![\"American](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/GettyImages-481630693.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tIn a recent interview, Elizabeth Smith, executive director for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York, told ARTnews<\/em> that 13 years ago when the artist\u2019s private estate was converted to a foundation, Frankenthaler\u2019s original mission was straight-forward: support artists. That mandate hasn\u2019t changed, even as its resources have grown, and Smith\u2019s staff has seen more interest in the painter coming from European curators, especially in Paris. Funding a portion of the Venice Biennale was an early priority for them: the painter showed there in 1966, and, when curator Henry Geldzahler in a review that year described her work as intellectually \u201cdifficult\u201d and \u201cadvanced,\u201d it was a key moment of critical approval for her. The foundation aims to mostly focus on New York.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhat we were doing is tied back to the artist very closely,\u201d Smith said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tIn 2020 and 2021, the Frankenthaler Foundation gave out millions to several non-profits earmarked for emergency funds for artists affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, more than they\u2019d ever spent annually in the foundation\u2019s history. (70 percent of the Frankenthaler foundation\u2019s current $574 million in assets is valued in the art collection.) The following year, one of the foundation\u2019s trustees Clifford Ross critiqued the paucity of American cultural policy, telling Gagosian Quarterly<\/em>, \u201cThis is about survival. We are not a country that has given governmental support to the arts in a significant way.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAEFI found that, in fiscal year 2024, artist-endowed foundations gave out $220 million to other charities, up 23 percent from the $178 million spent a decade earlier. The latest figure is just a small fraction, roughly 2\u20133 percent of the field\u2019s overall assets, attributable to a special dynamic within the US\u2019s layered tax code: large parts of the assets these organizations oversee are tied up in the financial histories and insurance values of the physical works of art. (While these organizations carry big endowments, much of it is not liquid.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAEFI\u2019s research coincides with other metrics that show a growing attention to the U.S. \u201cdonor\u201d class. According to a 2024 Bank of America study, 48 percent of American families with net worths between $5 million and $20 million reported having or planning to establish funding their own organizations by 2029.<\/p>\n \n\tVincent of AEFI and other cultural leaders who watch the cultural non-profit space closely describe the field as becoming a wealthier, but somewhat uneven philanthropic force. \u201cThis represents only a narrow portion of the field,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a much larger group of culturally significant, but under-resourced artists out there.\u201d Vincent said AEFI isn\u2019t just studying the highest-capitalized foundations, but the field at different levels of financial capacity.<\/p>\n \n\tBefore becoming large-scale foundations, a majority of established artists leave estates to operate as private collections. They bestow heirs and executors with limited liquidity and staffing, large archives of mid-process materials and the unpaid work that industry people call \u201csweat equity\u201d to keep it all intact. Vincent said AEFI is working to capture more of these families in its research, but that the approximate number of small estates that need attention in the U.S. alone are not yet measured.<\/p>\n \n\tHeirs don\u2019t always have total control. In September 2025, when painter Lucien Smith reopened FOOD, the experimental restaurant that Gordon Matta-Clark co-founded in 1971, the revival drew crowds, and prompted a question for Matta-Clark\u2019s two heirs that they had been circling since his death in 1978 when he was just 35 years old: what does it take to safeguard the artist\u2019s legacy without letting it fade out of view?\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tMatta-Clark, an artist known for his architectural interventions and critiques of urban space, was a closely-watched figure. He earned recognition for helping fuel a colony of artists active in downtown Manhattan during the \u201870s. Jessamyn Fiore, executive director of the artist\u2019s private estate, initially supported the project, but later worried it might not serve Matta-Clark\u2019s wider recognition.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe estate doesn\u2019t own the concept. There\u2019s no licensing of it. We\u2019re not making any money from it,\u201d she told ARTnews<\/em> recently in an interview.<\/p>\n \n\tNow, decades after Matta-Clark\u2019s death, Fiore and her family are weighing a more permanent path for the estate: potentially converting it into an endowed nonprofit to secure its long-term stability and legitimize a mission she says is based in philanthropy. Heirs of other conceptually-driven artists from that era face similar dilemmas, caught between expanding public visibility and navigating the expectations of doctorate-level cultural stewardship.