“Being Black, being a woman, being an immigrant, being divorced, being a writer, being a mother—all parts of me are in my collection,” Suzanne McFayden told Cultured Mag in an interview.

The Jamaica-born, Texas-based author has been very open about her collection—not always a given among the art world’s top buyers—which includes the likes of artists Glenn Lygon, Pervis Young, Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu, and Deborah Roberts prominently displayed in her Brutalist style home. . A cornerstone of her collection is Mutu’s 2003 collage I Have Peg Leg Nightmares, which she considers her first serious art purchase. “It started me on the journey that I’m on today,” she told ARTnews in 2021.

It’s not the artists’ notoriety, however, that attracted McFayden. Instead, she collects art based on an almost gut emotional reaction. “I’m only interested in works that move the soul,” McFayden told Artsy of her approach to collecting. “I call it a quickening, usually a blood-rushing sensation I feel in my stomach. It’s an urge that makes me want to get closer, one that lures me in to learn or ask questions. That’s the feeling I enjoy the most, and it really doesn’t happen often.”

In addition to her keen sense for collecting, McFayden is a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem and of the Blanton Museum of Art, where she was named board chair in 2021. She also provided support to artist-founded nonprofits, like Titus Kaphar’s NXTHVN and Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang Community Center. Inspired by the art collecting and charitable efforts of Agnes Gund, McFayden’s other philanthropic endeavors sponsor national and international humanitarian aid to feed the hungry.

She has also helped to pave the way for people of color in a sector that can be difficult to permeate, with a collection of top Black contemporary artists of our time and leadership positions among notable institutions. “We’re witnessing Black artists reclaiming abstraction, allowing themselves to make work that is more radical, more political, and more fluid,” she said of the current moment.

Japanese entrepreneur and investor Kankuro Ueshima may have only started to seriously collect art in 2022, but he’s quickly made up for lost time. Focusing on what he calls “contemporaneity,” Ueshima has acquired over 650 artworks from a wide range of international artists in just two years. It’s a who’s who of top artists, including historical luminaries like Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, and Andy Warhol, contemporary blue-chips like Gerhard Richter, Takashi Murakami, Theaster Gates, and Damien Hirst, and a vast swath of emerging Japanese artists. Ueshima is far from done, having acquired an additional 40 works so far in 2024.

Ueshima has pledged to be a new kind of art collector as well, at least for Japan. As Ueshima explained in a recent interview, it is unusual for Japanese collectors, in particular, to share their collections with the public. Ueshima has gone against that grain since the beginning, publicly listing his entire collection on his website and on his Instagram, with detailed descriptions for each work in English, Japanese, and Chinese. He took that effort even further this year, when he opened the Ueshima Museum in Tokyo in June.

Located in the Shibuya Kyoiku Gakuen school complex, the museum spans over 15,000 square feet of Ueshima Tower. Open to the public, the museum is intended to present a rotating selection of Usehima’s collection and to help build engagement with contemporary art in Japan with interactive and educational programming for students and young curators. For the museum’s first collection exhibition, 74 works were spread across the museum’s six floors, with each floor structured around a different theme.

“I want to share art with people around the world. I’ve been showing my collection on my website and social media, but from the beginning, I also wanted to create a place for people to see the art for real,” Ueshima told Japan News earlier this year.

“My lifestyle revolves around art,” Japanese collector Ryutaro Takahashi told Art Basel in March 2024, ahead of the fair company’s Hong Kong edition. “I used to have a penchant for collecting red wine, but now my interest lies solely in art.”

Takahashi, a psychiatrist by trade, estimated that his 3,000-piece collection consists of 99 percent of works by Japanese artists—the other 1 percent being pieces by Taiwanese artist Charwei Tsai. Its beginnings are on brand, too. His pivotal acquisition—“the beginning of my deep seated fascination,” as he put it—was Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets #27 (1997) in 1998. By the ’60s, Kusama was regarded with awe in Japan for her public interventions and activism, but the international and market fervor that is now inextricable from her work was still to come. Takahashi, ahead of the sensation, now counts some 70 works by Kusama in his holdings, including The Pacific Ocean (1959), a seminal entry in her celebrated “Infinity Nets” series.

