After discovering, in 1986 that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, Robert Mapplethorpe was determined to build a lasting artistic legacy. He accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the sweep of his photographic inquiry, accepted increasingly challenging commissions, and, despite the ravages of his illness, continued to create powerful images up until his death in 1989.

After coming to grips with his diagnosis, Mapplethorpe began to discuss with his friends and professional advisers the best way to preserve and manage his archive of photographs after his death. The consensus was that the appropriate vehicle to protect his work, to advance his creative vision, and to promote the causes he cared about was a foundation -- a not-for-profit organization managed by friends and advisors, people he knew and trusted, with substantial professional credentials, who after he was gone would work together to attain his goals. With characteristic foresight, Mapplethorpe decided to move forward immediately, realizing that the only way to ensure that the proposed foundation would become the institution he envisioned was to establish it and make it fully operational while he was still alive to oversee it.

The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc. was founded on May 27, 1988, some ten months before the artist's death. Robert Mapplethorpe funded the Foundation with substantial contributions, selected four trustees to serve with him on its board, and was appointed its first president. He also established the Foundation's initial philanthropic mandate, targeting the area of his greatest concern: the recognition of photography as an art form of the same importance as painting and sculpture. He directed that the net revenues proceeds from the sale of his works be used to benefit those museums and other artistic institutions that had shown particular interest in establishing photography departments or expanding their existing ones. The Foundation's first gift went to the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Contemporary Art-not, in fact, to sponsor the now legendarily controversial Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment, but to assist the ICA in producing the handsome catalogue that accompanied the show.

Sadly, as Mapplethorpe's work traveled the country in The Perfect Moment, his medical condition continued to worsen. The epidemic had raged for years, but there were still few, if any, medical treatments that could slow the rate at which HIV destroyed the immune system. Notwithstanding his clear-sighted and hardheaded plans for his own demise, Mapplethorpe, with characteristic valor, never relinquished the fierce hope that he could survive. With great determination, he pursued every medical possibility. By January 1989 he had visited or received doctors and researchers from his home state of New York, from Washington and California, and even from foreign countries, including Japan, Germany, and France -- unfortunately, to no avail.

In late February 1989, despite his rapidly deteriorating condition, he made a courageous decision to leave his home in Manhattan and travel to Boston's New England Deaconess Hospital, where some of the most meaningful and advanced medical research in the AIDS field was being conducted. There, he came to appreciate first-hand the enormous task faced by the research immunologist in battling the fiendish complexity and sophistication of the HIV/AIDS virus. During the last weeks of his life, he supplemented the Foundation's existing goal of supporting photography with a new second mandate: to support medical research in the HIV/AIDS area, in the hope of halting the continuing tragedy of men and women dying before they reached their most creative and productive years. His trip to Boston was his last. Tragically, he died there, at age forty-two, on March 9, 1989. AIDS had come too soon for him, too long before the promising new life-saving treatments that his own philanthropic efforts would help to eventually develop.

Mapplethorpe is considered by many art scholars to be among the most important American photographers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Since his death, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the world, including several major traveling retrospectives. But the works he left behind are only part of his artistic legacy; the other part is his foundation.

In keeping with Mapplethorpe's wishes, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has spent millions of dollars to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV infection. It has provided study grants to university research centers and established important medical facilities and programs, such as the Robert Mapplethorpe Laboratory for AIDS Research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, the Robert Mapplethorpe AIDS Treatment Center at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Center for HIV Research at St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center of New York. The Foundation has also provided substantial financial support to the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), which was one of the first recipients of Mapplethorpe's generosity during his lifetime.

In the field of the photographic arts, the Foundation has funded numerous publications on photography, supported exhibitions at various art institutions, and provided grants-in the form of funding or gifts of original Mapplethorpe works-to qualified art institutions, ranging from the world's major art museums to small university galleries. In 1993, the Foundation provided a major gift to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to create the Robert Mapplethorpe Gallery and inaugurate the Guggenheim Museum's photography department and program.

In addition to its charitable work, the Foundation works to maintain Mapplethorpe's artistic legacy by organizing and/or lending to Mapplethorpe exhibitions around the world, preserving his archive of vintage editioned prints, strictly maintaining the editions he established during his lifetime, and placing his work in important museum collections around the world.

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