A Foundation in Dallas Has Been Doing the Hard Work of Digital Art Conservation for 17 Years. Almost Nobody in Crypto Knows They Exist.

The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation started collecting digital art in 2009 with a single work: Leo Villareal’s Big Bang. That purchase kicked off what is now the most comprehensive private collection of digital and media art anywhere — 400+ works spanning from 1959 to the present, by 138 artists.

What makes it remarkable is not the scale. It is the infrastructure.

The Conservation System

The foundation’s collections manager, Kate Weinstein, published a detailed paper in the Electronic Media Review outlining a five-phase conservation system built from scratch:

  • 60-day testing periods for every software-based artwork before acquisition
  • Media-specific artist questionnaires (three versions: software, video, custom electronics)
  • Required deliverables: source code, project files, wiring diagrams, backup specialty components (same-batch LEDs, etc.)
  • Separate exhibition files from archive files
  • Geographic storage split: physical drives in Chicago, hardware in Santa Fe
  • Standardized loan packets with on/off videos, installation manuals, behavior summaries

They have no in-house conservators. A small staff manages 308+ time-based media works, acquiring roughly 30 per year.

The Collector

Carl Thoma is 77 years old. He co-founded Thoma Bravo, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. He has been collecting art since 1975. In a July 2026 interview with Observer, he said:

“You become a serious collector when you understand your role as a steward, not an owner.”

His collections manager put it more bluntly:

“It should be illegal to buy art and not show it to the public.”

Run the Code

This year, the foundation mounted “Run the Code: Data-Driven Art Decoded” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin — a group exhibition drawn entirely from their collection, featuring Refik Anadol, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, teamLab, Daniel Canogar, Siebren Versteeg, Marina Zurkow, and others. The New York Times covered it. It ran from March 8 to August 2, 2026.

The curator, Kathleen Forde, told Le Random that the foundation’s next research focus is early computer art from 1965 to 1975 — the exact era where conservation becomes the hardest problem. Works that ran on Amiga 1000s, on Apple IIs, on hardware that no longer exists.

Why Tech Capital Does Not Collect Digital Art

Thoma explicitly says that tech capital does not collect digital art. His explanation: it requires long-term commitment, complex conservation, infrastructure, and ongoing collaboration with artists and institutions.

The Lesson for On-Chain Art

The hardest part of preserving digital art is not storage. It is the 60-day testing, the artist questionnaires, the wiring diagrams, the backup components, the standardized loan packets that let a museum in another city install a work without calling the artist at midnight. It is the unglamorous, years-long work of treating code as something that occupies physical space, breaks down, and needs human stewardship to survive.

A foundation in Dallas is doing that work. They have been doing it for 17 years.

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