<\/p>\n \n\tSimilarly to Matta-Clark, when conceptual artist Hannah Wilke died of lymphoma in 1993 at age 52, she left her family without a clear blueprint for how to steward the complex body of work and ideas she left behind. Her sister, Marsie Scharlatt, one of the estate\u2019s executors, was tasked with establishing an archive of Wilke\u2019s art and materials in Los Angeles, becoming the main contact for curators and galleries researching her work. Last year, Scharlatt approached a New York advisory firm run by Allan Schwartzman, about ushering the estate into a more ambitious phase: securing a museum retrospective that could reframe Wilke\u2019s legacy more than two decades after her death.<\/p>\n \n\tSimon Preston, who leads the firm\u2019s artist advisory division, said the family needed help placing Wilke\u2019s more controversial works from the 1970s and 1980s into the permanent collections of major institutions. \u201cThe estate was split between family members,\u201d Preston said. \u201cThat\u2019s a major hindrance when curators can\u2019t access all the work under a unified inventory.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWilke belonged to a generation of artists experimenting with \u201csoft sculpture\u201d in the 1970s and \u201980s, producing latex casts associated with yonic symbols and later documenting the illness that killed her through unflinching self-portraits. Her work was often divisive: feminist critic Lucy Lippard dismissed Wilke\u2019s use of her own beauty as capitulating to the male gaze, while others hailed her as a renegade in the art world. \u201cIt\u2019s still contentious,\u201d Preston said. \u201cWe were waiting for the right moment, and the right time to have those conversations with historians.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe remnants of projects by artists like Wilke and Matta-Clark, conceptual, cult-adjacent figures with deep subcultural credibility but limited commercial reach, occupy what legacy strategists call the \u201cmiddle field.\u201d These families often manage substantial archives through private LLCs, striving to preserve and amplify the artists\u2019 reputations without the institutional backing or capital that buoy larger foundations.<\/p>\n \n\tMichael Quinn, a New York attorney who advises estates said that the commercial art world has become so professionalized that many postwar artists are unprepared to organize their studios, archives, and intellectual property before death. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole generation of aging artists in a grey area,\u201d Quinn said. Establishing a foundation, he added, is legally intricate and financially prohibitive, viable for only a small handful of families with consistent funding.<\/p>\n \n\tDavid Stark, founder of Artestar, a New York\u2013based company that manages licensing and brand partnerships for artist estates, said in an interview that it took many years for collaborations tied to the estates of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to yield meaningful revenue. Those arrangements, he said, were conceived not simply as profit-making ventures but as ways to expand the artists\u2019 audiences beyond the confines of galleries, museums and art workers. \u201cIt\u2019s about asking who their audience is now,\u201d Stark said.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou have to ask: does the artist matter today, and to whom? Licensing deals are often credited with a broader awareness of the artist,\u201d Stark added. Only a very small handful of organizations managing an artist\u2019s work and image after death, he noted, have the capability to bridge the gap between institutional recognition and commercial relevance. For artists like Matta-Clark and Wilke, who were staunchly anti-commercial in their approaches, Stark said, it\u2019s not as straightforward about how to grow exposure to them. \u201cIt\u2019s much harder for these mid-tier artists who don\u2019t have the same kind of megaphone,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cMost artists fall into a middle zone,\u201d Quinn said, noting that the inaccessibility of many large groups of artistic material can have a \u201cflattening effect\u201d on the field\u2019s intellectual rigor. Heirs often contend with steep estate taxes and limited liquidity, while museums grow increasingly hesitant to accept large donations of art without clear stewardship structures. The result,he added, is that many important bodies of work languish in private limbo.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThey have substantial bodies of work, but not the millions required to establish or sustain a foundation. It\u2019s competitive, even in death.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/market\/artist-foundations-assets-twombly-calder-rauschenberg-estates-1234782653\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-87743579.jpg?w=1024″] Since the 1990s, a small network of artist-endowed foundations has expanded dramatically, now controlling roughly $9 billion in assets, according to new research collected by the Aspen Institute\u2019s Artist-Endowed Foundation Initiative (AEFI), a center that studies philanthropy in the U.S. The researchers tracked how, as the country\u2019s economy has grown, a few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1913821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1913821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1913821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1913821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1913821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Fashion](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/hm_basquiat_who-decides-war.png?w=400\")
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