New Fund at Andy Warhol Foundation to Benefit Struggling Artists

Andy Warhol’s images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans have become so familiar

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that few people realize that their creator was once an unknown artist who made his living as a commercial illustrator, designing advertisements and window displays.

“Day jobs” are still a fact of life for today’s aspiring painters, dancers, and filmmakers. But now the foundation created by Mr. Warhol’s estate is leading an ambitious new effort to help artists gain the money and expertise they need to advance their work.

Next week, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, in New York, will announce the birth of “Creative Capital,” a fund for artists that has received slightly more than $5-million from over 20 donors, most of them small family foundations and individuals.

Creative Capital will provide grants of $5,000 to $20,000 to individual artists and will also help them put their works on the market, identify galleries or performance spaces, develop new audiences, and offer advice so that they can become financially self-sufficient through their artwork.

There’s one condition, however: Artists will be expected to return a portion of any proceeds earned from projects supported by Creative Capital. The money will be returned to the fund and redistributed to other artists.

The Warhol Foundation was motivated to transform Creative Capital from an idea into an independent charitable organization in part because Mr. Warhol himself had encouraged the careers of other artists, especially those who were young and not yet widely known.

But the foundation was also acting on its anger over Congressional moves to force the National Endowment for the Arts to slash federal support given to individual artists. Congress took that action in 1996, after an eruption of controversy over the endowment’s financing of projects that some people thought were pornographic and offensive to religious sensibilities.

Archibald L. Gillies, president of the Warhol Foundation, says that while he and other foundation leaders spoke out about their opposition to cuts in the N.E.A. budget, “at a certain point, we said, ‘Let’s do something positive here.’”

Mr. Gillies and others involved in starting Creative Capital say that, in addition to the loss of federal aid, they were concerned by the difficulty that individual artists reported in obtaining support from foundations.

Grants to individual artists have never been plentiful because many foundations say they don’t want to have to deal with the complex federal rules involved in giving money to individuals. And as more and more foundations have poured money into efforts to expose youngsters to the arts or to reinvigorate poor neighborhoods, money for individual artists has become harder to obtain, experts say.

Creative Capital will focus its efforts mainly on helping mid-career artists. The fund’s creators say that doing so will allow them to choose artists who have a track record of accomplishments but have not yet become well-established or financially successful enough to earn a living from their artwork.

The fund will support those artists in creating original work that is “innovative and experimental,” says Ruby Lerner, executive director of Creative Capital. “We are looking for work that is more cutting edge — for people who are crashing through traditional boundaries.”

Before she was tapped to head Creative Capital, Ms. Lerner served as executive director of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, in New York, and as publisher of Independent Film and Video Monthly. She also previously worked for Manhattan Theatre Club, an off-Broadway non-profit theater, concentrating on ways to attract more playgoers.

Because she has spent most of her career at organizations that seek foundation grants, Ms. Lerner says she hopes that she can help Creative Capital avoid many of the problems she has seen in the ways that foundations give money to artists.

Ms. Lerner says she has been frustrated by how long it often takes foundations to make decisions about grant proposals. “There are certain values to contemplation and deliberation, but foundations can’t respond quickly to an opportunity or take advantage of a moment that really might help an organization or individuals. We hope we’ll be able to operate with a little more alacrity.”

Ms. Lerner’s three staff members — who are themselves artists — plan to take an active role in soliciting proposals so that Creative Capital can find the most promising candidates.

The artists who become Creative Capital beneficiaries are likely to welcome the marketing advice they will receive almost as much as the cash grants.

Shannon Kennedy, 31, a visual artist in Minneapolis, says she is glad Creative Capital will “help people gain the tools they need to go past the year of the grant.”

“Money is great,” she says, “but then at the end you still end up with the problem of, ‘How do I get my work seen?’”

So far, most artists say they understand Creative Capital’s expectation that grantees give some of their profits back to the fund. But some cultural experts admit that they were initially skeptical.

“I was extremely nervous about the notion that the artists are supposed to make money, because not all art can make money,” observes Ronald Feldman, the co-owner with his wife, Frayda, of a prominent New York art gallery that bears his name. Mr. Feldman, who helped finance and exhibit some of Mr. Warhol’s work, has agreed to serve on the board of Creative Capital.

