Creating a Living Legacy

The Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) initiative provides artists with resources and instruction in the areas of career documentation, inventory management, and legacy planning.

Legacy Specialist Alex Unthank and artist Marcos Dimas looking at slides on a lightbox in a room filled with papers, art supplies and storage. — Legacy Specialist Alex Unthank working with CALL Artist Marcos Dimas in his studio.

Recognizing that artists of all ages may need support to organize their studios and take charge of their creative legacies, the Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy Initiative (CALL) provides a comprehensive suite of resources to help artists create usable documentation of their artworks and careers, manage their inventory of artworks, and start the estate planning process.

After many years working directly with older artists on career documentation, the Foundation expanded the vision for CALL, making its resources widely available through free workbooks, online tutorials, and case studies.

See Guides & Workbooks

Tutorials & Case Studies

CALL Program Participants & Talks

CALL resources were developed through more than a decade of direct work with mature artists in their studios, and honed by feedback from Legacy Specialists, who were trained by the Foundation to assist the CALL Artists.

Recognizing artists' voices as essential to the understanding of their practice and legacy, in 2007 the Foundation began partnering with VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) to produce the annual CALL/VoCA Talks, a series of in-depth interviews with artists who participated in the CALL program. The full-length videos are available below, and accessibly preserved with full transcripts at the NYU Fales Library.

See All CALL Artists

Watch CALL/VoCA Talks

Program Strategies & Milestones

In 2007, the Foundation began exploring new ways to support mature artists in the thorough documentation and preservation of their life's work. Over the next decade, we worked closely with dozens of artists to develop the CALL resources that are now available to the public. We’ve compiled the strategies, milestones, and outcomes of each phase of the CALL program in a timeline.

CALL Program Timeline