John Chamberlain and David Smith are pillars of postwar sculpture, but the people now shaping how their work survives—and evolves—are their children and grandchildren. Alexandra Fairweather grew up inside Chamberlain’s world; he raised and later adopted her, and she was helping in the studio as a kid simply because, as she joked, she was “the one who could use a computer.” Luke Smith-Stevens had the opposite experience. His grandfather, David Smith, died long before he was born, but he spent his childhood wandering the steel sculptures in “the fields,” the artist’s outdoor installation site in Bolton Landing.
During Robb Report’s House of Robb at Miami Art Week, they explained how preserving an artist’s legacy today is far more complex than maintaining a studio or cataloguing a body of work. Onstage, they laughed about their contrasting introductions—one shaped by daily studio life, the other by growing up among the work without ever meeting its maker. Those early memories now guide how they manage their families’ estates.
Both stressed that place remains central to understanding each artist. Chamberlain’s Shelter Island studio still stands as he left it, along with a new archive center built on a former horse farm. For Smith, the Adirondack landscape is inseparable from the sculptures themselves. “Visiting the space opens up a new way of seeing,” Smith-Stevens said.
But the hardest part of legacy management, they noted, isn’t exhibitions or gallery partnerships; it’s keeping history intact. Archives are aging faster than institutions can digitize them. Film reels, correspondence, and early recordings risk disappearing, and not all museums have the resources to preserve them. “So much will potentially be lost in the next few decades,” Fairweather warned. Smith-Stevens agreed, urging artists’ families to record stories now, before they vanish.
In the end, the work is less about protecting objects than preserving meaning. It is a balance between scholarship and storytelling, honoring an artist’s intentions while interpreting them for new generations. And for Fairweather and Smith-Stevens, it is a reminder that legacy is not fixed—it is something shaped, and safeguarded, every day.
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