Famous talents abound elsewhere in his holdings, such as Takashi Murakami, whose Tan Tan Bo (2001) caught Takahashi’s eye at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. A potent blend of tenacious and polite, the work was already spoken for when Takahashi inquired about buying it; he returned later and “surprisingly” found it still unsold. He quickly bought it. Among Takahashi’s other favorite pieces are large-scale works like are eerie sculptures by Izumi Kato; several oil paintings by Nanae Mitobe; calligrapher Hidai Nankoku’s Work (1964), a 16-feet-high ink painting; and Tatsuo Miyajima’s soaring light installation Time Waterfall (2016), first spotted at Art Basel Hong Kong.

Takahashi, however, is no island unto his art. “In my early days of art collecting, when I had fewer than 500 pieces, I preferred to keep them to myself,” he said. “But, as my collection grew, I felt compelled to share it with the world. It is almost sinful to continue keeping it private.”

As of 2024 Takahashi has mounted some 25 exhibitions of his collection in Japan and beyond; the latest was a showcase at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the largest such show to date. The purpose, he says, is to inspire emerging artists. The effort seems to be paying off. He cites the young painter Aki Kondo as having taken inspiration from these exhibitions and several of her works now hold “a significant place” in his collection. Takahashi added, “I have been collecting art for nearly 30 years, and its impact on my life has been profound. As my collection grows in both quantity and quality, I hope to become a better person, to be worthy of my collection, and to embody the true essence of a collector.”

One the music industry’s most powerful, Irving Azoff and his wife Shelli Azoff might just be the proverbial Hollywood power couple. In the past Irving has served as chairman and CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment, and CEO of Front Line Management. In 2018 with Oliver Chastan, Irving cofounded Iconic Artists Group, which in 2024 bought the publishing catalog, recorded music, and some name and likeness rights of rock singer Rod Stewart, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Shelli made a name for herself as a sports agent who, in the 1990s, helped introduce soccer to an American audience, a move which is still paying dividends today as Major League Soccer becomes more popular. That’ll likely increase even more so when the US serves as one of the three hosts for the 2026 World Cup.  

The Azoffs have been collecting art for a considerable chunk of their 40-plus-year marriage. Just last year, according to Vanity Fair, Shelli was spotted in the booth of LA-based dealer François Ghebaly during Frieze LA, where she had just scooped up a painting by Sayre Gomez. “It was a trophy, a real trophy,” she said of the work. Later in the day, she said she’d also picked up work by Yoshitomo Nara and Asuka Anastacia Ogawa at other booths.

Should they want to expand their collection, the couple certainly has plenty of wall space. In February 2024, they spent more than $11 million on the property next to their 3.2-acre estate in Beverly Hills. This expansion builds on another addition to their home, which saw the couple drop $21.5 million in 2022 on the other property next to their home.

Hortensia Herrero is a prominent Spanish art patron and philanthropist, married to supermarket tycoon Juan Roig. Known for her deep commitment to preserving Valencia’s cultural heritage, Herrero spearheaded the restoration of key historic landmarks in the region such as the Iglesia de San Nicolás de Valencia and the Colegio del Arte Mayor de la Seda. That initiative has cost the 74-year-old billionaire at least $10 million, according to Forbes.

Herrero’s art collection began with a focus on local Valencian artists but has since expanded to include international contemporary works after a visit to the 2013 exhibition “Sorolla and America” at the Meadows Museum in Dallas. During that trip, she met curator and fellow Valencian Javier Molins, who would later become Herrero’s confidant, and an advisers of sorts, traveling with the collector to artist studios, biennials, and art fairs, searching for works broaden and internationalize her collection.

That collection, as of last year, is housed in the 17th-century Palacio Valeriola. After a seven-year, $42-million renovation the historic Valencian building was rechristened the Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero (CAHH). The 27,600 square-foot Gothic structure is filled with work by renowned 20th-century masters like Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as site-specific commissions by contemporary artists such as Mat Collishaw, Tomás Saraceno, and Sean Scully.

