Amid Culture War Funding Cuts, Can Artist Foundations Save the Day?

Many successful people have time to plan their legacies, but the final months of Nancy Graves’ life were chaotic. In May 1995, the 55-year-old sculptor, painter and printmaker was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and five months later, she was dead. With no heirs, she had to decide quickly what to do with her belongings and wealth. Like many other artists with significant holdings of artwork and other assets, she created a nonprofit foundation through her will to shelter her estate from high death taxes. But what sort of foundation should this be? What would its purpose be?

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Most artists’ foundations serve the posthumous interests of the artists, as trustees and administrators arrange exhibitions of their work, prepare a catalogue raisonné, inventory artwork and make documents and archival material available to scholars. The Henry Moore Foundation in England, for instance, was set up in 1977 to “advance the education of the public by promoting their appreciation of the fine arts, particularly the work of Henry Moore.” In somewhat more inflated language, the foundation created by Salvador Dalí in 1983 in Spain aims to “promote, boost, divulge, lend prestige to, protect and defend in Spain and in any other country the artistic, cultural and intellectual oeuvre of the painter… and the universal recognition of his contribution to the Fine Arts, culture and contemporary thought.”

Contrast that with Graves, who modeled her idea of a foundation on those established by Adolph Gottlieb and Lee Krasner, whose primary purpose is to provide grant awards to artists in need.

Fifty or even 30 years ago, there were far fewer artists’ foundations. However, “post-1960 artists have done much better than many earlier artists who often didn’t have the wherewithal to set up a foundation,” said

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