Venet Foundation

Read this record carefully before treating it as a live prospect. Venet Foundation (EIN 38-3969112, New York, NY) is the U.S. 501(c)(3) that finances Fondation Venet, an operating contemporary-art museum in Le Muy, France, founded in 2014 by sculptor Bernar Venet. It is not a conventional grantmaking foundation that fields applications from outside nonprofits. IRS filing data (source: irs_eo_bmf, last verified 2026-06-20) lists the entity as is_grantmaker: true and accepting_applications: true in the database's default schema, but application_instructions is explicitly flagged "__no_filing__" — no public application process has ever been documented — and the foundation's own website (About, Contact, Events, Plan Your Visit) contains zero references to grants, RFPs, LOIs, or funding programs for third parties.

Governance is thin by design: the only IRS filing with full officer detail (FY2020) names three people — Bernar Venet (President), his wife Diane Segard Venet (Treasurer), and Jacquelyn E. Mansfield (Secretary) — all uncompensated, with no professional program staff. Functionally, the vehicle underwrites the museum campus (New Gallery, Stella Chapel, sculpture park, Versailles Park): collection conservation, loans of Venet's work to partner institutions, and annual guest-artist exhibitions. That is where its money goes, not into a discretionary grants pipeline for unaffiliated nonprofits.

For a typical grant-seeking organization, treating this as a standard prospect would misallocate research time. There is no LOI-to-proposal-to-site-visit progression to learn, because there is no evidenced review process at all. The one realistic path in is relationship-based: organizations that already borrow from or co-exhibit the Venet collection, museums working in minimal/conceptual art, or contacts with a direct line to Bernar Venet or Diane Segard Venet are the only prospects with plausible traction. First-time cold outreach through the website's general contact form — which is scoped to visitor and press inquiries — should be expected to go unanswered.

Hard numbers are scarce, and that scarcity is itself the finding. The database's own grantee and financials tables for this record are empty (0 grants, no financials array), and the single "matched grant" surfaced by the discovery pipeline — a Cornell/Empire AI GPU-compute allocation call for AI researchers — has no plausible connection to an arts foundation and should be treated as a mismatch, not a real opportunity tied to Venet Foundation.

The most complete financial picture comes from the FY2020 Form 990-PF (via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, the most recent year with full extracted detail): total assets $6,624,314; revenue $35,502 (contributions $10,888 plus other income $24,614); total expenses $162,394; grants/charitable disbursements paid $10,731; net result a $126,892 deficit for the year. The current IRS Business Master File snapshot used to build this record shows total assets of $5,599,588 and reported income of $28,216 — a roughly 15% decline in assets since 2020, consistent with the foundation drawing down principal to cover museum operating costs rather than growing an endowment to fund external grantees.

On payout: $10,731 in total charitable disbursements against $5.6-6.6M in assets is a fraction of a percent — far below the 5% minimum distribution the IRS requires of private foundations, and almost certainly satisfied through operating/program-related expenses at the museum rather than checks to outside nonprofits. No individual grant amounts, award dates, or recipient names are broken out anywhere in the available filings or web content, so there is no typical-grant-size or program-area breakdown to report — because there is no evidence of a recurring outside-grants program to measure. Filings referenced (2015, 2016, 2017, 2020) show the pattern has been stable for at least five years.

The database groups this foundation with four other Arts & Culture-coded foundations of nearly identical asset size (all within about 1% of $5.6M), which appears to be an asset-proximity match rather than a funding-behavior match — none of the peer records include disclosed annual giving in this dataset, so those cells are marked not available rather than estimated.

Even without giving data for the peer set, the names themselves are telling: Braman (prominent Miami art collectors), Vija Celmins (a working artist's personal foundation), and Frieda C Fox (a family foundation) all fit the same profile as Venet — single-donor or single-family vehicles built around one collector's or artist's legacy rather than open, staffed grant programs. Grant seekers scanning this asset tier ($5.5-5.6M) in Arts & Culture should expect the majority to behave like Venet: minimal outside grantmaking, no public application process, and access gated by personal or institutional introduction rather than a written proposal.

Activity in 2025-2026 is museum-operations news, not grantmaking news, and no press coverage of new grants, RFPs, or funding announcements from this entity was found in any search. On the exhibition side: the foundation staged a site-specific performance, "Relief-Collapse: 23 Arcs," on July 11, 2025; held a private view of new Bernar Venet sculptures in its New Gallery space in July 2026; and has extended its 2026 public visiting season through October 31, 2026. The museum continues to loan works from its permanent collection to partner cultural institutions internationally and to host annual guest-artist exhibitions alongside Venet's own work.

No leadership changes, new program launches, or funding-priority announcements were found for 2025-2026. The most recent detailed IRS filing (FY2020) lists Bernar Venet, Diane Segard Venet, and Jacquelyn E. Mansfield as the sole officers; because that data point is now several years old, it should be re-verified against the current Form 990-PF before any outreach rather than assumed current. Given the absence of any grants-related news across multiple targeted searches, the most defensible summary for a grant seeker is: this foundation's public-facing activity in the period is entirely about running its own museum campus, not distributing funds to outside organizations.

There is no formal application process to optimize for here, so the useful advice is about triage and channel, not proposal craft. First, verify before you invest any time: pull the current Form 990-PF via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer or Candid (EIN 38-3969112) to confirm today's officers and check Part XV for any grants paid to organizations outside the Venet museum ecosystem — the only fully detailed filing on record dates to FY2020, and outreach based on stale leadership data wastes goodwill.

Second, do not use the website's general Contact form as a grant-request channel. It is explicitly built for visitor and press inquiries (fields ask about telephone, organizational affiliation, and "where did you hear about us") with no grants-specific routing, and the site states plainly that the foundation is not reachable by phone — email only.

Third, if your organization has a genuine point of connection — a museum loan relationship, a minimal/conceptual-art exhibition partnership, a scholarly or conservation collaboration tied to the Venet collection, or a personal introduction to Bernar Venet or Diane Segard Venet — lead with that relationship, not a written LOI. This is a family- and artist-governed vehicle with no program staff to shepherd an unsolicited pipeline through review stages; there is no LOI-then-full-proposal-then-site-visit cadence to plan around because none is evidenced anywhere.

Fourth, keep any approach narrow and mission-adjacent — co-organizing an exhibition, an artist-residency tie-in, or a conservation/loan collaboration — rather than requesting general operating or program support, since that is closest to what the entity is actually shown to fund (its own museum operations).

Fifth, calibrate expectations: with only $10,731 in total charitable disbursements in the most recent detailed filing year against $5.6-6.6M in assets, and a documented multi-year trend of drawing down principal rather than growing a grants budget, this foundation should sit near the bottom of a prioritized prospect list for any organization without a pre-existing relationship — deprioritize it relative to funders with a demonstrated, staffed grants program.