If you’ve ever taken an art class at any point in your life, you’ve probably seen Andrew Wyeth’s famous 1948 painting, “Christina’s World,” in which a woman lies in a yellowed, grassy field, gazing toward a farmhouse that feels impossibly far away. Wyeth’s drawings and paintings, created over his seven-decade-long career, evoke nostalgia and longing in a quiet, rural America that has captivated viewers for generations.
His work also generated great wealth for the artist and his family. Andrew Wyeth, who died in 2009, met with huge commercial success during his lifetime not only due to his talent and drive but also to the efforts of his wife, Betsy, who served as his business manager, muse, protector, critic, guide, devoted ally and the “chief architect of the Wyeth mystique.” She was so much a part of the artist’s career that one of the couple’s two sons has said that she should also have signed his paintings. Betsy is credited with introducing him to the real-life Christina, a connection that led to that famous work, as well as setting up tableaus to inspire him, naming his paintings, guarding his time, and more. Other members of the Wyeth family were and are also artists, including Andrew’s father N.C., a successful illustrator known for doing advertisements and popular editions of “Treasure Island” and “The Boy’s King Arthur.”
In 2002, Andrew and Betsy launched and funded the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, a Delaware-based foundation dedicated to encouraging the study, appreciation and recognition of excellence in American art. It has since given out more than $15 million to its cause, today making some three-dozen grants a year. It uses its funds to support nonprofit projects about American art, museum catalogues and books, and conservation and restoration. (The next call for applications opens this winter.) It also supports long-standing programmatic partnerships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a couple of Smithsonian institutions, the College Art Association and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The foundation houses its own collection of more than 7,000 pieces of Andrew Wyeth’s work at two partner locations — the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine — and funds both places.
After Betsy’s death in 2020 at the age of 98, the foundation’s endowment grew. It now sits at around $90 million, not including the value of its art. This summer, the foundation hired its first-ever executive director, Laura West, who started July 1. Just 31 years old, she brings to the task of professionalizing the foundation a master’s degree in art history, an MBA and a background that includes working at Sotheby’s, holding an internship at the Brandywine, and most recently, spending a few years working as a banker at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.
IP caught up with Laura West to learn more about the foundation and what’s next for the Wyeth artistic legacy.
I’m assuming that Betsy Wyeth’s passing turbocharged the work the foundation can do. Is that right?
Yes. The Wyeth Foundation was a central piece in their estate plan, for both of them. It was always their intention that a large majority of their estate go to foundation, so that’s cash, property and works of art. The foundation was given the Allen and Benner islands in Maine, where Andy and Betsy lived in the summers. We sold them to Colby College. They have been using the islands as part of their academic programs. The art is something that we’ll never sell because Betsy’s intention was that the foundation collection would be shown in exhibitions and studied. It’s a tool to amplify Andy’s legacy. We can utilize the collection and go out and talk about his art. You can see on our 990, it looks like we have $304 million, as of 2023. That is reflective of the estate appraisal. Our 5% is not calculated on the art because that’s not sellable. The goal of that art is to curate amazing shows, create a dialogue with other artists, and bring Andy’s work into the public eye.
Why did the Wyeth Foundation hire you as its first executive director now, five years after Betsy’s passing?
They have wonderful people working at the foundation and they were basically helping run it. Once everything was settled, it was time to find someone to do this as their full-time job and formalize the process and structures. The foundation first hired Dr. William Coleman in 2022 as the Wyeth Foundation curator and director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center, comprised of the 7,000 pieces roughly evenly divided between our study centers in Maine and Pennsylvania. Now that the estate is settled and the collection is curated and on a good cycle — Will and his team in Maine and Pennsylvania are constantly working on shows — they wanted to think bigger.
What’s on the agenda for your first year of professionalizing the foundation?
When Andy and Betsy were alive, the focus was excellence in American art — publication and exhibition grants, typically in the $25,000 range, and conservation. Publications were really important for Betsy because they live on; a curator does so much work on an exhibition, sometimes for years, and once it’s down, it’s gone, unless there is a publication. We feel very passionate about these publications. They were able to punch above their weight with these grants.
