Jenny Wu speaks to various nonprofits about fundraising and the types of compromises that may come with it
In May I was given a press ticket to a fundraising luncheon on Park Avenue. The main event was a talk between a painter of florid mixed-media tableaux represented by a blue-chip gallery and a curator from a major contemporary art institution. Onstage the artist expressed her love for New York, a place where, in her words, you could be enjoying a day out with friends one moment, and the next be startled by a furry little creature scampering across the sidewalk. Her quip made the audience chuckle, but what struck me was the way she could invoke – in one deft stroke – the filth and neglect that so many New Yorkers confront daily without so much as pointing a finger or uttering the word ‘rat’.
Making art about rats is another story. Art that, say, lets you watch them sniff around and climb on tiny sculptures installed near their habitats through night-vision-equipped trail cams. This is the premise of Asad Raza’s exhibition Thigmotaxis (the rat show), on view through December in Times, an experimental, noncommercial art space that opened in February. “The rat show has been in the works between me and Asad for a few years,” Summer Guthery, one of Times’s two cofounders and previously the director of the arts nonprofit (and former exhibition space) Canal Projects, tells me over the phone. “I wanted to do it at Canal Projects, [but] something about rats just didn’t appeal to them.” Alongside cofounder Francesca Sonara, Guthery has been knee-deep in rat-related fieldwork with Raza for the past nine months. “Rats are not the problem. We are the problem,” Sonara says (Indeed, we dig up their burrows with construction equipment in the process of gentrifying neighbourhoods; we leave garbage bags out on the curb and are surprised to find them scavenging inside.) “Rats are gross because we’re gross.”
Times, which is based in a rented gallery space between Chinatown and Tribeca, opened seven months ago with a performance by Latvian choreographer Jana Jacuka that began as a standup comedy set and evolved into an opera and an exorcism (by the end, there was drool on the floor). Performances, exhibitions and screenings have followed, by Nina Beier, Bob Kil, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Liv Schulman and others. Guthery and Sonara are longtime friends and collaborators. “We have the same taste,” Guthery says. “We like the same weird shit.”
They are able to broadcast their taste unabashedly thanks to their arrangement: Sonara seed-funded Times, and while she and Guthery have since brought in other private donors, the two remain in full control of the programming. While other arts nonprofits – say, more robustly financed but also relatively new entities in the city such as Amant and Center for Art Research and Alliances (CARA) – tend to structure their governing bodies with discrete roles for the board, the founder, the executive director and so on, Sonara and Guthery pride themselves on handling daily operations together and working in equal partnership. They are, after all, the only members of Times’s board and, save for the occasional university-funded intern, Times’s only employees. Moreover, they’ve set up Times under what they call a ‘three-year obsolescence model’. Planned obsolescence – the promise for their nonprofit to essentially self-liquidate, so as not to bloat and ossify – is liberating, according to Sonara, because it allows them to focus “a comparatively smaller amount of money” on “a smaller period of time”, to avoid making artists perform a song and dance for the donor class. Of course, Guthery and Sonara can take this position because, at Times’s scale and given what will be its eternal youth, the duo can afford to be a bit cheeky.
A more typical, cautious model presents itself in nonprofits such as Triple Canopy, an online publishing platform devoted to experimental art and literature, which began as a nonhierarchical, unpaid editorial collective and became a 501(c)(3) – which is to say, a formal magazine with a compensated masthead – in 2010. Since its inception, Triple Canopy has sought to operate well beyond the standard purview of a magazine and has ‘published’ artworks, performances, lectures, workshops and even their own installation of reproductions of early American furniture and ‘primitive’ paintings in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Last fall, artist Louis Osmosis kicked off the magazine’s annual interdisciplinary symposium with a performance during which he crawled on all fours and used chalk to number the holes in the floorboards of the auditorium, as if taking inventory for the vermin.
