In 2013, the editors of The Toast, an online magazine of feminist humor and commentary, asked Alexis Coe to write a regular column. Ms. Coe, a historian, was eager to accept, but couldn’t. “It was early in my career,” she said. “I couldn’t do it for the nominal fee they were offering early writers.”
Then the editors called with some unexpected news. They had found a woman (a lawyer in her early 30s) who liked Ms. Coe’s work and had offered to subsidize the column, provided she could remain anonymous to the public. Suddenly, Ms. Coe had something she had never considered herself worthy of — something that she didn’t realize actually existed in the modern world.
She had a patron.
Ms. Coe wrote 15 columns, for which she received checks exceeding the standard pay rate. She said she and her patron did not meet and only briefly “exchanged pleasantries” over email. And yet the relationship, she said, “really did feel significant to me — not necessarily in monetary value, but in the knowledge that the work that I was doing wasn’t insular, and the people who were reading it weren’t just librarians in New England.”
It may seem incredible that a benefactor would simply drop from the sky like this. But Ms. Coe’s experience is emblematic of a shift in how some arts enthusiasts, from wealthy individuals to grant-making foundations, are relating to creators. They are moving away from merely collecting and consuming art and toward a model reminiscent of the Renaissance, when royal houses provided room, board, materials and important professional connections to talented artists of the day.
Patrons of the 21st century are far less politically motivated than the Medici family and their ilk, and they generally don’t house artists in their lavish estates or command them to paint frescoes. But just like the patrons of old, they are giving creators a pathway to success and economic stability, providing living expenses, supplies, pep talks and more.
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“For many years, patrons were supporting institutions or a product, underwriting this ballet or putting their name on a specific show at a museum,” said Carolina García Jayaram, 42, who has spent nearly two decades in arts philanthropy and advocacy and recently became president and chief executive of the National YoungArts Foundation. Today, she said, “donors understand how important it is to support artists — not just the art.”
Artist advocates say this is partly a reaction to widespread budget cuts for public art education and, more recently, to concern about President Trump’s effort to eliminate the National Endowment of the Arts, whose grants fund artists and communities in every state. But a younger cohort of patrons, in their 30s through early 50s, has also begun thinking about artists like start-ups, for which “incubation” periods are common.
“Funding based on a collection model is backward,” said RoseLee Goldberg, an art historian at New York University and the founder of the performance art nonprofit Performa. “There isn’t this support for an artist if they don’t have big object to sell.” Ms. Goldberg believes today’s patrons are similar to the “angel investors” of tech. “You see that something has potential to grow and you want to support that incubation period,” she said.
Sarah Arison’s grandparents founded YoungArts 36 years ago, as a multidisciplinary national arts competition for teenagers. Today, Ms. Arison, 33, president of the Arison Arts Foundation and a member of the YoungArts board of trustees, is raising money to support artists as they mature.
“I’m now focusing on the next critical juncture: from B.F.A. and M.F.A. into really creating a career and profession,” Ms. Arison said. “If you are going to be a doctor, your career path is clear. That’s not the case for most artists.”
Ms. Goldberg said Renaissance-era patronage created just this kind of career structure. Young artists of great talent began as apprentices to master artists and were often hired by wealthy families or adopted by royal houses. “The great painters were court painters,” she said. “That changes after the Renaissance. There wasn’t a job you could have.”
YoungArts already provides apprenticeships, but the foundation is now trying different ways of introducing past winners of the teenage competition, many now adults, to potential funders, including an online portal.
The foundation is also undertaking renovation and expansion of its Miami campus to include performance sites, “maker” and wellness spaces, recording studios and dining facilities. Ms. García Jayaram and Ms. Arison hope it will revive something of a Renaissance court experience, which brought together artists and intellectuals across disciplines.
This being 2017, new websites are also helping artists identify potential patrons. As Kickstarter, GoFundMe and Indiegogo have helped individual projects (or predicaments), so has Patreon.com enabled people to fund their favorite artists with monthly contributions to aid the creative process, not just the product.
“As an artist, money comes in chunks,” said Jack Conte, 32, who founded Patreon in 2013, in part, to help his band, Pomplamoose, bring in revenue. “Some big thing happens, and you get a payday through licensing or a publication deal or a brand integration, and you have to hope it lasts.”
