Joan Mitchell Foundation

10/05/2026

Every artist’s estate needs a champion. Often, close relatives or trusted friends step in to assist an artist near the end of their life in planning for their estate and organizing their work and studio. In many cases, the responsibility of managing an artist’s legacy after they pass away falls to their children as their heirs.

At the Creating Future Memory Convening, Daisy Murray Holman, daughter of artist Elizabeth Murray, Trustee of her estate, and Executive Director of the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, asked that family members of artists stand up so that she could identify them, and made a plea to other children of artists: “If you’d like to be in touch, just to talk about what it feels like to be in this position, I’d like to continue that conversation.” She has since been working on a website for “Artists’ Kids” and connecting to exchange information specific to their vantage point.

On the Artists’ Kids website, Holman muses: “What’s the difference between being the kid of an artist or the kid of a banker? Maybe nothing, and maybe everything. But definitely: stuff. Usually: a parent that loved something enough to commit their lives to it.”

Read more legacy stories in our report, “Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship,” and visit Holman’s Artists’ Kids website (links in bio).

Pictured here:
1: Birthday party in Elizabeth Murray’s studio on White Street, New York, NY, c. 1989. Courtesy of Daisy Murray Holman.

2: Daisy Murray Holman and daughter at UB Anderson Gallery, during retrospective exhibition “Elizabeth Murray: Back In Town,” 2021. Courtesy Elizabeth Murray.

10/01/2026

For New York-based artist Juan Sánchez, proper artwork storage was simply out of reach financially for most of his life. A pioneer in the Latinx art movement, Sánchez noted that this situation was not uncommon among his artist community. “You don’t have the finances or the conditions to store the work in a way that would maintain it in good shape,” he said.

The consequences of limited resources for artwork preservation and storage during an artist’s lifetime, and after they pass on, can be dire. Sánchez, who serves on the board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, has lamented, “I’ve seen artwork taken out of studios and thrown into a dumpster and it’s very painful to witness. Every one of us is vulnerable.”

In 2010, as a participant in the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s CALL initiative, Sánchez began implementing critical documentation and storage projects that stabilized his life’s work. He also organized the contextual materials in his studio into an archive, which is in the process of being acquired by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Because of these efforts, Sánchez was prepared to embrace a momentous and overdue opportunity: the preparation of his first traveling retrospective. Juan Sánchez: States of Liberation, which opens next summer at the in Washington, DC, then heads to the of American Art in New York and concludes at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.

Read more legacy stories in our report, “Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship,” and download our legacy planning guides for artists (links in bio).

Pictured here:
1: Juan Sánchez in his studio in New York, 2012

2: Juan Sánchez showing visiting Penn State MFA students a section of his Fractured Grids, 2016-2026, floor installation, mixed media collage on 12 x 12 inch Masonite panels.

3: Juan Sánchez, Confused Paradi(c)e, 1995. Oil and mixed media collage on wood panel, 78 x 66 inches.

Juan Sanchez

09/28/2026

In the keynote conversation at the Creating Future Memory Convening, artist and curator Amalia Mesa-Bains (Amalia Mesa-Bains) shared her experience as a Latina artist working in the US since the 1960s. Her reflections shed light on key challenges faced by Black and Brown artists as they chart their careers, asking important questions about how their work will be preserved and remembered.

Mesa-Bains observed that museums have often failed to collect work by Latinx artists like herself because the institutions “weren’t grounded in our world.” She continued, “Every piece of my work that has been acquired—which is only very, very recently—has been acquired in a museum where there’s a Latina [curator].”

While Mesa-Bains has made personal strides in recent years towards recognition, she stressed that the current political moment in the US has heightened insecurity for artists and cultural institutions, especially in the Latinx community. In her words: “They’re running with a big eraser right behind us. Remembering is a defiant act.”

Read more legacy stories in our report, “Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship” (link in bio).

Pictured here:

1: Amalia Mesa-Bains with Josh T Franco at Creating Future Memory Convening, 2025, photo by Heather Cromartie

2: Amalia Mesa-Bains at Creating Future Memory Convening, 2025, photo by Heather Cromartie

3: Amalia Mesa-Bains, “An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio,” 1984, revised 1991, mixed media installation including plywood, mirrors, fabric, framed photographs, found objects, dried flowers and glitter, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisitions Program © Amalia Mesa-Bains

09/24/2026

https://hyperallergic.com/an-unequal-artist-legacy-field-defines-who-gets-to-be-remembered/

A new report from the Joan Mitchell Foundation highlights deep structural issues affecting legacy work across the arts.

