It isn’t every day that a major arts grantmaker appears seemingly out of the blue, but that’s exactly what happened with the Ruth Foundation for the Arts. In 2022, a $440 million bequest from the late Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, who was a major shareholder in her family’s company, put the foundation on the map. Its intentions: to move $16 million to $20 million out the door annually. As I wrote at the time, that kind of money would catapult it into the upper strata of arts funders.
The foundation (known for short as Ruth Arts) wasn’t entirely new: Kohler originally established it as the RDK Foundation, which typically disbursed a total of $1 to 2 million a year. But when Karen Patterson assumed the role of executive director in 2022, she found herself overseeing an entity that suddenly ranked among the arts philanthrosphere’s largest grantmakers. Needless to say, it wasn’t a conventional onboarding process.
In a recent Zoom call, Patterson said her first order of business was “how to translate Ruth as a person and her legacy into what was essentially a national player in the arts.” Using RDK Foundation’s trust documents as a roadmap, she and the foundation’s trustees reaffirmed Kohler’s support for regional arts organizations and artists, but they also gave themselves room to improvise. “Those instructions aren’t too prescriptive,” Patterson said. “So how do you take that off the paper? How do you remember that Ruth operated in so many different ways?”
Two years later, we have an answer. Inspired by Kohler’s distinctive brand of giving, which the foundation describes as “nonhierarchical and committed to structural change,” it has rolled out an artist-led grantmaking program, provides significant unrestricted multi-year support, convenes leaders to discuss timely topics and is building a new public-facing arts space. And for those keeping track, it disbursed $16 million in calendar year 2023, which is an approximate 700% increase over the RDK Foundation’s average outlay and comports with its intentions to move between $16 to $20 million a year.
That being said, I don’t want to get too hung up on numbers. While the foundation’s endowment ensures it will be a major player for the foreseeable future, Patterson, who hails from the nonprofit world, understands that the complexion of its programs is just as important as the dollar amounts. “We knew multi-year general operating support was needed because we used to be the ones asking for it,” she said. “But what has been surprising is that now, it’s being celebrated as something that’s considered risky. What does that tell you?”
Honoring Kohler’s legacy
Born in 1941, Kohler was a member of the Wisconsin family known for the privately held manufacturing and hospitality company Kohler Co.
Kohler’s interest in the arts and her dedication to arts philanthropy went way back. She was director of Sheboygan, Wisconsin’s John Michael Kohler Arts Center for many decades, served as chair and member of the Wisconsin Arts Board, and was a panel member and site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Organization. Kohler also served on the board of another family giving vehicle, the Kohler Foundation, Inc., from 1969 to 2019, and as the foundation’s president from 1999 to 2006.
Kohler established the RDK Foundation in 1984 to further her philanthropic interests, which included small, grassroots organizations, several art schools and her alma mater Smith College. Ruth Arts — its legal name remains the RDK Foundation — continues to fund those organizations through the RDK Legacy Fund and also established a partnership with John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where Kohler served as director for over 40 years.
Patterson, meanwhile, got to know Kohler while serving as the chief curator at the Kohler Art Center from 2012 to 2019. With Ruth Arts established after Kohler’s passing, she began to work with trustees “to get to a place where you can honor her legacy and also remain forward-facing.” Everyone knew Kohler in some capacity, but each trustee also brought their differing perspectives to the endeavor. One trustee, Susan Flader, had been Kohler’s best friend since childhood. “We all knew,” Patterson said, “that we’d have to get on the same page in terms of what the future of this foundation can be.”
A participatory flagship grant program
Over time, stakeholders kept returning to a common theme — Kohler’s unwavering belief that “starting a conversation with artists changes things structurally,” Patterson said. This thinking informed the creation of Ruth Arts’ flagship grant program, Artist Choice. The participatory program, which launched in 2022, has artists nominate and select organizations to fund, all of which receive unrestricted support.
In Artist Choice’s first year, Patterson and the foundation’s strategic advisor Deana Haggag reached out to 25 artists for nominations — and then asked them each to nominate another artist to nominate an organization. “It was a way to broaden our reach and a way for artists to spread the word,” Patterson said, “and also a way to avoid only asking artists in our network. Most often, artists selected students or mentees, which was beautiful to see.”
