Motherwell Estate Gifts $200,000 to Fine Arts Work Center

The estate of Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell and photographer Renate Ponsold Motherwell, who died in 2023, will give $200,000 to Fine Arts Work Center, a residency program and arts education center in Provincetown, Massachusetts that Motherwell cofounded more than 50 years ago.

The gift will go to support FAWC’s two main programs: its fellowship, where a cohort of 10 visual artists and 10 writers stay at the organization’s campus for seven months during the off season, and its Summer Workshops, weeklong programs in focused disciplines of art and writing.

“The mission of this place is to grant fellowships to emerging artists and writers that has no expectations on it,” FAWC’s executive director Sharon Polli told ARTnews. “It’s just a gift of time and space to be in community with other artists and writers for seven months, which was the minimum amount of time that the founders felt that you needed as a young artist, to get up every day and kind of face yourself and your own the expanse of time in order to develop that really robust, rigorous studio practice that would define you and transform your life into that of a working artist.”

Each year, FAWC receives over 1,400 applications for the 20 fellowship spots; it has hosted over 1,000 fellows to date. The fellows stay in live-work spaces at the historic Days Lumberyard, which provided affordable studio spaces to artists, including Motherwell, between 1914 and 1972, when FAWC acquired it. Each fellow receives a stipend of $10,000, with visual artists receiving an addition $1,000 materials stipend. Past visual arts fellows include Lisa Yuskavage, Tala Madani, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jennifer Packer, Firelei Báez, Ellen Gallagher, Jack Pierson, Duane Slick, Candice Lin, and Troy Michie. 

Between June and August, when Provincetown’s population swells from a population of around 3,000 year-round residents to anywhere between 60,000 and 80,000 daily visitors, FAWC hosts around 65 weeklong workshops that are open to the public, ranging from printmaking and figurative painting to creative nonfiction and prose poetry.

Additionally, the Motherwell gift will help support its Scholars Awards, which allows for more than 100 young people, from low-income backgrounds or historically marginalized groups, to attend the Summer Workshops for no cost on tuition, as well as a housing and travel stipend from those not from Cape Cod.

In 1968, Motherwell, who had visited Provincetown since the early ’40s, cofounded Fine Arts Work Center with a group of artists, writers, and patrons that included past US poet laureate Stanley Kunitz and collector Hudson D. Walker. The founding group, Polli said, “started thinking about the future of Provincetown as a place that would always be a place of experimentation and creativity. Even at that time, it was starting to become too expensive for artists and writers to live and work here, and so they formed the Fine Arts Work Center.”

She added, “The Motherwell family is incredibly important to this small artist community here at the tip of Cape Cod.”

While $200,000 may seem like a modest sum, Polli, who began her tenure in May 2021, said for an organization of FAWC’s size, with an annual operating budget of $2.5 million, the sum accounts for about 10 percent of its yearly expenditures, including $200,000 in fellowship stipends and $100,000 for the Scholars Awards program. Polli estimated that the total cost of hosting one fellow to the organization to be around $50,000. The gift allows the organization “to invite talented emerging voices here and give them the opportunity to experience that and say yes to that opportunity,” she said.

In 2018, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, FAWC established its first endowment, which now totals around $3 million. Since the pandemic, the organization has increased its stipends both for fellows and the summer faculty by around 20 percent.

“The most important thing to know is that we’re investing that directly into artists and writers,” Polli said. “Something like $200,000 goes directly into those artist stipends and artist fees and allows us to really enable artists and writers to live and work here and thrive when they come.”

Because of Provincetown’s important role to artists over the past century, Polli said she sees FAWC’s support of artists to be essential to that history. The organization will also have a booth at the Armory Show this September, in the fair’s nonprofit section, where it will showcase the work of 19 past fellows, curated by past fellow, artist Matt Bollinger.

“We consider the mission to nurture artists and writers in a creative community, with no expectations other than that they invest in their creative practice, experiment and take risks, and have the space to do that, to be essential to American culture,” Polli said. “We’re making that investment in them in the very early stages of their career, before they have any book deal signed, before they’ve got major gallery representation or major museum exhibitions.”

She continued, “So many [past fellows] really cite this unstructured gift of time and space as having been an essential moment for them and their creative development to discover their artistic voice, so we consider the mission essential for American arts and letters.”