In 2012 Herrero launched the Hortensia Herrero Foundation, which promotes and supports cultural awareness, knowledge, and education in the Valencia, with a focus on recovering the region’s artistic heritage. In June 2021 the foundation, in partnership with the Archdiocese of Valencia, began a restoration project at the Santos Juanes Church, a National Historic and Artistic Monument since 1947. Aimed at stabilizing the church’s structure and giving new life to its frescoes, that restoration project, completed in 2024, cost more than $6 million.

The foundation also supports dance initiatives in the region including the Valencia Danza International Campus, a collaboration with Asociación de Arte y Danza del Mediterráneo; the Esther Mortes School of Dance; and the Ballet Vale+ project, which researches the use of the classic ballet as a physical and social therapy for children with cerebral palsy.

Norwegian businessman Christen Sveaas has had an eye for collecting since childhood. When he was 10 years old, he started assembling stamps before buying and peddling antique coins across Europe in his teens. Fast-forward to present day and his art collection exceeds 1,700 pieces, no doubt bolstered by the success of his private investment company, Kistefos AS, which boasts some $1 billion in assets, with stakes in shipping, telecommunications, consumer credit, and real estate.

How does one accommodate such a massive collection, which contains pieces by artists ranging from by Edvard Munch to Yayoi Kusama to Keith Haring? If you’re a Norwegian billionaire, you build a 110,000-square-foot, spacecraft-like venue called The Twist that straddles Norway’s Randselva River. It’s been called a “must-see” cultural attraction by such publications as the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Daily Telegraph. The Twist is the nucleus of the Kistefos Museum, a sculpture park set in 45 acres of pine forest 80 miles north of Oslo and founded by Sveaas in 1996. Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg are just two of the artists to feature there. Which work would the Norwegian add to his park if he could choose any? “A fabulous bronze sculpture by Brancusi,” he told the Art Newspaper.

On his approach to collecting, Sveaas told the paper, “What I have learned is to trust my instinct, soul and eyes, but not my ears. Identify one or two galleries and absorb what you learn from them. My advice to young collectors would be to buy something that brings you pleasure and mystery to look at.”

For many years, art has been in the background of Belgian fashion designer Raf Simon’s work. In 2017, several months after Simons was appointed to take over as creative director of Calvin Klein, he launched a campaign that placed models in front of works by Richard Prince, Dan Flavin, Sterling Ruby, and Andy Warhol. The collaboration not only paid tribute to the label’s American roots, but in securing a three-year deal with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to tap the nonprofit’s archive, Simons got deeper access to the work of deceased artist than what is usual in the fashion industry.

Decades earlier, it was Simons’s own namesake menswear brand and embrace of minimalist looks that brought him recognition. He launched his first collection in 1995 after studying industrial design at Antwerp’s Royal Academy. He later took on top roles at Dior and Prada, where he is currently co-creative director.

Though Simons closed his label in 2022 after nearly 30 years, the influence of contemporary art worked on his ideas has been a key part of the historicization of that brand. In an interview with PIN-UP magazine, Simons mentioned how curator Jan Hoet’s takeover of the Belgian city of Ghent for Documenta 9 in 1992 was a pivotal viewing experience for him as a teenager. His relationships with artists developed, referencing living with works by sculptors, painters, and image-makers like Martin Kippenberger, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillsman, Cady Noland, Isa Genzken, and Steven Shearer, as well as younger names like Sanya Kantarovsky and Anne Collier.

In an interview with W magazine in 2017 he admitted it’s his friends who remain his core influences. One such artist whose captured his attention is California-based sculptor Evan Holloway, who is roughly the same age as Simons. “I keep coming back to that generation at a lot, and then I let it go a little bit. The generation that kind of created and caused my obsessions,” he said.

Korean American collector Miyoung Lee worked in finance before pivoting to art. The daughter of a banker and former South Korean official, who served as ministers of the government’s energy and trade agencies, Lee followed in her family’s line of work in business, getting her MBA at the Harvard Business School in 1992. Since then, Lee has quietly risen as an important collector in New York, lending artworks and giving funds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where serves as vice chair of the board of trustees.

