Judd Foundation maintains and preserves Donald Judd’s permanently installed living and working spaces, libraries, and archives in New York and Marfa, Texas. The Foundation promotes a wider understanding of Judd’s artistic legacy by providing access to these spaces and resources and by developing scholarly and educational programs.
Judd Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
“The space surrounding my work is crucial to it,” wrote Donald Judd in the 1977 essay which first outlined the principles of Judd Foundation. “As much thought has gone into the installation as into a piece itself.”
The history of Judd Foundation is interwoven with the development of Judd’s ideas about art, and the practical concerns of his work. While employed as an art critic in New York in the 1950s and early 60s, Judd became increasingly aware of the limitations placed on artists and the importance of maintaining creative autonomy. His own experience of lending his work for temporary exhibitions, combined with his ongoing investigations into the use of space, influenced his decision to ensure that a portion of his work would be permanently installed as he intended. “The purpose of the Foundation,” he was later to write, “is to preserve my work and that of others […] in spaces I consider appropriate for it. This effort has been a concern second only to the invention of my work. And gradually the two concerns have joined and both tend toward architecture.”
Judd’s strongly held convictions were highly specific to his practice, and they led him to produce work which was radically original. However, as he put it in an interview in 1992, “My clarity is just one person’s clarity.” As a critic and an artist, Judd believed that every individual had the right to pursue their own distinct vision and set of values, generating new ideas and practices as part of a flourishing society. Such freedom depended on “an open situation of contemporary art,” a cultural context where artists were prioritized above that of institutions. Judd Foundation was established to support this ideal; since Judd’s death in 1994, the Foundation has worked to preserve Judd’s spaces as he intended, upholding his claim that “permanent installations and careful maintenance are crucial to the autonomy and integrity of art.”
The spaces in New York and Marfa present a series of proposals for how art can be installed and preserved; in being seen and experienced, they serve as a resource for artists and the visiting public, inspiring questions, ideas, and new creative practices. “New work and life is vital,” wrote Judd. “And the development of the new work is only in the middle of the beginning.”