The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation maintains a continually growing breadth of content around the work of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Foundation is a resource for anyone interested in learning about and contributing to Gonzalez-Torres’s work.
Gonzalez-Torres passed away in 1996, at the age of 38, due to AIDS-related illness. With an acute awareness of his own mortality, the artist chose to consciously focus on developing a body of work that was diverse and complex; he simultaneously sowed and solidified strategies that would allow the work to remain responsive and ever-present. He dedicated a significant amount of time to embedding his ideas and strategies through dialogue with specific individuals who were closely engaged with his work, including exhibitors, gallerists, fellow artists, owners, gallery attendants, fabricators, students, and others – aiming to inspire those he spoke with to become deeper thinkers, not only about his work, but about their role in society at large. The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation models its approach on Gonzalez-Torres’s methodology of perpetual thinking and questioning, supporting open dialogues with individuals involved with exhibition making, writers, scholars, and any individuals who wish to engage.
The Foundation offers practical and conceptual support for exhibitions that include or respond to the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The Foundation builds and maintains an extensive archive of past and current exhibitions, implementing robust practices to accumulate a wide range of material generated from diverse sources – including photographic documentation, as well as interviews with a variety of individuals who participate in decision-making and the experience of the work. The facilitation of scholarship and publication projects is an ongoing locus of the Foundation’s activities, including commissioning texts by writers from different fields on a rolling basis. The Foundation continues Gonzalez-Torres’s process of the reissuance of the Certificates of Authenticity and Ownership (for those works that fall within this practice). The Foundation maintains and licenses copyright for Gonzalez-Torres.
As Gonzalez-Torres's primary intention was for individuals to have firsthand experiences with his work, the Foundation’s website prioritizes the works through abundant photographic representation. The pages for individual works are continually updated in order to dynamically reflect their parameters and evolving histories. Each of these pages includes the specific work caption using the precise structure, wording, and punctuation that Gonzalez-Torres devised. Each work page is also accompanied by a complete exhibition history (linking to additional information for each exhibition), although pages may not include images of every installation of a work. While each page attempts to represent the work’s full capacity as thoroughly as possible, the pages across a body of work may collectively reflect the parameters of that body of work more fully. In order to further support access to the parameters that Gonzalez-Torres established for his work, each work page links to the Core Tenets for that respective body of work.
The Foundation strives to cultivate networks of multifaceted contributors around Gonzalez-Torres’s work through diverse leadership structures within the organization, such as the Fellows Forum (established in 2008) and the Thinkers in Residence (established in 2020).
This website makes available an extensive selection of writings around Gonzalez-Torres’s work. Although Gonzalez-Torres rarely opted to participate in interviews or give lectures, documentation of many extant artist writings and speeches are accessible throughout the website, including in the Interviews, Artist Statements, Lectures section.
The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation is a Section 501(c)(3) charitable and educational organization, established in 2002 by the Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.