09/23/2026

: Mikiko Ino describes her work to perpetuate her late husband Kikuo Saito’s legacy as a labor of love that grew out of her grief following his passing, giving her a sense of purpose. “Kikuo always said there are two deaths: the first is physical, and the second is when nobody talks about you. I decided to never give him the second death.”

, the nonprofit Mikiko founded in her husband’s memory, is based in a former school building in Verplanck, NY, where Saito based his studio practice in his final years. The public charity honors Saito’s vision through exhibitions of his work alongside other abstract artists, artist residencies, and community-based public programming.

Mikiko has been spearheading KINOSAITO since 2018. In addition to exhibitions, residencies, and other programs, she utilizes KINOSAITO for storage and artwork documentation projects essential to ensuring the longevity of Saito’s work. Mikiko noted at the Creating Future Memory convening that funding legacy projects has been a challenge in her journey. Mikiko shared, “Starting [to fundraise to support this work] is hard, but continuing is much harder.”

Follow to learn more, and click the link in our bio for more legacy stories in our free report, “Creating Future Memory: Building the Field of Artist Legacy Stewardship.”

Pictured here:
1: Mikiko Ino with artwork by Kikuo Saito, “Robana,” 1979. Courtesy of KINOSAITO, photo by chika_kobari

2: Kikuo Saito in 1990. (Via Wikipedia, by Glickphoebe, CC BY-SA 4.0)

3: Alex Rojas’s residency studio at KINOSAITO, Verplanck, NY, 2021. Photo by chika_kobari, courtesy of KINOSAITO.

09/21/2026

Last week, we released “Creating Future Memory,” a report on artist legacy stewardship. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting key voices from this publication: artists, estate stewards, curators, archivists, and others engaged in legacy work, sharing their experiences and perspectives on the work that they do and why it is important.

At the Creating Future Memory convening last May, we asked participants to reflect on why they work to preserve artists’ legacies. They wrote responses on notecards that were displayed as a Wall of Whys and incorporated into the report.

🗨️ Artists and arts workers, add your “whys” in the comments below!

➡️ Download the free report and explore the new Legacy Field Map via the Foundation’s website (links in bio).

09/17/2026

This week, we launched a report on the state of artist legacy stewardship in the US, alongside an online Legacy Field Map—mapping nonprofit organizations throughout the country moving legacy work forward in different capacities.

The new Legacy Field Map is a direct response to a challenge that we’ve heard expressed over and over from artists and legacy workers: the need for more visibility and connection among those doing this work, who often feel they are working in isolation or reinventing the wheel as they go. Many of the institutions in the online Legacy Field Map offer innovative models that others can learn from as we envision a more robust ecosystem supporting artist legacy stewardship in communities across the country.

Follow the link in our bio to browse the free online directory and map, which highlights archival centers, like the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (Archives of American Art), the Getty Research Institute (Getty , and the Asia Art Archive in America (Asia Art Archive in America); resource providers like VLA (Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts) and Center for Art Law (Center for Art Law (US/CH)); and community-based organizations, like Sixty Inches from Center (Chicago, Sixty Inches From Center) and Legacy Lab New Mexico (Legacy Lab New Mexico).

You can help us grow the Legacy Field Map by submitting your own organization’s information or suggesting others to list. Explore the map and learn how: https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/legacy-field-map.

09/15/2026

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,” now 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 visibility, connection, and exchange among those working to preserve and celebrate artists’ lives and work across the country.

The Creating Future Memory report weaves the voices and big ideas from the Creating Future Memory Convening (May 2025) together with the Foundation’s broader research to offer a grounding in what artist legacy work can entail and how the field can build a supportive and sustainable legacy ecosystem around artists. It is our belief that intentional, artist-centered, and well resourced legacy stewardship is central to artists, communities, institutions, and our shared cultural record—and to writing a more inclusive art history.

This report is for artists, their family members and supporters, archivists, conservators, curators, arts leaders, grantmakers, gallerists, lawyers, and lawmakers—all of whom can play a role in building and sustaining a robust ecosystem supporting artist legacy stewardship. We unpack key challenges for each group—including the need for more training, funding, and connection across the board—and share promising strategies and new initiatives to move the field forward.