In interviews, Lee has recounted becoming more recently focused on acquiring the work of Asian artists like Hanna Hur, Lotus Lang Kang, Jes Fan, and Christine Sun Kim, as well as artists like Leila Babirye, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jesse Darling, Virginia Overton, and Merikokeb Berhanu. Since its launch in 2021, Lee has made it a point skip Labor Day in here and head over to Seoul for Frieze. “The Korean art scene is really coming into its own,” she recently told ARTnews. Wherever she travels to see art, she seeks out the work of Korean and Korean diasporic artists, whose profiles have been on the rise over the past several years. “Yes, Korean artists are having a moment indeed,” she added.

Lee maintains she’s very careful when it comes collecting and in September told Frieze that she’s trying to get outside of her comfort zone when it comes to artists whose styles she’s less typically drawn to. “One of the problems I have with my collecting journey is that maybe I am too easily moved. I do like to get into the curator’s or the artist’s mind and see what they are trying to do. Even if it’s not something aesthetically appealing to me,” she said.

Philanthropist and collector Sangita Jindal was exposed to the arts by her mother, Urmila Kanoria, who launched the Kanoria Center for Arts in 1984 in Ahmedabad, India. “Her dedication to art and architecture gave me the impetus as a young girl to cultivate a taste for modern and contemporary art,” Jindal recently told ARTnews.

Jindal founded her own eponymous cultural institution, the Jindal Arts Creative Interaction Center, in 1994. But she started collected when she was 19, when she bought her first piece of art. “It was a small painting from Anjolie Ela Menon, a figurative painter and one of India’s leading contemporary artists,” Jindal told Artnet News. “My favorite work [in the collection] is Krishen Khanna, Girl on a Swing (ca. 1990s). It denotes freedom for me in a society where you are expected to follow norms. This swing represents the ability to dream and bring fantasy into your life. To me, Krishen Khanna’s work symbolizes the purpose of existence.”

Today, Jindal is the president of Art India magazine and the chairperson of JSW Foundation, the social development arm of the conglomerate JSW Group. Led by her husband, Sajjan Jindal, JSW Group operates in the steel, energy, infrastructure, and automotive industries; the group is itself part of the larger family business empire, O.P. Jindal Group, founded by Sajjan’s father, Om Prakash Jindal. (The Jindal family’s net worth was estimated to be $7.8 billion in 2017, according to Forbes.)

And like her mother, Sangita Jindal has passed on her passion for the arts to the next generation. With her daughter Tarini Jindal Handa, she recently set up Hampi Art Labs, an art center with an residency program in southern India. “We do not have too many such avenues in South Asia, where artists can mull over thoughts, pick up strains slowly, and discuss possibilities with other artists, curators, and thinkers,” she told ARTnews. “If India is to become an art powerhouse in the future, we need to have centers that enable and encourage creativity in different modes.”

Tour-de-force investment couple John and Amy Griffin have certainly made a splash across many sectors including finance, fashion, and art. John is a billionaire and the founder of the hedge fund Blue Ridge, which he closed in 2017; Amy is the founder of the startup investment firm G9 Ventures. Together, the pair collect contemporary art. It’s not just their holdings, however, that contribute to their individual and paired successes.

“Amy is more than an investor. She becomes your friend and your champion,” Spanx CEO Sara Blakely told the Wall Street Journal. “For founders, that can be even more important than the money.”

Spanx is one of the numerous companies, among them Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, that Amy has supported via G9 Ventures. In recent years, Amy has made headlines for her efforts in supporting women owned companies not just through monetary means, but “for her use of soft power—making introductions, chasing down founders at conferences and offering mentorship,” according to the Journal.

Though John tends to be more private, this spirit is echoed beyond business involvements with Amy having held board positions on a number of foundations and, in 2021, being named a trustee of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Together, the Griffins donated funds to support a portion of the University of Virginia’s planned landscape design under its school of architecture that incorporates sustainable design. While UVA is both of their alma mater, they connected later in life while training for the New York City marathon.

Additionally, through their eponymous foundation, they continue to prioritize grantmaking in New York and invest in education and poverty relief.