Clara Wu Tsai watched the second recreation of the Liberty’s playoff run on the Barclays Heart final week seated between her associates, the artist Rashid Johnson and the rapper Meek Mill. It was a triumphant evening, simply as she had confidently predicted it could be as she left the Crown Membership, Barclays’ personal eating area, earlier than the beginning of the face-off. Dressed merely in black trousers and a sheer sweater, she led her dinner friends — Meek Mill, Johnson and the actress Lake Bell — to their seats courtside.
The New York Liberty, of which Wu Tsai is a co-owner and an ever-present power power, crushed the No. 1-seeded Minnesota Lynx, 87-71. John Turturro, a loyal fan of the group, was additionally within the stadium that evening — seated in a crowd that sustained a roar practically with out interruption.
The Liberty, who took the championship title two years in the past, superior to the semifinals, the place the group is at present trailing the Atlanta Dream and will face elimination in Friday’s recreation.
Whatever the final result, Wu Tsai is likely one of the most celebrated stewards within the W.N.B.A. And at 60, she finds herself at a second of artistic transition, aspiring to go away a broad cultural imprint on Brooklyn that may lengthen past her basketball empire. In late July, she and Joe Tsai, the billionaire chairman of the tech large Alibaba and her husband of 30 years, introduced their cut up. (“Whereas they’ve grown aside,” a spokesman for the couple mentioned on the time, “their divorce is amicable.”)
Within the intervening months, Wu Tsai has ready for the openings of varied public arts initiatives she has sponsored in and round Barclays; settled right into a carriage home in Brooklyn Heights, the place she is spending increasingly time; and turned up on the Venice Movie Competition for the premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Bucking Fastard,” a movie she produced.
It’s a story of two sisters who converse in unison, fall in love with the identical man and collectively dig a tunnel by way of a mountain vary. Wu Tsai learn the script and was transfixed. “I assumed, OK, a film like this may not get made by way of typical channels,” she advised me. “And I simply believed the movie should exist.”
When Wu Tsai thinks that one thing ought to occur, she usually has the means to make sure that it does. Three years in the past, for instance, she flew to Istanbul to woo Breanna Stewart, then a coveted free agent within the Euroleague, to the Liberty. Wu Tsai rented an 80-foot touring boat and took Stewart, her spouse and the couple’s daughter on a cruise.
Wu Tsai started overseeing the group seven years in the past. In 2019, her husband, who held a minority stake within the Brooklyn Nets, purchased the group outright, a purchase order shortly adopted by the couple’s acquisition of the Liberty. Quickly after, they moved the group from Westchester County to Barclays Heart, which, as majority shareholders in Brooklyn Sports activities & Leisure, they successfully management. Wu Tsai ensured that feminine gamers would get pleasure from the identical facilities — expanded coaching services, for instance — that the lads do.
Followers involved that the Tsais’ divorce would lead to a sale of the groups have been relieved to study that regardless of the dissolution of the wedding, the administration and possession construction would stay in place.
Wu Tsai fell in love with basketball rising up the daughter of an economist in Lawrence, Kan., the place she obsessively rooted for the College of Kansas Jayhawks, she advised me. We have been seated at an extended eating desk on the loft like second ground of her carriage home, which is appointed in a darkish, moody palette and outfitted with the kind of modernist bohemian furnishings that instantly remind you the place you aren’t — an antiseptic, glass-tower enjoyable home acquainted to the higher Midtown Manhattan billionaire aesthetic. African beaded chairs stood in an entry area. A Lorna Simpson portray held on one wall of the lounge and a Rashid Johnson on one other.
The Tsais met in New York within the early Nineties when Joe was a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell. He had performed lacrosse at Yale, and the couple’s three youngsters grew up as critical athletes. Earlier than the Tsais took over the Nets and the Liberty, they’d considered shopping for the Houston Rockets, which have been on the block at about the identical time. That they had been in search of a sports activities group each as a result of they thought it could make an excellent asset, Wu Tsai mentioned, and since it could deliver the household, so besotted with sports activities, nearer collectively.
“The youngsters have been actually thinking about Houston as a result of James Harden at the moment was enjoying for Houston,” she mentioned. “I used to be instantly centered on Brooklyn and on New York, which is the place I labored out of enterprise faculty.” Wu Tsai had gone to Stanford, the place she is a trustee, then on to Harvard Enterprise Faculty earlier than touchdown a job at American Categorical.
