When Laura West became the executive director of the Andrew Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the role was new for her and for the foundation. She had a lot of questions, such as: How does one spearhead the professionalization of an artist-endowed foundation? What are the specific legal requirements for a foundation with much of its wealth tied up in art? How does one navigate the input from family and friends of the artist? For guidance, West turned to Aspen Institute’s Artist Endowed Foundations Initiative (AEFI).
A program of Aspen Institute’s Philanthropy and Social Innovation Program (PSI), AEFI harnesses Aspen Institute’s approach of combining education, convening and connection to support directors of some 300 artist-endowed foundations. “It’s like an artist-endowed-foundation bootcamp,” said West. “It’s a great way to network and grow. Just today, I was connected to two executive directors, one at the Mike Kelley Foundation in L.A. and one at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Our art doesn’t look the same and our programs don’t look the same, but we all have the goal to work with our artists’ legacy and grow this field for the general public.”
First a study, then a seminar
AEFI got its start in 2007, when Christine J. Vincent, its current managing director, began noticing the growth of artist-endowed foundations. Vincent, who had served as deputy director for arts grantmaking at the Ford Foundation and then president of what is now Maine College of Art and Design, reached out to some colleagues about her observation, including the leaders of the Pollock-Krasner, Warhol and Lichtenstein foundations. “They said, ‘A week doesn’t go by that we don’t get a call from an artist who wants to create a foundation, or an attorney with an artist who wants to create one, or an attorney, who, after the artist has died, is responsible for creating a foundation. We help. But we’re just saying the same thing over and over again,’” said Vincent. “I had my Ford Foundation hat on and said, ‘It sounds like we need a study!’ Why are they being created? How are they being created? What can we identify as effective practice that we can share with this growing field?”
With funding from more than 30 artist-endowed foundations and institutional arts funders, including the Ford Foundation and Getty Foundation, Vincent organized what she thought would be a simple study to delve into these questions. Aspen Institute’s PSI invited the project to be based there. The study wound up taking three years, and ultimately led to the publication of the “Aspen Institute National Study of Artist Endowed Foundations,” which came out in 2010.
While so much of the conversation around money and the arts concerns getting money to artists, some succeed in turning their creative output into serious wealth. The study showed that the value of the assets held by artist-endowed foundations had more than doubled in the five-year period between 2011 through 2015 alone, as my colleague Mike Scutari reported in 2019, rising to nearly $8 billion. AEFI has now identified more than 400 artist-endowed foundations; today, these foundations together hold more than $9 billion in fair market value assets.
The wealth of artist-endowed foundations is slated to keep growing due to the long-term growth of the art market, in combination with some other notable trends: more artists than ever and an aging generation of artists. “It’s demographics,” said Vincent. The existence of so many artist-endowed foundations is not only an inspiring data point for all those other artists still on the grant-seeking side of things, but also a reflection of a growing force shaping the art world and the field of philanthropy.
Vincent organized convenings around the country to disseminate the study findings. Those conversations led to requests by participants for more opportunities to get together and learn in an ongoing, structured way. AEFI evolved to meet these needs.
The art of stewarding a legacy in paintings and drawings, and giving it away
Today, the AEFI’s mission is to “help the next generation of artist-endowed foundations make the most of their founders’ generosity in service to a charitable purpose.” It does this by addressing the information gap facing many leaders of this type of foundation through three major components: research and report updates, a 30-person, remote seminar on strategy, and a leadership forum. It also holds an IRL convening for the community in L.A. and New York each fall and does special projects, such as the current AEFI Consortium Advancing Next-Gen Leaders in the Visual Arts.
“In the seminar, we teach foundation basics, including important rules around self-dealing, and the concepts of public benefit, fiduciary duty and good governance, getting set up, philanthropic programs, the art market and strategy,” said Vincent.
The forum addresses different things each time it meets. “The last time the forum took place, in 2024, we had a big focus on AI because it’s out there. So there is a great deal of concern about AI and its unauthorized use of images and data. We also focused on the pushback against DEAI. Those are two great examples of topics the forum covers,” said Vincent.
Because their holdings include art created by the founder, artist-endowed foundations have unique, complex rules and regulations to follow, some that are distinct from other foundations. They often are led by people with little experience in the world of philanthropy, like artists. “The people who participate are all very accomplished, but they don’t know about private foundation regulations and law and how their activities intersect with those considerations,” said Vincent.
One such newbie: Steven R. Rose, the executive director and president of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, which stewards the legacy of abstract expressionist Emily Mason and her mother, pioneering abstract artist and printmaker Alice Trumbull Mason.
Rose, an artist himself, worked as the studio manager for Emily Mason for nine years, until her death. “My training is as an artist, but I did do a lot of work in administration early in my career, so I had some background in that,” he said. “What I didn’t know was how to run a nonprofit and the conflicts of interest that come up and friends and family members who might have a stake in the collection. The AEFI seminar was a formative experience for me and our foundation.” For Rose, AEFI provided an education in fiduciary responsibility and best practices around issues like accounting, hiring contractors, putting a collection together and insuring it, and finding a legal representative for the foundation. That knowledge, he said, gave him more confidence in his ability to take the lead and inform board members and others about required actions.
So far, the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation has created scholarships for art students enrolled in CUNY’s Hunter College, awarding three each year in 2023 and 2024. It also partnered with the Wolf Kahn Foundation in 2022 to award $800,000 in grants to six arts and culture organizations in New York City and Vermont, honoring the joint legacy and the lives of Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason, who were married for 62 years.
Like West, Rose has found the connections he’s made in the artist-endowed foundations world particularly valuable. “This is one of the most generous communities I’ve ever been a part of in terms of giving advice, bringing connections forward and imparting knowledge. It’s not as competitive as other fields. There is a true belief that all ships rise together. It’s beautiful to be a part of,” he said. “Being in this role and looking at my colleagues has allowed me to gain a long view of art history and even relax some of the competitiveness in my own life as an artist.”
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James Merle Thomas is a seasoned arts executive, scholar, curator, and since 2023, the deputy director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Thomas participated in the AEFI leadership seminar in 2023. The Frankenthaler Foundation makes huge grants for artists and organizations, and launched the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative in 2021. Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was a major player in second-generation postwar American abstract painting and played a role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. She painted for six decades, collected work by other artists, and left behind a tremendous amount of valuable art.
Thomas said that collaborating with other foundations is critically important today, given the landscape and broader climate that cultural institutions are facing. “Increasingly, we look to catalyze sustainability and to work effectively with other philanthropic foundations doing that work,” he said. The Frankenthaler Foundation, for example, partnered on the Getty Foundation’s LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, launched to support artists and art workers impacted by the fires in Los Angeles in January.
More recently, it partnered with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to provide emergency funding to small visual arts organizations that lost funding due to the NEA cuts. “Even though they are two different artists representing very different traditions in American art, we are united and aligned in our mission-driven values around supporting visual arts organizations,” said Thomas. “They were small grants, but do-or-die funding for a lot of these organizations. A $10,000 grant or $20,000 total match; it’s the difference between supporting their community and having to close up shop.”
Thomas made a conscious choice to move into the artist-endowed foundation world after having worked at the intersection of higher education and museums for 20 years. He said that the AEFI does a good job of integrating new leaders into the field and helping foundations navigate changes within their own organizations and in response to social issues. “It functions like a gathering space for ideas and exchange about the issues that are most pressing and relevant for these artist-endowed foundations now, particularly through in-person events,” he said. “The platform has created fluency and community so the members can continue to connect on these questions that are driving this sector.”
