Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on On Balance, to ARTnews newsletter on the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Artist and publisher Corina Larkin it’s been a while since he looked Ted Berger, executive director emeritus of the New York Foundation for the Arts, as a mentor. For years, she consulted Berger, once called the “angel on the shoulders of thousands of struggling artists” by New York Times—about how to finance artist-led projects. During her tenure as executive director of Chelsea’s CUE Art Foundation, Larkin and Berger, who serves as CUE’s board chair, have spoken often about how to alleviate resource shortages in the field. The result of those conversations, Larkin explained at a press reception Tuesday, was Trellis Art Fund, a new private family foundation dedicated to funding artists’ practices.
The Chelsea-based fund will provide 12 recipients with $100,000 spread over two years. Larkin will serve as its chief executive officer.
“Given the world we live in, with so many other pressing crises, the role of artists is even more precarious,” Larkin said. ARTnews. In philanthropic circles, he said, “there is often a disconnect between the perceived value of art and the understanding of what it takes to get to the point of producing it.”
In a call with ARTnews, Berger said the way arts funding is distributed through public and private organizations is reaching “a moment of crisis.” The system, which Berger is often credited with creating in New York, saw its fault lines exposed after the pandemic, when it failed to keep up with rising living and material costs due to inflation.
“It doesn’t really deal with the necessities of life,” he said. “A lot of organizations in our field focus on dead artists.”
Trellis will manage a $15.8 million endowment, much of which will come from Larkin’s husband and the fund’s treasurer, Nigel Dawn, who oversees public pensions and college endowments at investment firm Evercore. That figure puts Trellis in a much lower bracket than the country’s largest arts funders. For example, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts in Milwaukee and the Jerome Foundation in Minnesota, which distribute similar grants to artists through family endowments, manage $860 million and $109 million, respectively.
But despite its smaller scale, Trellis is committed to distributing grants without restrictions that do not track the artist’s use of the money. Larkin described how the group she assembled to lead the organization is aware of what it takes to sustain the work that goes into artists’ practices and sustain their livelihoods. The grant disbursement over two years is part of an effort to make a “slightly larger financial commitment,” he said. They forego a more conventional route in which grants of $5,000 to $10,000 are given for a project, approved as part of a proposal process. That approach, he said, doesn’t address the issue of maintaining an artist’s livelihood.
The fund’s five-member advisory board is made up of a handful of prominent advisers and curators connected to New York’s leading art institutions, including a sculptor. Arlene Shechet and commissioners Marcela Guerreiro e Eugenia Tsaiwho worked at the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, respectively.
Nominated by an anonymous panel selected by the board of 75 academics, artists and curators based in the United States, including Buffalo, Savannah, Tulsa and Aspen, the initial grant recipients will be announced in mid-July, with another round coming in 2026. .
Guerrero and Tsai helped elevate underrepresented artists from their museum roles. Guerrero has curated critically acclaimed exhibitions around Latino artists, while Tsai has done so for African American and Asian artists. After 15 years as chief curator of the Brooklyn Museum, Tsai stepped down last May. Having met Larkin through CUE, Tsai said ARTnews in an interview that the non-profit organization Chelsea came to his attention because of its emphasis on artists who operate on the periphery of larger arts organizations. Some artists who had passed through CUE she met from the 90s, when she was connected with the New York artist collective Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, a group that addressed issues of race and inequality within artistic institutions.
“For artists, there’s never enough money,” Tsai said, speaking at a press reception at the fund’s Manhattan office on Tuesday. she said ARTnews she heeded Larkin’s call to join the board, seeing it as a way to stay involved in the process of building artists’ momentum and safeguarding them from periods of instability. He acknowledged that curators must sometimes confront the way artists’ trajectories are shaped outside museum walls. “Often, the most exciting things are happening outside of mainstream institutions,” he said.
Larkin said that in the future the fund may look to partner with other arts organizations and add established artists to the board, but there are no concrete plans yet. Money managers overseeing the foundation’s endowment will aim to grow it year after year, he said, while pursuing an ethical investment strategy, as the pool of recipients expands.
“We’re just trying to give people time and space and recognition,” he said.
Related Articles