Within the early section of the pandemic, the Tsais created a $50 million fund focused on efforts to alleviate financial inequality in Brooklyn. Two years earlier, Wu Tsai had co-founded the Reform Alliance together with Meek Mill, the Patriots proprietor Robert Kraft and others, geared toward measures that may enable previously incarcerated folks to extra simply regain a maintain on their lives. Brooklyn, she felt, could be an acceptable place to increase her philanthropic efforts.
A number of the cash in her present fund is deliberate towards a assured primary revenue initiative for brand spanking new moms in Brownsville, the place the poverty price has stood intractably greater than the New York Metropolis common for many years. Some goes to a program that brings incarcerated mother and father and their youngsters collectively as soon as a month on the Brooklyn Youngsters’s Museum. Different cash has been directed at increasing arts and music training in public faculties — curricula based mostly on the work of Max Roach and Jean-Michel Basquiat, each Brooklynites.
A number of the work lined by the fund shouldn’t be as explicitly progressive in spirit — A.I. boot camps and pitch contests for budding entrepreneurs. The winner of a contest to be determined within the coming weeks will obtain a $150,000 grant. Offering “entry to capital” for small companies, Wu Tsai mentioned, is a chief curiosity.
And so too is artwork. Wu Tsai has commissioned Johnson and her pal, the conceptual artist Sarah Sze, to provide items for Barclays. Each Sze’s set up, “Wave,” and a portray of Johnson’s shall be launched this month. “Hundreds of individuals go to the Barclays Heart nearly each evening to expertise one thing particular, whether or not it’s a live performance or a Liberty recreation or a Nets recreation, and so they all go there to be uplifted,” Wu Tsai mentioned. “They go there to cheer, to sing loudly on the high of their lungs with their favourite band, And so I simply thought artwork ought to be a part of that have.”
Wu Tsai additionally lives in Southern California, in La Jolla, the place she raised her youngsters. When she is in Brooklyn, she spends a variety of her time at Barclays, the place the gamers prepare. At one level once we met, she pulled out the Liberty’s 2024 championship ring, a mixture of white diamonds, black diamonds and Brazilian Paraiba tourmalines, in aqua, a Liberty colour. Too large to put on, the piece principally lives in a protected.
I requested Wu Tsai what she did for enjoyable when she was in Brooklyn. She goes to birthday dinners for Liberty gamers, she advised me. She sees her pal Nicholas Ma, a documentary filmmaker and the son of Yo-Yo Ma. She likes to go to Meat Hook, a butcher in Williamsburg. She enjoys having conferences with folks at Café Brume, an Alsatian restaurant on Montague Avenue. Once I requested whether or not she was courting, she mentioned that she was not.
Brooklyn philanthropy exists in its personal cozy insular ecosystem, other than Manhattan, the place fortunes within the a whole lot of tens of millions or billions of {dollars} are in far more ample provide. Given the extent of her wealth, some folks have grumbled about Wu Tsai’s true stage of borough dedication, the suggestion being that she could possibly be doing much more, simply as so many different individuals who have come from Manhattan and settled into $10 million townhouses may.
Wu Tsai has not joined any of the main native cultural boards — not the Brooklyn Museum, or the Brooklyn Botanic Backyard, the Brooklyn Public Library or the Brooklyn Academy of Music (though she has funded an upcoming movie competition, Playback, there). As a substitute, Tsai sits on the boards of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, with its $22 billion in property, and Lincoln Heart. 4 years in the past, the Tsais donated $50 million towards the renovation of Geffen Corridor.
Arts funding in New York has continued to undergo within the aftermath of the pandemic as audiences have shrunk and companies and the federal authorities have pulled their giving again, and the results have been felt most acutely outdoors Manhattan. Stephanie Ingrassia, the vice chair of the Brooklyn Museum board and a longtime Brooklyn philanthropist, mentioned that nice efforts had been made to interact Wu Tsai extra deeply within the lifetime of Brooklyn and that she hopes that as she entrenches herself on this new chapter, she’s going to take into account an rising vary of causes. “We actually are stewards of this place, and we’ve got to assist these small organizations that make Brooklyn Brooklyn,” Ingrassia mentioned.
Wu Tsai’s giving has been a lot chased, and he or she has created sure parameters. She doesn’t contribute to political campaigns, as an example, or constitution faculties. “I believe Brooklyn establishments typically punch above their weight,” she advised me. “They do superb issues. The Brooklyn Museum, their exhibitions are world class.” She does what she will, she advised me, however some issues, she mentioned, are bigger than anybody individual’s capability to unravel.