Artist Foundations Control $9 B. in Assets, Topped by Twombly at $1.5 B.

A small network of artist-endowed foundations has expanded dramatically since the 1990s and now controls approximately $9 billion in assets, according to new research compiled by the Aspen Institute’s Artists’ Endowment Foundation Initiative (AEFI), a center for the study of American philanthropy.

Researchers traced how hundreds of American artists established nonprofits and endowments before their deaths, establishing legal and financial frameworks to protect and promote their work as the nation’s economy grew. This latest figure represents an increase of approximately 17% from the $7.7 billion reported in 2018, the last time AEFI released its findings. AEFI has offices in Washington, D.C., and New York. The new figure is nearly three times the $3.5 billion the group reported in 2011.

Based on financial data provided by AEFI Director Christine J. Vincent and audited by AEFI art newsIn their study, only five of approximately 500 foundations held more than 50% of total assets of $9 billion, with Cy Twombly’s foundation alone managing more than $1.5 billion in assets, including art. The other four foundations are those of Alexander Calder, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Rauschenberg, each with assets in excess of $500 million. Slightly lower, donations from those dedicated to Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth and Josef and Anne Albers ranged from $255 million to $416 million. The group consisted of primarily American artists, all born before 1931, most of whom lived primarily on the East Coast during their lifetimes, although the Albers came to the United States as German refugees. Many foundations—which serve as the legal holdings of collections preserved after an artist’s death—reach such heights as the value of the works inflates. (While museums like MoMA report donations of more than $1 billion, for comparison, these numbers do not take into account the value of their collections.)

Data collected from public tax forms show that a handful of well-capitalized foundations established by painters and sculptors after the war dominated the field of artist estate planning and that the field continued to expand. Of the 10 largest foundations among the 500 foundations reviewed by AEFI, the Low Road Foundation, established by Jasper Johns, was the only one that continued to expand during Jasper Johns’ lifetime. Conley Rollins, a representative of the foundation said art news In an email, the foundation was moving forward with plans to establish an artist colony in Sharon, Connecticut, where Johns, 95, lives. Rollins declined further comment.

Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York, said in a recent interview art news When the artist’s private estate transformed into a foundation 13 years ago, Frankenthaler’s original mission was simple: support artists. Despite its increased resources, this mission did not change, and Smith’s staff found that European curators were more interested in the painter, especially in Paris. Funding part of the Venice Biennale was their top priority: the painter exhibited there in 1966, and it was a key moment for her to gain critical recognition when curator Henry Geldzahler described her work as intellectually “difficult” and “advanced” in a review that year. The foundation’s goals are primarily focused on New York.

“What we do is very much about the artists,” Smith said.

In 2020 and 2021, the Frankenthaler Foundation donated millions of dollars to several nonprofit organizations specifically to provide emergency funding to artists affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, which is more than the foundation has spent annually in its history. (Seventy percent of the Frankenthaler Foundation’s current $574 million in assets is in its art collections.) The following year, one of the foundation’s trustees, Clifford Ross, criticized the lack of cultural policy in the United States, saying Gagosian Quarterly“It’s about survival. We’re not a country where there’s a lot of government support for the arts.”

AEFI found that artist-endowed foundations gave $220 million to other charities in fiscal 2024, a 23% increase from $178 million a decade earlier. The latest figures represent only a small fraction, roughly 2-3% of total assets in the field, and are due to unique dynamics within the U.S. tiered tax laws: much of the assets these organizations oversee are closely tied to the financial history and insurance value of physical artworks. (While these organizations have large endowments, much of them are illiquid.)

AEFI’s research is consistent with other indicators showing increasing attention to the U.S. “donor” class. According to a 2024 Bank of America study, 48% of U.S. households with net worth between $5 million and $20 million reported having funded or planned to fund their own organizations by 2029.

AEFI’s Vincent and other cultural leaders who follow the cultural nonprofit sector closely describe the field as becoming a richer but somewhat uneven philanthropic force. “This represents only a small part of the field,” she said. “There are more culturally significant but under-resourced groups of artists out there.” Vincent said AEFI looks not only at the highest-capitalized foundations but also at different levels of financial capability.

Most established artists leave their estates and operate as private collections before becoming large foundations. They give heirs and executors limited liquidity and staffing, extensive archives of intermediate process materials, and pro bono work that industry insiders call “sweat equity” to keep everything intact. Vincent said AEFI is working to capture more of these households in its research, but in the United States alone, the approximate number of small estates of concern has yet to be measured.

