The Artist as Philanthropist: At a time when government and corporate support is decreasing, artists’ foundations matter a lot
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In the wake of the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005, representatives of the New York-based Joan Mitchell Foundation reached out to the arts community in New Orleans in an effort to help. After corresponding with individual artists and arts-organization leaders, says Carolyn Somers, the foundation’s executive director, “we realized that returning to the studio and finding a way to continue to make work following the flooding of the city” was a major challenge for New Orleans artists.
In September 2005, the foundation made its first emergency grants to artists who were adversely affected by Hurricane Katrina, and in the years since, it has provided more than $3 million in support to both individual artists and arts organizations in New Orleans. By 2007, the foundation had concluded that the city’s infrastructure for supporting artists, even before the disaster, was “fragile” at best.
In the summer of 2010 the foundation made its first real-estate acquisition in New Orleans: a bed-and-breakfast in foreclosure on an acre and a half of land near the city center that was once part of a Creole plantation. It is now being transformed into an artists’ community.
The Joan Mitchell Foundation was established in 1993, a year after the artist’s death in Paris, and was formed with her stated goal of aiding painters and sculptors. The foundation also provides free art-education classes in New York City and, through a nomination process, awards grants to painters and sculptors as well as graduating M.F.A. students.
It is one of a small but growing number of artist-endowed foundations that are becoming a powerful force in the world of cultural philanthropy. In addition to overseeing individual artists’ legacies by documenting and protecting their work, such foundations, through hands-on involvement with other artists and organizations, are discovering the best and most efficient ways to provide much-needed support at a time when traditional funding sources are shrinking.
“Most government officials think the arts are dispensable,” says Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the largest artist-endowed foundation, which currently has about $330 million in assets. The foundation announced $14 million in cash grants to arts organizations for the fiscal year ending April 2012. Funding provided by artists is the “purest and best way to support the arts,” says Wachs.
In late 2010, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., bowed to pressure from critics and removed David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly, which includes a segment showing ants crawling over a crucifix, from its group exhibition “Hide/Seek.” The Warhol Foundation, a lead supporter of the show, publicly condemned the move and said it would cease funding for all future Smithsonian shows if the work was not reinstated. In a letter to secretary G. Wayne Clough, Wachs wrote that the museum’s “blatant censorship” was “unconscionable.”