‘All art is worthy of preserving’: what should artists do to protect what they leave behind?
With a dip in the art market and only one in five artists exhibiting their work in a museum, those on the outskirts are grappling with how to preserve their legacy
The painter Renzo Ortega had been thinking a lot about creating a plan for what to do with all the artwork he had accumulated over his 25-year artist career. A storage room in his native country of Peru and one in North Carolina where he lived were already packed with hundreds and hundreds of paintings. Each embraced different artistic styles, from folk art to expressionism and pre-Hispanic patterns, including vivid landscapes and pieces that captured the realities and contributions of Latin immigrants like himself to US life.
Life is short and unexpected, he reflected on the evening of his 50th birthday, death being the only truth for an artist as they age, and “nothing guarantees that what an artist produces will generate monetary success or cultural recognition,” he said. Something was certain: “If a gallery hasn’t represented me at 50, it never will.”
If the future wasn’t clear, at least it would be for his artworks.
Thinking about his legacy also raised the question: what did success mean to artists outside of the art world establishment? In New York City, Ortega studied at the Art Students League and obtained his MFA at Hunter College. His 25-year trajectory encompasses more than 40 solo and group exhibitions at local galleries and museums along with teaching painting at prestigious art departments and winning more than 10 grants. Despite these achievements, “I’ll go to an art fair or have an exhibit, hear people say how much they love my work, then all the artworks return to the storage room, unsold,” he said.
In a sinking art market where last year, global auctions of fine art fell by 27% from 2022 and only one in five artists exhibited their work at a museum, artists unfairly have to carry the weight to “succeed” under dire conditions. Women and artists of color face even more barriers. In the US, female-identifying artists, Black American artists, and Black female American artists across all genres and periods have represented only 5.3% of all market sales from 2008 to 2022, according to the Burns-Halerpin report. Latino and Indigenous artists are yet to be accounted for. “We don’t have a shortage of creative geniuses and talent,” the art critic and curator Charles Moore, who wrote The Black Market, A Guide to Art Collecting said. “We have a shortage of marrying them with collectors that buy their works and support their creative output.”
Regardless of having obtained blue chip gallery recognition, “all art is worthy of preserving and reflective of a time and an experience,” Jason Andrew, founding partner at Artist Estate Studio, said. “Whether or not the artist is internationally celebrated, the art is still valuable.” Yet, so much of it gets lost to history.
“A first step is to be honest about the artist’s desires and have an estate plan. In the UK and the US, this generally means drafting a will or planning a trust,” recommends Ursula Davila-Villa, co-founder of Davila-Villa & Stothart, which helps artists secure a legacy preservation plan and stewardship. Ortega, for instance, is certain he doesn’t want to give away all his art or assign his children to sort out the storage rooms when he is gone. His biggest fear is that all his paintings will end up at the local thrift shop. “You don’t need a gigantic estate or lawyers on staff to write an understanding of what you want,” Jason Andrew said.
Additionally, creators should contextualize their work so that those who find it can better understand it. “The most important thing I’ve come away with is that the artist needs to find a way for their story to become accessible to the public so that it can live beyond them,” Andrew added. This could be done through journaling, recordings of oral histories, or even sharing their artistic process on social media.
After moving his artworks to a bigger storage space, Ortega plans to set aside weekly time to organize, sign, date and inventory all his work, as well as catalog and archive his paintings. He also wants to seek local partnerships with regional galleries by displaying artist retrospectives so that his older paintings can leave the storage room and be shared with the public. A survey exhibition of his New York artworks from 2000-2003 will open this December at ArtSpace in Raleigh, North Carolina. Regarding resources, he would rather spend his time and money on other endeavors than attending art fairs. “I would love to show my son the painting of Las Meninas in Spain one day or the Malba [Museum of Latin American Art] in Buenos Aires,” he dreamed.
Ultimately, if he wanted to destroy his pieces, that would also be his decision to make, “I have no cultural responsibility to give all my art away, nor would I want to burden my children with paying for the storage room,” Ortega said.
For those who pass without a plan for their artworks, a common reality is that these may end up in the trash. In 2001, when the native New Yorker and mixed media artist June Kosloff’s uncle, Dick Lubinsky, died suddenly at 68, she couldn’t allow that to happen and decided to become the executor of his belongings. Diagnosed with different degrees of schizophrenia, Lubinsky was in and out of hospitals in New York City between 1951 and 1958. Although Kosloff knew her uncle was an artist, she didn’t know about the vast body of work he had left behind.
When she went in to clear out Lubinsky’s apartment in the Bronx, Kosloff found “a treasure” of never-displayed artworks. Hundreds of paintings, drawings and collected antique cameras were buried among the thousands of hoarded items that filled the apartment, a storage room in Mount Vernon, and the interior of three cars. There were moving portraits of people from the neighborhood as Lubinsky captured the sadness, humanity and melancholy of unhoused families and others considered outsiders. Kosloff was blown away and realized she had to show this collection to the world.
“First, I couldn’t let him go to Potter’s Field,” Kosloff said, referring to New York’s largest public graveyard for unidentified bodies or those who can’t afford to pay for burial. “And I couldn’t let all of his art end up in the trash,” she added.
Kosloff embarked on this journey, learning from zero. “It’s not like I could just take all of my uncle’s paintings into a big NYC gallery and ask them to take them,” she said, referring to the more prominent establishments that tend to only work with estates of artists who reached some commercial validation.
After looking for local non-profits willing to display at least a portion of her uncle’s works, Kosloff curated her uncle’s first solo show at Local Project Artspace, an artist-run space in Queens, in 2004. Lubinsky’s art was also displayed in a 2014 group show at Fountain House Gallery, a Manhattan-based gallery representing contemporary artists with mental illness, the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania, several times at the NYC Outsider Art Fair, and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore (2009). “The gift given to me is that every artist’s voice matters,” Kosloff said.
The emotional labor undertaken by those who care for an artist’s estate is usually underpaid or not paid at all. In her practice, Davila-Villa has seen a gender disparity firsthand with her own clients (although formal studies are yet to quantify this): “The majority of legacy caregivers are women, who may feel rather lonely in the long endeavor of preserving the legacy of an artist, which in most cases is a family member,” she said. For Kosloff, who always felt like her uncle was there with her, this journey was time- and resource-consuming, but she wouldn’t have done it any other way. “It was the right thing to do, and I feel like I achieved the unachievable with my uncle, and he would be happy,” she said.
Although she plans to exhibit more of his work in the future, Kosloff is now focusing on her own practice and creative projects. Her large-scale, colorful portraits in remembrance of family members and lineage were shown in May at Positive Space Tulsa, an Oklahoma artist-run space, in a show called Recipes For Life: The Lucky Bubby Cookbook, where she also includes a painting honoring her uncle. Regarding what will happen to her artworks, Kosloff doesn’t have a set plan for them yet. “Right now, I’m trying to be an artist while I’m alive,” she said.
Still, thinking about death raises the question of how to champion more artists in life. “What was happening when those artists were painting, sculpting, working, and what would have happened to them if they had had financial and institutional support and validation from collectors and writers in their lifetime?” Moore asked. “What would have changed?”