Joan Mitchell Foundation releases landmark report on artist legacy stewardship

NEW YORK, NY.- What happens to an artist’s work, archives, and ideas when they are gone? Who makes the decisions that drive who and what gets to be remembered? What stories and perspectives are at risk of being lost in times of accelerated cultural erasure? These questions are at the heart of a new report from the Joan Mitchell Foundation: Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship, available as a free PDF download via the Foundation’s website. Alongside this publication, the Foundation is also launching an online Legacy Field Map—a crowd-sourced directory designed to support connection, knowledge-sharing, and community among those working to preserve and celebrate artists' lives and work across the country.

“With the release of the Creating Future Memory report and companion Legacy Field Map, we aim to share the current state of artist legacy work in the US while making the case for deeper, more equitable investment in this work, within the arts and beyond,” said Christa Blatchford, Executive Director, Joan Mitchell Foundation. “The stories and data that we have compiled after years of field work, research, and conversations clearly demonstrate how central legacy stewardship is to artists, communities, institutions, and our shared cultural record. Without intentional legacy planning and sustained attention to the preservation and contextualization of a broad range of artists’ work, we risk losing entire ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to the world and to one another.”

The Foundation’s commitment to artist legacy work is rooted in its experience as stewards of Joan Mitchell’s own legacy, and builds on more than 15 years of providing resources through its Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) initiative. Drawing on this past work and ongoing research, the Creating Future Memory report is grounded in the voices and big ideas from a field-wide convening of the same name that the Foundation hosted in May 2025 at BRIC in Brooklyn, with support from the Mellon Foundation. The event brought together 145 individuals: artists, family members working on their loved ones’ legacies, legacy workers, representatives from artist-endowed foundations, archivists, conservators, curators, grantmakers, and representatives of art institutions, the market, and governmental agencies.

“What we heard from participants at the convening was both inspiring and sobering: across the country, individuals, collectives, and organizations are doing extraordinary work to preserve artistic legacies—yet these efforts remain largely disconnected from one another and chronically under-resourced,” said Solana Chehtman, Director of Artist Programs, Joan Mitchell Foundation. “Alongside this dedication, we continue to hear urgent accounts of loss: archives discarded or damaged, artworks destroyed, artists forgotten. And perhaps most persistently, we hear from artists’ family members and other legacy workers that they are overwhelmed from taking on the enormity of this work with a lack of adequate knowledge, funding, connections, or infrastructural support. In the current political climate, as cultural erasure accelerates, the need for collective action has never been more pressing.”

Sythesizing these voices and learnings, the Creating Future Memory report begins with an overview of what artist legacy stewardship entails and outlines key challenges facing the artist legacy stewardship ecosystem—many of which stem from structural inequities in the broader cultural landscape. Through the Creating Future Memory convening and its other research, the Foundation has identified three main types of challenges in artist legacy stewardship: 1) access to knowledge, 2) funding and resources, and 3) coordination and collaboration. The publication unpacks these concerns while highlighting promising strategies emerging in the field.

Creating Future Memory is available as a free PDF download via the Joan Mitchell Foundation's website. The companion Legacy Field Map, also housed on the Foundation's website, gives visibility to nonprofit legacy organizations, facilitating connection and information exchange between legacy workers across the country.