My mother, Penny McCall, and her husband, David, director of Refugees International, were riding in a car through Albania in April 1999 on a mission to aid innocents displaced by the war in neighboring Kosovo. Their car crashed, killing them, fellow aid worker Yvette Pierpaoli and their Albanian driver.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, at age 32, I became an inheritor. Of course, acceding to a personal estate always brings complications. These difficulties multiply when the estate holds diverse assets such as multiple family trusts, considerable property and a contemporary art collection, as well as a private foundation and a 501(c)3. Typically, these assets come with their own sets of advisors, lawyers and assistants in place, ready to help navigate any problems. Unfortunately, this was not true for me when I inherited the Penny McCall Foundation. At the time, the foundation employed no active director; David’s longtime assistant oversaw operations. She admitted she had no background in the foundation’s reason for being: contemporary art.

David had established the foundation in 1987 as a gift to my mother, giving her a way to support her passion for art. Initially, she employed the foundation as an instrument to give money to emerging artists, with amounts that ranged from $2,500 to $10,000, without any stipulations.

My goal became to establish an awards program that would have a significant impact. I wanted the prizes to recognize important contributions to the field of contemporary art and to provide a financial boon to recipients.

But by the time I became director of the foundation in 2000, there was no longer a formal procedure for giving grants. My mother’s interests had expanded to other causes, and any prescribed grant-making method through the Penny McCall Awards program was informed by her personal relationships within the art world. My goal became to establish an awards program that would have a significant impact on the lives of American artists, curators and arts writers. I wanted the prizes to recognize important contributions to the field of contemporary art and to provide a financial boon to recipients.

In my efforts to restructure the program, I was lucky to be able to rely on my mother’s reputation as a benefactor and collector to assemble remarkable advisory panels comprised of museum directors, artists, curators and collectors such as Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Lisa Phillips, the Henry Luce III director of the New Museum; and artists Cindy Sherman and Isaac Julien. In forming the panels, I aimed to firmly establish the Penny McCall Foundation’s reputation in the art world. This group gave me and the foundation an enormous wealth of collective expertise. I had served on numerous panels and boards with them, so when it came time to adopt the new foundation guidelines and practices, we approved them unanimously.

Our panel discussions proved fascinating. First, we set procedures for the new Penny McCall Awards. They had been called grants, but we decided that the word "grant" better addressed project-based initiatives, while "award" more clearly conveyed our intention to have no rules as to how the money was to be used. The language we chose became critical to our mission. We realized that when we applied the word "artist" with "emerging," "mid-career" and "need," each panelist held a different interpretation of the connotation. As a group, we needed to clarify these distinctions. Is an "emerging artist" only to be defined chronologically, or can an emerging artist be any age, as long as his or her work is considered important and developing? We chose the word "under-recognized" instead of "emerging;" this applies to a larger pool of artists, and it is our hope that this award will help an artist become more recognized when he or she wins it.

"Need" and its implications became a sticking point. Why should we consider need at all, and how should we evaluate it? I felt that almost all under-recognized artists could use some financial support. In fact, so did most of my panel members; art institutions are notoriously frugal when it comes to compensation. Because our goal was to promote the awards and the foundation based on merit, as well as on the size of the cash award, we concluded that a nominee’s need would not play a role in our decision.

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I had arranged to give awards totaling $240,000 because the foundation portfolio had performed well. We agreed that individual awards of $30,000 were sizable–higher than the now-defunct NEA prize–and could change artists’ lives by allowing more studio time, child care or travel money. At that time, one panel member argued for two large grants of $100,000 each. The Whitney Biennial had recently unveiled its $100,000 Buxbaum Award, and our panelist stressed that this largesse was a very important step. But while the panel agreed that the amount was important, our mission to reach under-recognized artists compelled us to award multiple recipients with lower sums.

The Penny McCall Awards program was successful on several levels. In the ensuing four years, we distributed a total of $690,000 to 17 artists and to six curators or arts writers. Our foundation has earned repute as a pioneer for selecting sound artists Stephen Vitiello and Jessica Rylan. The institutional art world applauded the foundation for acknowledging writers and critics for the inimitable service they provide. Until the McCall Awards, no other organization had recognized critical art writing with its own prize.

By the end of 2004, I decided it was time for the foundation to create a large international award to acknowledge artists, arts writers and curators around the world. Again, we convened a distinguished panel, established guidelines and began the process. We created the Ordway Prize, a biennial award named for my great-great aunt Katharine Ordway. The prize recognizes people in the middle of their careers who have made important contributions to the field of contemporary arts and letters. The art world has responded very positively to the program, one of the most generous international art prizes in the world, and that is immensely gratifying.

At a private luncheon in New York last December, I presented the inaugural Ordway Prizes on behalf of the Penny McCall Foundation. Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and curator and author Ralph Rugoff won the honors. Each received $100,000 in unrestricted funds, and each of the two finalists in each category received $7,500, for a total of $230,000. As director of the foundation my stepfather founded and my mother shepherded, I savored the moment.

Seven years ago, life gave me a remarkable opportunity shrouded in the most tragic circumstances. Today, I remain enormously grateful for my mother’s decision to bequeath to me stewardship of her foundation. I am so pleased to be able to extend the model of philanthropy set by her and Katharine Ordway, and I welcome the many occasions and opportunities that affiliation with the foundation has provided. But perhaps the greatest gift they gave me is the opportunity to spend my life as a student of the arts.

Photograph by Julie Skarratt.