Today, Triple Canopy operates on a budget of approximately $1 million per year, their director Molly Kleiman tells me. Their work is heavily reliant on philanthropic giving: around 80 percent of their income is contributed, 60 percent from private foundations, the city and the state (they do not receive any federal government support), 20 percent from board members and individuals. Historically, the organisation has had, in Kleiman’s words, “very little cash buffer”. “We are fundraising for the year that we are currently in every year,” she says. In terms of their expenses, the organisation must pay rent on their office in Chinatown and pay its editors and designers. Kleiman observes that organisations often fare better when fundraising for new activities or a capital campaign than for existing programmes. “You have to smuggle funding your general operations into new initiatives in creative ways,” she says. “It’s something that we’re all doing all the time.” Conversely, one can choose not to perform for funders – or specifically not for certain funders whose values and politics are suspect – even if this refusal means “you stay smaller”, Kleiman said in June, speaking at To Build and Sustain, a conference in Montreal for independent arts publishers organised by Momus magazine, stressing, “Access to more funds always comes with different compromises.”
“We are in a much more stable position than we have been in the past,” Kleiman tells me, “due to a few multiyear grants from foundations that have been genuine partners of ours.” These include, among others, the Lambent Foundation: in 2024, with the foundation’s support, Triple Canopy began awarding fellowships to genre-bending, public-spirited artists such as Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Alex Tatarsky and New Red Order. Kleiman emphasises that the Lambent Foundation’s executive director, Michelle Coffey, convenes with grantees in closed-door sessions during which they share with one another the operational challenges they face. This type of procedure provides relief because grantees are able to converse rather than compete; they are also spared the awkwardness of describing everything they’ve done as a success to the funder – even the endeavours that fail – and having to then repeat the same ‘successful’ strategies year after year.
It’s not that weird and worthwhile programming does not take place at larger nonprofits like Amant, whose founder and CEO, Lonti Ebers, the spouse of billionaire Bruce Flatt, spent $40m building a 1,950-square-metre campus for exhibitions, performances and residencies in East Williamsburg, or CARA, which occupies a nearly $17m property in the West Village purchased by Jane Hait, stepdaughter of billionaire Howard Marks. I have fond memories of Mette Edvardsen declaiming at the former and dancers choreographed by Ligia Lewis slouched against the walls of the latter. But there is often a palpable disconnect between the progressive, experimental ethos these entities profess and their pseudo-corporate governance structures, which affect increasing numbers of people as the organisations grow in age and ambition.
CARA, an exhibition space and supporter of arts-related research and publication that opened in 2022, is currently governed by 13 independent voting members plus Hait, serving as founder and board chair, and curator Manuela Moscoso, acting as executive and artistic director. There is still work to be done, Moscoso tells me over email, to clarify how the board and management make decisions and hold one another accountable. Internal improvements are made via cycles of audits, and Hait informs me that “there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all”. Relatedly, burnout is a real risk among employees working to execute the vision of what Hait calls “a board with big dreams”, which involve, according to Moscoso, “evolv[ing] from a founder-initiated project into a public institution” and “making what we have built durable”. But Hait tells me CARA must continue to grow, because, as it stands, the number of good artists still exceeds the artworld’s capacity to care for their practices and legacies. Growth means anything from increasing funding and staff in order to expand their fellowship programme, which currently offers two $75,000 awards every two years, to publishing more books so as to reach a wider public.
All the while staying conscious of the fact that, in Moscoso’s words, “an institution can grow in size while becoming thinner in purpose”. The question is whether any organisation can truly buck the trend, and until that happens, it might behove us to pay attention to the ones scurrying past our feet, pursuing models that are smaller, ever nimbler and more terranean, with noses and ears to the ground.
ArtReview’s October issue is accompanied by Philanthropy Today, a standalone 66-page publication on the evolving nature of philanthropy in the arts, including feature articles on key concerns within the field, case studies on how philanthropy is involved in shaping the public sphere, and interviews with prominent philanthropists. This publication was created with the support of the Hong Foundation, Fundación Ama Amoedo, Padimai Art & Tech Studio, Amos Anderson Fund & Amos Rex and PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION