Preserving a Legacy: What Happens to an Artist’s Collection After They Pass?

What happens to an artist’s artwork when they pass away? Have they set up a plan for the preservation of their final works or will they be discarded to the landfills never to be seen again? At every turn, we see articles where a wealthy patron donates the bulk of their collection to a museum, such as the Cincinnati Art Museum or the Dayton Art Institute, or endows a foundation to create their own museum, like the Eli Broad Museum in Los Angeles. A recent article in The New York Times discussed the gift of more than a billion dollars worth of cubist masterpieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Leonard Lauder of the Estee Lauder Fortune.

As we keep evolving The Art Show and our storytelling via podcasting and now blog posts, we hope to not only highlight the amazing artists and creators we encounter, but also to discuss relevant issues in the art world, such as the preservation of great works.

Aminah Robinson, who passed away in 2015, left her collection of works, her home and personal property to The Columbus Museum of Art and I am looking forward to sharing her artwork and her story with our viewers on a new episode of The Art Show, which will premiere in the coming months. While stories like this are not unique, it does make me wonder about our local artists and what happens when they are no longer with us.

As President of the OhioDance Board of Trustees, my thoughts on preserving an artist’s artifacts and legacy started when our organization created the Virtual Dance Collection as an archive of Ohio’s key figures and organizations in the dance world. There were several instances in which we recorded interviews and scanned photos before they passed away or, on the other hand and in many instances, they were put on the curb of garbage collection. As a producer for the documentary Willis “Bing” Davis: Reach High and Reach Back, the team and I were very fortunate that Davis’ archive of personal papers was donated to the University of Dayton Special Archives. This access to his legacy gave us an unbelievable advantage when planning how we wanted to film content.

For every magical discovery, there is an equally rich story. Take Scott Burton for example; He was one of America’s leading sculptors in the late 1970s and 1980s who made a deathbed bequest of his entire estate to The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This was done with the good intention of preserving his work and with the belief that the museum staff would steward that process. Unfortunately, with limited resources, they were not equipped to manage such a request. His work languished in obscurity until a concerted effort of historians, scholars and artists resuscitated interest in his work roughly 35 years later.

I like to consider myself not just a creator, but a collector as well. I am fortunate to be able to occasionally indulge in purchasing small works of my favorite local and national photographers in support of my love for photography. The story of Vivian Maier and her collection is one that totally fascinated me. A caregiver and nanny by profession, Vivian spent her weekends snapping photographs in the streets of Chicago from 1956 on and amassed a collection of over 100,000 negatives. They ended up in a Chicago auction house and were rescued by John Maloof, who saw the amazing imagery and visual record of this bygone era that was captured in this treasure trove of a collection. Vivian has been posthumously recognized as one the best street photographers of the late 20th Century.

As an artmaker approaching a milestone birthday of 60 years, I have had to make a conscious decision to incorporate an exit strategy with every piece of visual work, choreography and performance documentation (our productions of The Art Show have already entered the pantheon of public record). This creative process has an added layer of gravitas and I am forced to be more diligent in documenting my work as well as signing each piece. Suddenly, it does not seem self-indulgent to map out downtime for my creative expression. And if my actions jump-start other artists and collectors to have similar considerations about how our art can live beyond us and how it can be shared with our communities, that’s even better!

Rodney Veal
CET and Think^TV Producer and Community Arts Liaison