“If we are only looking for art that can return the capital, then maybe we are sending out the wrong message about what the arts can be or do.”

But he says he was reassured by Creative Capital’s organizers that it would be fine if some projects failed to produce a profit, and that the amount returned would be negotiated with each artist in proportion to the size of the project, the amount Creative Capital contributed to it, and how much profit it generated for the artist.

“It’s a fantastically healthy but also radical idea,” says Elizabeth Streb, 49, a New York choreographer. When she was young, she says, she wanted support with no strings attached, but as an established choreographer, she feels it is more reasonable for a financial supporter to expect her to earn a profit.

Creative Capital evolved in part out of a 1996 meeting at Brown University that brought together artists, writers, musicians, scientists, business leaders, and others to talk about what could be done to support the creative process in a year when the federal government had cut spending on the arts by nearly 40 per cent.

In directing the National Endowment for the Arts on ways to make cuts, Congress said almost all grants to individual artists should be abolished. Lawmakers — and many of their constituents — were incensed over the provocative subject matter of N.E.A.-supported artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. While grants are still made to individuals pursuing jazz, folklore, and literature projects, the $5-million to $6-million that the endowment previously gave to individual artists is sorely missed by many in the cultural world.

A number of prominent cultural figures have already agreed to serve on Creative Capital’s board, including the performance artist Laurie Anderson and the film director Richard Linklater.

Mr. Linklater, who directed Slackers and Dazed and Confused, says his concern about financing troubles prompted him to set up a fund that gives out $50,000 a year to aspiring Texas filmmakers. He says he joined the board of Creative Capital as a way to deal with the money problems on a larger scale, and to do so in multiple artistic disciplines.

Though Creative Capital is technically independent of the Warhol Foundation, it will initially be housed rent-free at the foundation’s offices, which are located in a part of Greenwich Village known as “NoHo,” short for North of Houston Street.

The fund’s Bleecker Street headquarters have a spacious industrial design that gives it the feel of an artist’s loft. A central room features a conference table surrounded by lightweight silver chairs, with a silver wall as a backdrop — a homage to the Factory, Mr. Warhol’s famed silver-painted studio and performance and gathering place for artists.

Paintings by Mr. Warhol are displayed prominently throughout the office, including eight works from a 1960s series of images of a hammer and sickle. Those paintings will be shown in Zurich this summer and then sold at auction.

It is sales like those that have endowed the foundation. Upon his death in 1987, Mr. Warhol left the foundation a vast collection of his works.

The foundation currently holds some $50-million in cash and $240-million in art. It expects to complete the sale of the art over the next 15 or so years, opting not to flood the art market by selling them at once.

The announcement of Creative Capital comes as the foundation tries to emerge from a cloud of controversy, accused by critics in its early years of spending too much on its own administrative expenses and not awarding enough money to arts groups. An investigation by the New York State Attorney General found no criminal wrongdoing, but under a settlement with the attorney general the foundation agreed to take steps to tighten its internal financial management (The Chronicle, December 17, 1998).

The big challenge for Creative Capital, say Mr. Gillies and Ms. Lerner, will be to support work that is daring, but not so extreme that it proves to be greatly offensive. After all, Mr. Gillies’s and Ms. Lerner’s hope is not that Creative Capital will replace the lost N.E.A. dollars, but that it will serve as a model for investing in individual artists that will encourage Congress to reconsider its position on the issue.

“There is no question that what happened with the N.E.A. was a blow to the spirit of individual artists. Many just carried on and didn’t pay attention to what was going on, but the atmosphere was poisonous,” says Mr. Gillies.

Representatives of the N.E.A. say they welcome the efforts by Creative Capital to help individuals.

Jennifer Dowley, director of museums and visual arts at the N.E.A., says, “We look at this as a tremendous partnership for us, and are enormously relieved that it is happening.” She says the endowment would continue to encourage Congress to authorize support to a broader range of artists because she says that is “the appropriate role for the federal government.”

Mr. Feldman, the gallery owner, thinks that were Mr. Warhol alive today, he would be pleased with Creative Capital.

In his own career, Mr. Warhol sought to combine art and business in profit-making ventures like his Interview magazine. He also encouraged younger artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

“He looked at these artists and saw they were speaking for a new generation,” Mr. Feldman recalls. “He wanted to be an impresario and harness the energy of something new.”