wynn told the New York Times last year, describing herself as an “angel donor” of the project. “I thought, what’s my final gift? I want to leave an imprint other than my name on a hotel casino.”
Last summer, ahead of the closure of the Mirage, after nearly 35 years in business and its forthcoming redevelopment as the Hard Rock Las Vegas, Wynn attended the hotel’s closing ceremony.
“It’s a very poignant moment for me, and I didn’t realize the impact of it until I walked into the building,” Wynn said during remarks at the event, according to the Nevada Independent. “But this is what we do in Las Vegas. We reinvest, we refresh, and we keep Las Vegas as one of the most exciting cities in the entire world.”