Joan Mitchell Foundation Publishes Extensive Report on Artist Legacy Stewardship

What does it take to preserve an artist’s legacy? “You can only learn how to do this by doing it,” Solana Chehtman, director of artist programs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, offered. That question animates an ambitious new report titled Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship, published by the Mitchell Foundation. “There are so many ways in which people can have a hand in this work, and we want to a raise awareness and give visibility to efforts happening around the country.”

The 80-page report, now available for free download at the foundation’s website, is an extension of the enterprise’s long-running Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) initiative and a 2025 convening that brought together 145 figures working on matters related to preservation and longevity for artists and their work. Among the attendees at the gathering in New York were archivists, conservators, grantmakers, estate executors, leaders of artist-endowed foundations, and, of course, artists themselves.

“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,” Chehtman said in a press release announcing the report. In an interview at the foundation’s office in Chelsea last week, she added, “At the convening you could see people identifying each other and learning that they were not alone in doing this work.”

The Creating Future Memory report focuses on three main subject areas—“Access to Knowledge,” “Funding and Resources,” and “Coordination and Collaboration”—and offers directives gleaned from the CALL initiative, which began in 2007 as a way to serve Mitchell’s stated desire for the foundation to “aid and assist” artists upon her death in 1992.

“What’s our obligation to keep an artist’s work out of the dumpster?” asked Christa Blatchford, the foundation’s executive director. “We realized, as an entity that stewards a legacy, we have a unique vantage and opportunity to talk about that.”

One passage in the Creating Future Memory report cites Mikiko Ino, who has worked to preserve her late husband Kikuo Saito’s legacy, recalling, “Kikuo always said there are two deaths: the first is physical, and the second is when nobody talks about you.” After his passing, she said, “I decided to never give him the second death.”

A resounding pull-quote from Amalia Mesa-Bains, an artist and curator who attended the convening, reads: “They’re running with a big eraser right behind us. Remembering is a defiant act.”

About the pressing needs and disquieting realities of legacy cultivation for artists, the report claims, “Too often, these efforts are approached as a series of isolated tasks, rather than as part of a coordinated, sustained process. In reality, legacy stewardship operates as a complex web of mostly invisible and often under-resourced tasks, in which each actor—artists, estate leaders, archivists, conservators, lawyers, and other supporters and arts workers—contributes complementary labor and knowledge.”

In the foundation’s office, Chehtman said, “Our mission is to aid and support artists, but it cannot be just on the shoulders of artists, because legacy is by nature communal.” She also stressed a sense of urgency undergirding work of the kind: “Given everything that is happening in the country and in the world, there are lot of communities and a lot of artists who are at risk.”

Alongside the Creating Future Memory report, the Joan Mitchell Foundation has launched a new “Legacy Field Map” to help build a crowd-sourced network of organizations working toward similar ends. The foundation is soliciting submissions and will vet candidates to be added to a resource that will expand over time. “Many of these people don’t know each other,” Chehtman said of workers in the field, “and they don’t know of each other either.”

At the core of the report and the map is an integral question, according to Chehtman: “How can we see this field not only as artists and their family members and foundation leaders but also everyone in the art field who can have an impact?”