NEW YORK, NY (April 16, 2026)— The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation announced today that Sanford Hirsch is stepping down from his position as Executive Director at the end of this year, the culmination of his venerable career founding and leading the organization for a half century. The Gottlieb Foundation stewards the work and legacy of American Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb (1903– 1974) and offers financial support to living artists through its grant programs. Hirsch was hired by Esther Gottlieb (1907– 1988) in 1976 to assist in the transition of her late husband’s estate into a not-for-profit foundation following a stipulation in Adolph’s will to support “mature, creative painters and sculptors.” Hirsch will return to his own studio to resume full-time the artmaking he practiced when he first met the Gottliebs. A search committee has been formed by the Foundation’s Board of Directors for a new Executive Director.
“Over his fifty-year career with the Gottlieb Foundation, Sandy Hirsch has exemplified the impact and integrity that heads of artist-endowed foundations work to achieve,” said Charlotta Kotik, President, Board of Directors. "Sandy has been an innovator in this field, securing the significance of Adolph Gottlieb’s painting and establishing a grant program where the Gottliebs bequest continues to support and sustain artists.”
“It has been an honor and a rare gift to be able to serve as Executive Director of the Gottlieb Foundation,” said Hirsch. “I am proud of what we have accomplished, both in the Foundation’s programs and in the model we established for artists to extend their legacies to the next generation. I am inspired by the incredible breadth of the art that I am privileged to view each year from all who apply to the Foundation’s grant programs. Their work is proof of Adolph and Esther’s vision in providing help to this important community in moments of need.”
During his tenure with the Gottlieb Foundation, Hirsch initiated twenty-one Gottlieb solo museum exhibitions that were installed at seventy-two museums in the United States, Europe, and Asia including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy. He collaborated with curators and scholars to include Gottlieb’s art in major thematic exhibitions in museums and galleries, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland. Hirsch has written extensively and lectured on Gottlieb’s work and American art of the twentieth century. Recently, Hirsch authored a major illustrated chronology on Gottlieb’s life and oversaw the publication of Adolph Gottlieb: A Powerful Will to Art (Gregory N. Miller & Co., 2025).
Hirsch sits on the Board of the Nancy Graves Foundation and the Hedda Sterne Foundation. He is a past Vice President of National Artists Equity and a former member of the Board of Artists Legacy Foundation.
About Adolph and Esther Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb was one of the small group of artists -- including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, David Smith, and others -- who developed the movement known as Abstract Expressionism.
Gottlieb was the recipient of numerous honors, prizes, and awards. He was the first American to win the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial (1963). The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, acquired one work (1946) and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum purchased eleven of his works (1948). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1972). He was the subject of fifty-six solo exhibitions in his lifetime, including a simultaneous retrospective held at the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1968). Other sites for monographic exhibitions include The Jewish Museum, New York (1957, 2001); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1959); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1963); MoMA (1974); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1981); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1981); Tel Aviv Museum (1981); Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas (1993), Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1994); Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (1994); IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain (2001); Fundació Pilar I Joan Miró A Mallorca, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2006), Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008) and Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2010–11).
Gottlieb achieved artistic and financial success far beyond his early expectations. Over the course of his life, Gottlieb had several friends and colleagues who, despite their artistic achievements, could not support themselves either through the sale of their art or through teaching or related work. The Foundation was founded in the spirit of support from artist to artist.
Esther Dick Gottlieb (1907– 1988) was a teacher who, during the Great Depression of the 1930s when the couple first married, worked at a vocational school in New York. She instructed needlework and design classes. Through her practice of sharing cash from her teaching salary with those artists in need in their community – including Mark Rothko and David Smith – she established a model for artist support, a precedent for the Foundation.
About the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation
The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in New York has been operating since 1976. The Foundation, with offices in what was Adolph Gottlieb’s studio, offers grants to individual visual artists through two programs: an annual Individual Support Grant and a separate program to assist visual artists in cases of catastrophic events through Emergency Grants. The Foundation also maintains an archive on the art and life of Adolph Gottlieb and organizes exhibitions of his art in solo and group exhibitions. The program awarded its first grants in 1977 and now annually awards twenty grants of $25,000 each to artists nationally and internationally. In 1985, the Foundation initiated a second grant program, unique in grant-giving artist-endowed organizations, to provide assistance to mature artists with financial need to recover from a catastrophic emergency. In the last year, 107 emergency grants were awarded for a total of $500,000. Since 1976, the Foundation has distributed $18,000,000 to date in unrestricted grants.