➡️ Download the free report and explore the Legacy Field Map via the Foundation’s website: https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/journal/new-report-creating-future-memory-explores-how-we-can-collectively-build-the-field-of-artist-legacy-stewardship

🤝 Help us spread the important voices and perspectives in the report by sharing it with your networks.

🗣️ Join the conversion by sharing your own legacy story and tagging .

Report cover artwork: Detail of Troy Montes Michie, Knickknacks, 2025.

09/09/2026

Meet 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow Rob Rhee, a Seattle-based artist and writer whose work draws on the historical and formal connections of cultivated gourds as human surrogates to create sculptural assemblages and vignettes that incorporate lessons in resiliency and adaptability.

Rhee writes: “As someone who came to sculpture through writing, I tend to move back and forth between the two, finding inspiration in cyclical processes of return. My decade-long relationship with gourds—in the studio and on the farm—follows these rhythms along different scales of influence and time. My work is the activity of cultivation, grafting, building soil, and other forms of agrarian bricolage—an ongoing conversation between past and future.”

Rob Rhee’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul, South Korea. Rhee also exhibited in the 10th Berlin Biennale and the 2011 Changwon Biennale. In 2018, he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art. His blog, Tabletop, was Short-Listed for an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation and his critical writing on art has been published in Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Arcade, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Norda. Rhee is an Associate Professor and Chair of the 3D4M program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Learn more about his work at robrhee.com.

Meet 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow Rob Rhee, a Seattle-based artist and writer whose work draws on the historical and formal connections of cultivated gourds as human surrogates to create sculptural assemblages and vignettes that incorporate lessons in resiliency and adaptability.

Rhee writes: “As someone who came to sculpture through writing, I tend to move back and forth between the two, finding inspiration in cyclical processes of return. My decade-long relationship with gourds—in the studio and on the farm—follows these rhythms along different scales of influence and time. My work is the activity of cultivation, grafting, building soil, and other forms of agrarian bricolage—an ongoing conversation between past and future.”

Rob Rhee’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Hunterdon Art Museum, White Columns, the Fort Worth Contemporary Gallery, the Portland Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum, the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul, South Korea. Rhee also exhibited in the 10th Berlin Biennale and the 2011 Changwon Biennale. In 2018, he was awarded the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award for Visual Art. His blog, Tabletop, was Short-Listed for an Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital / the Andy Warhol Foundation and his critical writing on art has been published in Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Arcade, Columbia: A Journal of Arts and Letters, and La Norda. Rhee is an Associate Professor and Chair of the 3D4M program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Learn more about his work at robrhee.com.

08/24/2026

Meet 2026 Joan Mitchell Fellow Azza El Siddique, an artist based in New Haven, CT.

El Siddique writes: “I create large-scale installations that use material transformation to examine how systems of power shape our understanding of death, memory, and belief. Working with steel, water, clay, and scent, I build environments that operate through a ‘catch-and-release’ system, where materials are set into motion to erode, stain, dissolve, and reconfigure over time.”

El Siddique (b. Khartoum, Sudan) received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; Amant Foundation, New York; John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Residency, Wisconsin; and Harbourfront Centre, Ontario. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Artforum, Artpapers, Canadian Art, and Border Crossings. Recent exhibitions include Echoes to Omega, Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; In the place of annihilation, MIT List Center, Cambridge; and that which trembles wavers, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal. Learn more about her work at and azzaelsiddique.com.

Pictured here:
1: Azza El Siddique, Echoes to Omega, 2024. Steel, expanded steel, bisque-fired clay, water, Sandalia, slow-drip irrigation systems, fountain pumps, 2-channel video, monitors, 9.5 x 60 x 16.5 ft.

2: Azza El Siddique, Final Fantasy, 2023. Steel, bisque-fired clay slip, unfired clay slip, 4-channel video, monitors, black concrete, water, Sandalia, slow-drip irrigation system, fountain pumps, Variable dimensions.

3: Azza El Siddique, Fade into the Sun, 2021. Steel, expanded steel, water, unfired clay slip, bisque-fired slip clay, glass, enamel spray paint, slow drip irrigation system, heat lamps, bukhoor, Sandalia, 10 x 25 x 25 ft.

4: Azza El Siddique, Fade into the Sun, 2021. Steel, expanded steel, water, unfired clay slip, bisque-fired slip clay, glass, enamel spray paint, slow drip irrigation system, heat lamps, bukhoor, Sandalia, 10 x 25 x 25 ft, detail view.

5: Azza El Siddique