A Newly Powerful Grant-Making Force: Artist-Endowed Foundations

When the Smithsonian in November removed a video by the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz from a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, the swift acquiescence to conservative religious critics and politicians brought condemnation from many familiar quarters—artists, gay-rights groups, and art advocates.

A less familiar source also demonstrated its anger about the museum’s move—private foundations. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation—donors to the exhibition— announced they would decline all future grants to Smithsonian museums unless the video was restored to the exhibition. Soon after, the (Alexander) Calder Foundation canceled plans to lend a sculpture for a future exhibition at the gallery.

This reaction is rather unusual from the often risk-averse foundation world, which tends to take a back seat when political controversies erupt. But the foundations that spoke up weren’t just any foundations. They were established by artists.

In 1989, when the Corcoran Gallery of Art famously canceled an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in response to conservative pressure, private foundations endowed by visual artists were modest in number. That’s different now.

A new study conducted for the Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation identified 300 artist-endowed foundations, more than half created in the last 15 years.

Whatever one’s view of the Smithsonian’s action, the episode shines a light on this little- known but fast- growing part of the philanthropic world.

Bearing names such as Avedon, Haring, Lichtenstein, Pollock-Krasner, Rauschenberg, and Ritts, these organizations make grants to nonprofits and to artists and scholars. They steward art collections and archives. They operate exhibition programs and contribute artworks to museums. They manage artist residency centers and conduct art education and cultural programs.

Some focus solely on the arts while others also make grants to organizations that focus on social issues, including HIV/AIDS, animal welfare, environmental conservation, and mental health.

The Aspen study found that the 127 largest artist-endowed foundations together reported $2.7-billion in assets in 2008, including more than $1-billion in art and intellectual property. That aggregate figure compares with the assets of longstanding arts or education grant makers, such as the Rockefeller Foundation ($3-billion) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($2.4-billion). The top 30 artist-endowed foundations, in terms of total grants paid, disbursed $52.5-million in 2008—aggregate giving comparable to the 2008 arts giving of the prestigious John S. and James L. Knight Foundation ($55.3-million) or the veteran Ford Foundation ($54.1-million).

And even though the weak economy and estate- tax changes might discourage other types of donors in coming years, artists are likely to keep giving.

Among foundations of deceased artists, more than 60 percent of those holding at least $1-million in assets are tied to artists who were not survived by children. Anni and Josef Albers, Adolph Gottlieb, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Herb Ritts, and Andy Warhol are examples. Clearly, minimizing estate taxes on bequests to sons or daughters was not a motivation in creating these foundations.

And more artists of similar stature and family circumstance will continue to create private foundations as a charitable means to steward their life’s creative works after their deaths. Already many artists have created such foundations during their lifetimes, including Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, LeRoy Neiman, and Maurice Sendak.

Although they may share characteristics, artist-endowed foundations don’t act in lock-step.

In the case of the Smithsonian controversy, the Warhol and Mapplethorpe foundations have taken a more public stance, but other artist-endowed donors to the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, including the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art, John Burton Harter Charitable Trust, and Jerome Robbins Foundation (financed with the choreographer’s intellectual property), have not.

Nonetheless, as the Calder Foundation’s canceled art loan indicates, one should look beyond grants to grasp the full potential influence of this new breed. Artist-endowed foundations directly lent or gave copyright permissions for almost three-dozen works featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition or catalog, including those by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers, as well as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol. That’s a substantial chunk of the featured works.

All of this suggests that while most still fly below the radar, artist-endowed foundations merit attention. Their increasing numbers combined with distinctive assets and direct engagement in the arts set them apart from the majority of private foundations in the United States. Big national foundations pursue more-abstract agendas, leaving an important role for grant makers that have closer ties to artists and the creation of art.

In the coming decade, we can expect to see artist-endowed foundations emerge as a force in cultural philanthropy and exercise new influence as stewards of America’s contemporary art patrimony.

Christine J. Vincent directed the Aspen Institute’s National Study of Artist-Endowed Foundations and a report on its results, “The Artist as Philanthropist: Strengthening the Next Generation of Artist-Endowed Foundations.”