The Future of Artists’ Legacies Is Being Rewritten by Their Heirs

John Chamberlain and David Smith are pillars of postwar sculpture, but the people now shaping how their work survives—and evolves—are their children and grandchildren. Alexandra Fairweather grew up inside Chamberlain’s world; he raised and later adopted her, and she was helping in the studio as a kid simply because, as she joked, she was “the one who could use a computer.” Luke Smith-Stevens had the opposite experience. His grandfather, David Smith, died long before he was born,…