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’s Artist-Endowed Foundation Initiative (AEFI), a center that studies philanthropy in the U.S.
The researchers tracked how, as the country’s economy has grown, a few hundred artists in the U.S. established nonprofits and endowed foundations before their deaths in the U.S., creating legal and financial frameworks to protect and promote their work. That latest figure is up about 17 percent from the $7.7 billion reported in 2018 when AEFI, which has offices in Washington, D.C. and New York, last published their findings. The new number is nearly triple the $3.5 billion the group reported in 2011.
According to financial figures provided by AEFI’s director, Christine J. Vincent, and reviewed by ARTnews, just five of the roughly 500 foundations captured in their research hold well over 50 percent of the $9 billion total, with Cy Twombly’s foundation alone presiding over $1.5 billion in assets, including art works. The other four foundations are that of Alexander Calder, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whom have over $500 million in assets each. At a slightly lower tier, those dedicated to Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, and Josef & Anni Albers, have endowments ranging from $255 million to $416 million. The group is mostly American artists, all born before 1931, with most having been primarily based on the East Coast during their lifetimes, though the Albers came to the U.S. as refugees from Germany. Many of the foundations—which act as the legal holding sites of collections preserved after an artists’ death—have reached such heights as the values of the works have swelled. (While museums like MoMA report endowments over $1 billion, for comparison, those figures do not factor in the value of their collections.)
The data, collected from public tax forms, shows that a handful of well-capitalized foundations established by postwar painters and sculptors dominate the artist legacy-planning field as it continues to expand. Of the largest ten foundations from the 500 reviewed by AEFI, the Low Road Foundation, established by Jasper Johns, is the only one that has continued growing in size while the artist is still alive. A representative for the foundation, Conley Rollins, told ARTnews in an email that the foundation is advancing plans to build an artist colony in Sharon, Connecticut, where Johns, who is 95, is based. Rollins declined to comment further.
American abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler photographed in her New York City studio in 1971.
Photo Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)
In a recent interview, Elizabeth Smith, executive director for the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York, told ARTnews that 13 years ago when the artist’s private estate was converted to a foundation, Frankenthaler’s original mission was straight-forward: support artists. That mandate hasn’t changed, even as its resources have grown, and Smith’s 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 “difficult” and “advanced,” it was a key moment of critical approval for her. The foundation aims to mostly focus on New York.
“What we were doing is tied back to the artist very closely,” Smith said.
In 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’d ever spent annually in the foundation’s history. (70 percent of the Frankenthaler foundation’s current $574 million in assets is valued in the art collection.) The following year, one of the foundation’s trustees Clifford Ross critiqued the paucity of American cultural policy, telling Gagosian Quarterly, “This is about survival. We are not a country that has given governmental support to the arts in a significant way.”
AEFI 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 2–3 percent of the field’s overall assets, attributable to a special dynamic within the US’s 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.)
AEFI’s research coincides with other metrics that show a growing attention to the U.S. “donor” 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.
Vincent 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. “This represents only a narrow portion of the field,” she said. “There’s a much larger group of culturally significant, but under-resourced artists out there.” Vincent said AEFI isn’t just studying the highest-capitalized foundations, but the field at different levels of financial capacity.
Before 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 “sweat equity” 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.
Heirs don’t always have total control. In September 2025, when painter Lucien Smith reopened FOOD, the experimental restaurant that Gordon Matta-Clarke co-founded in 1971, the revival drew crowds, and prompted a question for Matta-Clarke’s 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’s legacy without letting it fade out of view?
Matta-Clarke, 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 ‘70s. Jessamyn Fiore, executive director of the artist’s private estate, initially supported the project, but later worried it might not serve Matta-Clarke’s wider recognition.
“The estate doesn’t own the concept. There’s no licensing of it. We’re not making any money from it,” she told ARTnews recently in an interview.
Now, decades after Matta-Clarke’s 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.
Similarly to Matta-Clarke, 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’s executors, was tasked with establishing an archive of Wilke’s 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’s legacy more than two decades after her death.
Simon Preston, who leads the firm’s artist advisory division, said the family needed help placing Wilke’s more controversial works from the 1970s and 1980s into the permanent collections of major institutions. “The estate was split between family members,” Preston said. “That’s a major hindrance when curators can’t access all the work under a unified inventory.”
Wilke belonged to a generation of artists experimenting with “soft sculpture” in the 1970s and ’80s, 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’s use of her own beauty as capitulating to the male gaze, while others hailed her as a renegade in the art world. “It’s still contentious,” Preston said. “We were waiting for the right moment, and the right time to have those conversations with historians.”
The remnants of projects by artists like Wilke and Matta-Clarke, conceptual, cult-adjacent figures with deep subcultural credibility but limited commercial reach, occupy what legacy strategists call the “middle field.” These families often manage substantial archives through private LLCs, striving to preserve and amplify the artists’ reputations without the institutional backing or capital that buoy larger foundations.
Michael 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. “There’s a whole generation of aging artists in a grey area,” Quinn said. Establishing a foundation, he added, is legally intricate and financially prohibitive, viable for only a small handful of families with consistent funding.
A 2024 fashion collaboration between H&M, Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate, and Who Decides War, arranged by Artestar.
Courtesy H&M
David Stark, founder of Artestar, a New York–based 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’ audiences beyond the confines of galleries, museums and art workers. “It’s about asking who their audience is now,” Stark said.
“You have to ask: does the artist matter today, and to whom? Licensing deals are often credited with a broader awareness of the artist,” Stark added. Only a very small handful of organizations managing an artist’s 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’s not as straightforward about how to grow exposure to them. “It’s much harder for these mid-tier artists who don’t have the same kind of megaphone,” he added.
“Most artists fall into a middle zone,” Quinn said, noting that the inaccessibility of many large groups of artistic material can have a “flattening effect” on the field’s 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.
“They have substantial bodies of work, but not the millions required to establish or sustain a foundation. It’s competitive, even in death.”
