ABOUT LEGACY ARTISTS
Legacy Artists are painters and sculptors whose estates have been accepted by ALF's board of directors and entrusted by the artist or artist's heirs to the Artists' Legacy Foundation in perpetuity. These artists' legacies include artwork, archives, ephemera, property and reputations. Viola Frey became ALF's first Legacy Artist after her death in 2004. She bequeathed her artwork, her archives, and her estate to the Foundation, enabling ALF to hire an executive director in 2005 and launch its Artist Award program in 2007.
Squeak Carnwath has planned on becoming a Legacy Artist since founding ALF in 2000, when she and her husband, Gary Knecht revised their wills leaving her artwork and their estates in ALF's care.
If you are a painter or sculptor who may be interested in becoming a Legacy Artist, you are invited to contact the executive director to discuss options and opportunities.
Since receiving Viola Frey's bequest, the Artists' Legacy Foundation has enhanced her legacy by supporting and promoting the exhibition Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey, which was organized by the Racine Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, and also traveled to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. ALF loaned work to the exhibition and helped the curators produce a high-quality catalogue by opening the Frey archives for research, assisting with that research, and providing introductions to significant people in Frey's life and career.
ALF worked closely with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Frey's gallery in New York, to plan its 2007 exhibition, Viola Frey: Relationships/Interrelationships and its 2010 exhibition Every Man, Every Woman: The Figures of Viola Frey. Similarly, ALF worked with the Sylvia White Gallery in Ventura, California, for its 2010 show Legacy in Paint and Clay. Additional gallery exhibitions are planned, and ALF has initiated discussions with museum curators for an exhibition of Frey's works on paper as well as other exhibitions in the future.
Beyond facilitating museum and gallery exhibitions, the Foundation organizes, stores, conserves, and insures all of Frey's artwork and is creating a working database to make information about her artwork readily accessible; ALF has commenced a long-term project to produce the Frey catalogue raisonné and is organizing the artist's papers and other archival materials to make them available and accessible to researchers, scholars, and students.