Not all generosity is institutional.
Most of it isn’t.

Most of it happens off the record, without witnesses, without announcements, without plaques. It moves quietly, passed hand to hand, story to story, like folklore.

Kenneth Noland bought materials for Jules Olitski when Olitski couldn’t afford them. Jasper Johns carried Roy Lichtenstein’s work to Leo Castelli when Lichtenstein couldn’t bring himself to do it himself. Agnes Martin slipped younger artists envelopes of cash in Taos—or simply showed up at their studios and gave them her full attention, maybe the rarest gift of all.

The nature/nurture question has been applied to artists at least as often as it has to athletes. And the verdict is still out. While I am distantly related to Stefan Lochner, a Northern European Gothic painter, his genes did not make an appearance in any of the intervening generations.  As for nurture, there are some things in my background that, while not predictive, at least didn’t halt my development as an artist.