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.