Ruth Arts’ approach contrasts with the traditional model, which, of course, involves foundation staff identifying and selecting grant winners. In this field in particular, Patterson said, stereotypes about what artists are like might be putting a damper on the prospects for participatory approaches. Patterson said Artist Choice was a way for Ruth Arts to push back against the idea that artists might be myopic, self-serving or cavalier when entrusted with nominating and selecting their peers. “This is a misconception of artists generally,” she said, “so we wanted to come out of the gate saying, ‘We believe that artists are more enmeshed in a community that you may realize.’”
To arts philanthropy’s credit, there have been efforts in recent years to pursue participatory approaches, including from major funders like the MacArthur Foundation, whose Culture, Equity, and the Arts program draws on input from a participatory panel of community members. I’ve also written about the Mosaic Network and Fund, housed at the New York Community Trust, which has the backing of some big-name funders and relies on a grant committee composed in part of African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American arts practitioners.
Ruth Arts is another encouraging data point to add to that field. In June 2022, the foundation went public and announced its inaugural round of funding — $1.25 million in unrestricted Artist Choice grants awarded to 78 arts groups around the U.S. In the program’s second year, Patterson, with the assistance of additional staff, reached out to a broader set of artist evaluators to expand the geographic and discipline-based diversity of nominated artists.
Other foundation programs include Core Grants, which send out $50,000 in unrestricted support to organizations that have received an Artist Choice award, and Ruth Awards, where winners receive an unrestricted $100,000 award over two years. The foundation announced the four winners of the inaugural Ruth Awards in early February.
“The biggest challenge we’ve encountered”
In overseeing Artist Choice, Patterson noticed that some organizations were nominated multiple times by different nominators, regardless of whether they knew the organizations. Intrigued, she and her team reached out to those organizations’ leaders to understand why so many evaluators independently admired their work and how the foundation could be more responsive to their needs.
“We understood there was a need for multi-year unrestricted grants, which all of our grants are,” Patterson said. “But we also knew that if we embarked on a multi-year relationship by cohort, we could learn more about the field in general.” As a result, the foundation created In Dialogue, a program convening arts leaders around issues like “the ever-evolving relationship between artmaking and place.” These discussions will shape Ruth Arts’ work moving forward. “It’s also an opportunity to collect information that other foundations may find useful,” Patterson said.
As noted, Patterson previously worked for nonprofits on the receiving side of the funding equation, and the same can be said for her staff. Two years into Ruth Arts’ existence, they’re still getting acclimated to being on the giving side. Since so much of the foundation’s funding follows a participatory and trust-based framework, rather than devote most of their time designing programs, “now most of us are curators, so the main challenge is making sure the money gets out the door to the right people in the right way,” she said.
Patterson acknowledged that staff who came from the nonprofit world likely worked in a stressful, demanding and exhausting environment. Again, having worked in the field herself, she’s made a concerted effort to create a supportive and balanced professional atmosphere. “The biggest challenge we’ve encountered,” she said, “was to build a healthy workplace and let people undo some of the behaviors they had to have on the nonprofit side.”
Finally, Patterson and her team are now adding a public-facing element to the job. That had been missing from her work at Ruth Arts, but not for long. Prior to our chat, Patterson visited a new 5,250-square-foot property that the foundation is leasing to support its grant operations. “Having a place to host convenings, exhibitions and residencies will add another layer of depth to our work,” she said. The new programming space will open later this year.
A little less than two years after going public with Artist Choice, Patterson believes Ruth Arts has found its footing. “Things still felt a little abstract until we hired staff and put those first grants out,” she said. “Now things are ongoing, and we continue to think about the relationship between the trust document and the work that we do.”
That work entails kicking off the third iteration of Artist Choice in the coming weeks, and as in previous years, there will be a few tweaks to the process. “It’s going to be different again,” Patterson said, flashing a grin. “I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it’s going to be great.”