We will continue our longstanding partner grants and our discretionary grants. But now, we have free reign with Andrew and Betsy Wyeth and the other artists in their family. We are settling into “Wyeth Foundation 2.0.” We hope to work on expanding the legacy of Andy and Betsy and put our weight behind scholarship and exhibitions on their work. We’re now allowed, essentially, to begin really focusing on the Wyeths themselves. It’s becoming well known that we have this amazing resource at those study centers and can put together exhibitions.
Are you reaching out to college museums, like, say, the Blanton Museum of Art at University of Texas at Austin — where I am now — to say, “Hey! Let’s have a show on Andrew Wyeth! We’ve got the work if you’ve got the wall space?”
I’m not reaching out to museums yet. We have so many long-standing partners, like the National Gallery and CAA, the Brandywine and Farnsworth. My goal is to first sit down with our partners and understand what we’ve done up to this point, what’s working and not working, and understand the peer landscape. Then, we have other stakeholders, like our board members, who each come from a different place in what they’re hoping we can do. We have art historians, a conservator, people in governance and business, lawyers and financiers. I will be thinking through all these different perspectives and weaving them together to help guide us into this next stage. Also, working with Will Coleman and seeing how his curatorial vision will align with our operations. How do we project our budget in the future to make some of his curatorial hopes happen?
Artists go in waves. One question is, “How do you bring Andy back into the public conversation and scholarship and study?” Making sure he is always considered in the cannon of American art history is really a goal. He is not always considered a modernist because he was a realist painter. He was accused of being too sentimental, not modern. Now, the pendulum is swinging back and people are reconsidering the way Andy has contributed to American art history and global art history and his craft and skill. Our goal is to amplify that.
We do have an exhibition on Betsy Wyeth opening next summer at the Brandywine, Farnsworth and Colby College Museum of Art. It’s called “By Design: the Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth.”
It sounds like your first year is a lot of assessing and planning and listening.
Yes. This is not like an entrepreneurial “move fast and break things” approach. It’s too valuable and fragile. We all feel lucky to be stewards of the Wyeth family legacy and we don’t take it lightly. We need to maintain what we have and then project into the future in a thoughtful way.
Andrew Wyeth’s subject matter of farmhouses and horses, coastlines and farmlands seem to fit in naturally with the current administration’s America focus and assault on artists, arts organizations, thinkers and educators offering anything other than a so-called “traditional” view of America. Do you see this administration as creating a particularly auspicious time to be promoting this work?
I would hope he would be accepted in all administrations.
We feel that our mission to encourage excellence in American art of all types is even more important now, at a time when institutions’ budgets are being cut, and our ability to help support their missions through our grant program. We’ve chosen not to define “American art” or “excellence in it.” There is so much more than traditional art, and we have a broad range. We don’t only fund work that looks like Andy’s; we have definitely funded exhibitions on modern art and abstract art. We have very few strictures on what we will and won’t fund, other than that we don’t fund exhibitions of art that have been created in the past 30 years. There are so many wonderful organizations that do focus on contemporary art and working artists. It’s easy for the rest of art to fall behind. So our goal is to support the broad definition of American art.
How did you come to this role after your past three years of working as a banker?
I always hoped to be in a role like this, on the business side of art, hopefully at a nonprofit. Everything I’ve done was in hopes of landing in a place like this. I grew up spending time in Chadds Ford and going to Brandywine. I was aware of the Wyeth Foundation. I definitely have an unusual educational path in that I chose to get an art history degree and then an MBA rather than a Ph.D. I never dreamed of being a curator. I love working with art. At Sotheby’s, it’s kind of like trial by fire. I loved that and it sparked deeper interest in study, but my goal was always to combine that with an MBA. I love the strategy and big picture and how you make things happen.
Your very deliberate approach and big-picture view sounds similar to Betsy Wyeth’s.
She was a wonderful figure and really a visionary. Nothing she did was on accident. Everything in her life was by design. I hope her story becomes more in the forefront over time. She and Andy were really partners. She was creating so much of the environment that inspired him. They were really a dynamic duo.
Why do you think Andrew Wyeth’s work is so loved by so many?
It’s painstaking tempera. The attention to detail, the layers and layers of tempera and color. It’s beautiful. The paintings also evoke a sense of place. You can almost hear the leaves crunching in the fall pictures or smell the salt in the Maine pictures. Walking around the places that inspired Andy, you can really see how he captured that sense of place.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
