News

AFELL and Soft Network in ARTnews

As the Canon Expands, the Business of Artists’ Estates Booms

By Maddie Klett • 1/14/2025, 11:50 am

When artist Paul Gardère died in 2011, his daughter, Cat Gardère, undertook her promise to steward his estate and legacy. Having worked as a studio manager and an exhibition coordinator, “I had a lot of familiarity working with artists, archives, and studios,” she told ARTnews. She began the long process of fulfilling her commitment to her father, but there was one catch: the elder Gardère had not set up a trust.

First, she cataloged his assets to prepare the estate for probate—or an inventory and appraisal of artworks to secure ownership in court. Being the sole benefactor of her late parents’ assets meant having some financial resources to begin this work, which involved hiring archivists and working 40 hours a week over 3 years to document inventory and create a digital archive. By 2022, with this digitization largely complete but dwindling funds, she realized there was far more to do in advocating for her father—namely, the work of getting his art into exhibitions and collections.

On Instagram, Gardère saw that her high school classmate, Max Warsh, was posting about the work of his late aunt, the writer and textile artist Rosemary Mayer. Mayer had a posthumous retrospective at the Swiss Institute in New York in 2021, which traveled to three institutions in Europe. “I thought it was serendipitous that somebody in my network was also doing art estate work,” Gardère said. It ended up being a blessing.

Warsh connected her to the Artist’s Foundation & Estate Leaders’ List (AFELL), a Google group started by Chelsea Spengemann, with Tracy Bartley, in 2019 for others in this situation to share resources. AFELL’s more than 300 members range from individuals to operations like the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. While much of its focus is devoted to helping steward the legacies of dead artists, some living artists, like Simone Leigh, have also used AFELL’s resources with the hope of learning best practices for legacy planning.

AFELL is just one outfit that has emerged in the past decade to help artists and their descendants ensure a future for their art. And as under-recognized artists get more and more attention within galleries and museums, these entities are increasingly important, working behind the scenes to help mount projects that would otherwise have been impossible.

With Soft Network, the Experimental Artists of the Past Get a New Life

The organization makes experimental and mixed-media works accessible to art lovers, curators and historians, chronicling elements of the art world that have for too long gone unseen. 

By Elyssa Goodman • 10/25/24 4:41pm

Bankers boxes, flat file cabinets, archival portfolios—they’re all here, placed with intention and order, preserving the work of oft-overlooked yet exciting artists in Soft Network’s Soho office. Co-founded in 2021 by curator Chelsea Spengemann, now executive director, and artist Sara Vanderbeek, Soft Network is a nonprofit organization that “preserves and provides access to the work of vital yet often vulnerable experimental artists and those who care for them.” It does this by assisting artists and those managing artist estates—or legacy workers, as they’re known—in cataloging, storing, digitizing and exhibiting artwork through a two-year-long Archive-in-Residence program. This helps artists and legacy workers preserve estates for the future; the ultimate goal is not to house work permanently but to help the estate stand in the art world on its own.

OFFSCREEN and Cultish are delighted to announce the winner of the first edition of the Cultish x OFFSCREEN Prize: Susan Brockman, presented by Soft Network.

A special mention was awarded to Lita Albuquerque, presented by Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach.

Cultish is a platform for creative exploration born from a shared passion for the arts and exceptional craftsmanship. With Cultish, Publicis Luxe reaffirms its commitment to culture as a transformative driver for luxury, thus pushing the boundaries of artistic expression for brands

It is in this dynamic that Cultish chose to partner with OFFSCREEN, an event highlighting artists working with still and moving images, who present site-specific installations in dialogue with a unique space.

The partnership between Cultish and OFFSCREEN culminates in the awarding of a prize, recognizing the best artistic proposal exhibited during the 2024 edition. This Cultish x OFFSCREEN Prize is awarded by a panel of international curators invited by OFFSCREEN, joined by curators from Publicis Luxe.

Susan Brockman, winner of the first edition of the Cultish x OFFSCREEN Prize

Soft Network featured on Giving Back is Dead podcast