Mr. Conte said Patreon has one million “fans” who each contribute an average of $12 every month to their favorite artists on the site. An outfit called Kinda Funny, which makes videos and podcasts, has two Patreon pages, through which they’re making more than $41,000 every month. Last year, 35 creators each earned more than $150,000 through the site.
Upstart.com, which connects artists and entrepreneurs with backers, has now turned to mainstream consumer loans. But Shefali Kumar Friesen, a digital artist, still has patrons she met through the site who are helping her turn a tech-art project called Emotitones into a profitable business.
“Investors take the mental anguish away from earning,” Ms. Friesen, 35, said. “Not everybody can get a grant from the Knight Foundation.” Conversations about business strategy with one of her patrons, Brad Feld, she added, are inspiring, “just like having a new paintbrush or new set of paints.”
Lija Groenewoud van Vliet hopes her incubator and patronage platform, In4Art, will prompt this kind of inspiration among both artists and the patrons who fund them. “You need a whole new ecosystem,” said Ms. Groenewoud van Vliet, 32, who began the organization based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands with her husband in 2015 and recently left a job in business development to run it full time.
In addition to matching patrons and artists and underwriting materials and creative development, In4Art will teach business strategy and brand marketing this summer. It also hosts a membership program, somewhat like Rent the Runway for art (costing up to 60 euros, or about $67, a month), and regularly hosts artists and patrons for dinners, salons and studio visits. “We create an environment of trust,” Ms. Groenewoud van Vliet said.
Historically, many patron-artist relationships have been troubled, defined by an extreme imbalance of pecuniary power. White female patrons of Harlem Renaissance artists became collectively — and critically — known as “Miss Anne” for their imperiousness. The Gilded Age painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler felt so exploited by his patron, Frederick Richards Leyland, that he vandalized a wall in Leyland’s home. Samuel Johnson grew nearly as frustrated with his patron, the Earl of Chesterfield. In 1755, he wrote, “Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help?”
More recently, a young patron-art dealer named Stefan Simchowitz has come under fire for flipping work repeatedly among a small circle of people to artificially inflate its price, and for underpaying artists who are financially strapped.
Anna Getty, 44, has used Mr. Simchowitz as a consultant. She began collecting art six years ago, after the death of her father, J. Paul Getty III. Her focus is on emerging artists, especially women, and her funding has helped to underwrite their supplies and living expenses. Patronage, she said, “isn’t a business.”
Nor is it to Matt Ross, 56, who started collecting about five years ago and focuses on young artists who are “way early in the game.” Like Ms. Groenewoud van Vliet, he emphasizes the importance of establishing trust between the artist and patron. “You’re supporting artists holistically,” he said. “You’re a card-carrying member of the artist’s support system. A quasi-mentor at times.”
In 2010, Mr. Ross left his position as chief executive of the music school company School of Rock and started the One River School of Art & Design, which provides gallery shows for artists in whom Mr. Ross has taken an active interest.
Daniel Rios Rodriguez, 38, a painter, is one. In 2012, Mr. Rodriguez was living in New York and poised to break through with a show, but it fell through. His marriage also ended. “It was dreadful,” he said. “It wasn’t feasible to continue to pay a ridiculous amount in rent for an apartment in Crown Heights and studio in Bushwick and child care expenses and the grocery bill and on and on and on.”
Mr. Rodriguez moved to San Antonio. “When you leave,” he said, “you get the sense that if you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind.”
But Mr. Ross, who had stumbled upon Mr. Rodriguez’s work at a fair, gave the painter a solo show at One River and introduced the painter’s work to a number of dealers, including the gallerist Nicelle Beauchene, now his official dealer.
At one point, when Mr. Rodriguez found himself in a financial bind, he said he did not hesitate to call Mr. Ross, who offered to buy a couple of paintings.
“It’s not his responsibility to make sure my bills are paid,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “But the fact that he said yes speaks to his investment in me as a person. He wants to see my work flourish but knows we have to put food on the table.”
Correction: May 17, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated in some instances the surname of a founder of In4Art. She is Ms. Groenewoud van Vliet, not Vilet or Vliet.
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