Heirs do not always have complete control. In September 2025, painter Lucien Smith reopened FOOD, the experimental restaurant co-founded by Gordon Matta-Clarke in 1971. The revival attracted huge crowds and raised a question for Matta-Clarke’s two heirs since his death in 1978 at the age of 35. Years old), they’ve been thinking about this question: How can the artist’s legacy be preserved without fading into obscurity?

Matta-Clark is an artist known for his architectural interventions and criticism of urban space, and a closely watched figure. He is recognized for helping to promote a group of artists active in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s. Jessamyn Fiore, executive director of Artists Private Estate, initially supported the project but later worried that it might not gain wider acceptance from Matta-Clark.

“The estate doesn’t own the concept. It’s not licensed. We won’t make any money from it,” she told art news In a recent interview.

Now, decades after Mata-Clark’s death, Fiore and her family are considering a more permanent path for the legacy: possibly converting it into an endowed nonprofit to ensure its long-term stability and legitimize what she calls a philanthropy-based mission. Heirs to other conceptually driven artists of the era faced similar dilemmas, torn between expanding their public profile and meeting the expectations of PhD-level cultural stewardship.

Like Matta-Clark, conceptual artist Hannah Wilke, who died of lymphoma in 1993 at age 52, left her family with a clear blueprint for how to manage 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 primary contact for curators and galleries studying her work. Last year, Sharratt approached a New York consulting firm run by Allan Schwartzman to take the estate into a more ambitious phase: staging a museum retrospective that would reimagine Wilke’s legacy more than two decades after her death.

Simon Preston, head of the firm’s artist advisory arm, said the family needed help integrating Wilke’s more controversial works from the 1970s and 1980s into permanent collections at major institutions. “The estate is divided among family members,” Preston said. “It’s a major obstacle when curators don’t have access to all works under a unified catalogue.”

Wilke was part of a generation of artists who experimented with “soft sculpture” in the 1970s and 1980s, making latex casts related to yonic symbols, and later documented the illness that led to her death through unflinching self-portraits. Her work was often divisive: Feminist critic Lucy Lippard believed Wilke used her beauty to succumb to the male gaze, while others hailed her as a traitor to the art world. “It’s still controversial,” Preston said. “We’re waiting for the right moment, the right moment to have a conversation with historians.”

The remnants of projects by artists like Wilke and Matta-Clark, conceptual, cult-related figures with deep subcultural credibility but limited commercial clout, occupy what heritage strategists call the “middle ground.” These families often manage vast archives through private limited liability companies, working to protect and expand the reputations of their artists without the institutional backing or capital to back up a larger foundation.

Michael Quinn, a New York lawyer who advises estates, said the commercial art world had become so professionalized that many postwar artists were unprepared to sort out their studios, archives and intellectual property before they died. “There’s a whole generation of older artists who are in a gray area,” Quinn said. He added that setting up a foundation was legally complex and financially prohibitive, making it feasible only for a few families with ongoing funds.

David Stark, founder of Artestar, the New York-based company that manages licensing and brand partnerships for artists’ estates, said in an interview that it took years for partnerships with the estates of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to generate significant revenue. These arrangements are not just about profit, he said, but also about broadening an artist’s audience beyond galleries, museums and art workers. “It’s about asking who their audience is right now,” Stark said.

“You have to ask: Do artists matter today? To whom? Licensing deals are often thought to increase an artist’s visibility,” Stack added. He noted that only a handful of organizations that manage an artist’s posthumous work and image have the ability to bridge the gap between institutional recognition and commercial relevance. For artists as staunchly anti-commercial as Matta-Clark and Wilke, it’s not so simple how to increase exposure to them, Stark said. “It’s much harder for these mid-level artists who don’t have the same amplifiers,” he adds.

“Most artists fall somewhere in the middle,” Quinn said, noting that the inaccessibility of many large-scale art materials can have a “flattening effect” on the field’s intellectual rigor. Heirs often face high estate taxes and limited liquidity, while museums have become increasingly hesitant to accept large art donations without a clear management structure. The result, he added, was that many important jobs were left in private limbo.

“They have a lot of work, but not the millions of dollars needed to build or maintain a foundation. Even in death, it’s competitive.”