The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was established in New York in 1987. Although Warhol’s own radical artistic experimentation was cut tragically short by his unexpected passing at the age of 58, he had generously made arrangements to help future generations of artists break new ground. He called for the creation of a foundation dedicated to “advancement of the visual arts,” in his will, leaving nearly his entire estate to the cause.
Since its inception, the Foundation’s purpose has been to support experimental and challenging new artistic activity in the most meaningful way possible, and to preserve and expand Warhol’s artistic legacy. Those two goals are intertwined: every initiative the Foundation supports is considered through the lens of Warhol’s maverick approach to art and life, from his fundamental sense of freedom to be new and different, to his forward-thinking generosity.
We believe freedom of artistic expression is fundamental to an open and enlightened democracy and are committed to promoting and defending it.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
To address Warhol’s directive, the Foundation quickly put a grantmaking program into place that has since evolved into one of the country’s top funding mechanisms to support innovation in contemporary art, awarding approximately $15 million in grants each year to artist-centered 501(c)(3) organizations. Through its grants, the Foundation has funded hundreds of exhibitions, curatorial projects, and commissioning opportunities — often fueled by subversive and challenging ideas — at small, artist-run spaces, internationally renowned museums, and a range of experimental venues inbetween. In the spirit of its founder, the Foundation’s philanthropic hallmark has long been its nimble responsiveness to the moment and eagerness to embrace new ideas and voices. The Foundation has been especially quick to address the changing needs of artists and shifting socio-cultural landscape, responding to the reduction in national arts funding in the 1990s by establishing and funding Creative Capital, and by providing relief for artist-centered organizations affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and more recently the Covid-19 pandemic. To extend the reach of its grants, the Foundation has designed and launched several initiatives over the years, including the Regional Regranting Program, which directly supports independently organized, public-facing, artist-centered activity in local and regional art scenes that lie beyond the reach of traditional funding sources, and Common Field, a national network of grass roots visual arts organizations.
We acknowledge our culture’s systemic marginalization of artists because of race, gender, religion, age, ability, sexual orientation, and/or immigration status among other factors. We actively seek to highlight the work of under-represented practitioners and support efforts to address entrenched inequities.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
As the Foundation has matured, Warhol’s profound philanthropic impact has grown to match his immense influence on art and culture. As the chief steward of Warhol’s legacy, it has been the Foundation’s duty to foster understanding of that creative achievement while also embracing the democratic values that he espoused during his lifetime. Ensuring that the thousands of works in his estate were made available to curators, scholars, and art enthusiasts, and also properly cared for, was among the Foundation’s earliest missions. An active loan program was quickly established, facilitating exhibitions of major paintings as well as previously unseen material. Artworks were also permanently placed in museum through a program that centered on museums which did not have significant Warhol works in their collections. The foundation enabled the museums to acquire works by selling them at a substantial discount, making each acquisition a partial gift from the foundation. Through this program 103 major works by Warhol entered the collections of 24 museums throughout the country.
Recognizing the need for an independent institution to store, conserve, study, and exhibit the estate’s holdings and present Warhol’s legacy to the public, the Foundation joined forces with the Dia Art Foundation and Carnegie Museums in 1989 to cofound the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA. More than 8,000 artworks and tens of thousands of archival objects from his estate were gifted to form the core collection of the museum and its study center, which continues to shed new light on Warhol’s multi-layered art and life.
Efforts were also taken to introduce under-recognized bodies of work to the public through thoughtfully curated exhibitions and scholarly catalogs produced in collaboration with prominent commercial galleries. The proceeds from those presentations, along with the carefully considered sales orchestrated through Christie’s, have vastly increased the Foundation’s grantmaking capabilities. Institutional donations have also provided unprecedented opportunities for the public to view and study Warhol’s lesser-known work firsthand. In 2007, for example, the Foundation launched the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Project, which gifted around 28,500 of the artist’s Polaroids and silver gelatin prints to more than 200 college and university collections around the country. Over time, the Foundation has given roughly, 52,000 works of art to more than 320 museums.
Additionally, the foundation transferred the title to fifteen acres of prime ocean-front property once owned by Andy Warhol in Montauk, Long Island to the Nature Conservancy. The purpose of the donation was to preserve a section of the ecologically significant Montauk Moorlands and to promote the visual arts. As a condition of the gift, while maintaining the aesthetic and ecological attributes of the Andy Warhol Nature Preserve, the Conservancy has established an interpretive nature trail for visitors through this tract of mixed wetlands, woodlands, and coastal bluffs.
The Foundation’s commitment to advancing Warhol scholarship is also exemplified by its ongoing sponsorship of the multi-volume Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings, Sculptures, and Drawings, a monumental undertaking that began in the 1980s. The Foundation took the helm of the project’s rigorous research and ambitious production in the 1990s, and has since completed five volumes, published by Phaidon, with a sixth in preparation. Support of print and film catalogues raisonné have further deepened understanding of the scope and depth of Warhol’s tremendous artistic output.
As the owner of copyrights to artwork created by Warhol and trademarks for his name and signature, the Foundation has been able to broadly communicate his legacy as a creative disruptor and cultural icon, using the tools of the mass media much in the way the artist did. Creative and thoughtful merchandising and advertising collaborations with Perrier, Absolut Vodka, Dior, and Burger King, to name a few, have recontextualized for a new audience Warhol’s open-minded embrace of art and commerce, elitist and populist image making, while also paying homage to his sophisticated propagation of himself as a brand. In the spirit of Warhol’s democratic values, meanwhile, the Foundation has ensured that his images have been readily accessible for non-commercial use by scholars, curators, and artists.
The fees generated from these innovative licensing initiatives, as well as from the carefully curated sales of artworks, contribute to an endowment that funds all of the Foundation’s operations and philanthropy, from the catalogue raisonné to its grants. As an artist-endowed organization, the Foundation has never had to fundraise; all of the work it has been able to do extends from its founder’s visionary generosity.
The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA was cofounded in 1989 by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Dia Art Foundation, and Carnegie Institute. Home to more than 500,000 objects, it is the largest repository of Warhol’s artwork and archival materials and among the most comprehensive single-artist museums in the world. Since […]
Warhol painted more than 100 works related to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which some have read as complex reckoning of his homosexuality, Catholicism, and mortality in response to witnessing AIDS devastate the gay community.