"The beginning is the most important part of the work." - Plato
The Art Legacy Institute has been in the making for 20 years.
Founded by former members of the FBI Art Crime Team, the Art Legacy Institute grew out of decades spent confronting the realities of the art market firsthand. Since the team’s establishment in 2004, we witnessed the scale and impact of art fraud—millions, and often billions, of dollars in misattributed, undocumented, or falsified works circulating over time. But in tracing these cases to their source, a deeper issue consistently emerged: the absence of complete, artist-defined records from the outset of an artist’s career. Whether viewed through the lens of law enforcement, historians, galleries, museums, collectors, or artists themselves, the conclusion was the same—when a body of work is not clearly documented, provenance must be reconstructed later, often imperfectly and too late. The Art Legacy Institute was created to address this gap: to equip artists with professional systems to define their work, establish authoritative records, and build enduring provenance that ensures their legacy is shaped by the artist, not circumstance.
Our Pillars of Legacy Protection
Our mission rests on three core pillars — areas where we’ve already made critical progress, and where your support will help us go further:
Legacy Catalog — Our flagship project. Built with the Amazon Web Services nonprofit team, the Legacy Catalog is nearing completion. It has been developed with industry-standard security at its core and designed by a world-class team to ensure easy adoption by artists. More than a tool, it is a long-term safeguard: simple enough for everyday use, yet robust enough to preserve an artist’s complete body of work. Each catalog is meant to serve the artist during their lifetime and endure as a trusted record for future generations.
FeaturePrint — A breakthrough patented technology that creates a digital fingerprint of each artwork. This innovation gives artists, collectors, and institutions a powerful provenance tool — and in 2026, we will roll it out broadly through our platform.
Education — We have already taken first steps through interviews and outreach, raising awareness about the need to safeguard artistic legacy. As this mission matures, we will grow a dedicated education program that equips artists, collectors, and the public with tools and knowledge for long-term protection.
Together, these pillars form the foundation of a more trusted art world — one where every artist’s voice is preserved and every legacy endures.