Marian Goodman Gallery will now represent the estate of Ana Mendieta, the pioneering Cuban-born multidisciplinary artist. The gallery will mount its first Mendieta exhibition in November in New York, ahead of a major Tate Modern retrospective next year.

As part of the agreement, the estate will continue to work with Alison Jacques in London and Prats Nogueras Blanchard in Barcelona and Madrid, but will depart Galerie Lelong, which represented Mendieta’s work for over three decades.

“With exciting new projects ahead and increasing momentum around the work, we realized that we needed a larger gallery—one that could help us carry Ana’s legacy into the future and meet the demands of this next chapter,” said Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece, who has been the estate’s administrator since 2013.

“It’s a huge honor for us to work with the estate of Ana Mendieta,” Junette Teng, a partner at Marian Goodman Gallery, told ARTnews. “Her work is deeply personal and universally resonant, while also conceptually rigorous, which makes her a natural fit for our program. She really expanded the possibilities of what art could be.”

Mendieta, who was born in Havana in 1948 and sent to Iowa during the Cuban Revolution, is best known for her multidisciplinary “earth-body” works exploring themes of migration, spirituality, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. She used site-specific materials to insert the human form into nature, often incorporating her silhouette or employing her body as a canvas. She then documented these ephemeral interventions with photographs and Super 8 footage, which are exhibited today.

During her lifetime, Mendieta earned a Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work was commissioned by private collectors and acquired by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Following Mendieta’s untimely death in September 1985, at the age of 36, her older sister Raquelín worked with a committee of the artist’s friends and peers to organize a 1987 retrospective at the New Museum in New York. In 1991, Mendieta’s estate began its long partnership with Lelong, which had just opened a New York branch, led by Mary Sabbatino, its vice president and partner.

“Mary Sabbatino and I developed a relationship that was more than just a partnership—we became like family,” Raquelín Mendieta told ARTnews in an email. “I’m extremely grateful to Mary for recognizing the importance of Ana’s work early on, and for all of the wonderful years of collaboration between the estate and the gallery.” To date, the artist’s work has appeared in over 600 group shows and over 55 solo exhibitions, including 16 museum retrospectives.

In recent years, public awareness around Mendieta’s life and work has grown, due in part to a wave of media projects developed without the estate’s support. Last November, Mendieta’s work set a new auction record at Christie’s, where an untitled 1985 wood sculpture sold for $756,000, marking the third record for her art set in 12 months.

Raquel Cecilia believes that contemporary viewers are responding to the universal, timely questions in her aunt’s work: “‘Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong?’”

“There’s a search for some kind of spiritual and cultural grounding” in today’s cultural and political landscape, added Rose Lord, a partner at Marian Goodman.

But all of this attention means new demands on both the estate and the gallery representing it; licensing and loan requests have surged, and, Raquel Cecilia said, “we have museums who are interested in installing some of Ana’s site-specific works, which we’ve never done before.” In July 2026, the Tate Modern will present a significant retrospective of the artist’s paintings, photographs, films, sculptures, and earthworks, bringing several pieces to the UK for the first time.

“Ana would have been very excited and proud to be in a gallery that represents Robert Smithson and [Giuseppe] Penone, amongst other artists there who are aligned with her work,” Raquelín wrote about Marian Goodman’s roster. “She also would have felt gratified to know that her work has resonated for so many years and continues to reach new audiences—that the public has engaged not only with her art, but with the ideas behind it.”

In June,  in the wake of underwhelming marquee auction results, the art adviser Jacob King sent a memo to his clients with a provocative thesis: Could the mainstreaming of an “investment mindset” be to blame for a market contraction? The spending slowdown on primary market art, King observed, could very well have come about from “feedback loops that caused prices for art to spiral higher, while propelling an ever-greater supply of new material onto the market.” Translation: artists generating works to feed a market that churns through them, with artworks flipped at auction and prices pushed up to unsustainable levels. 

King isn’t the only one who has noted this tendency. Kibum Kim, director at Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, has observed the rise of an “artificial sense of urgency that doesn’t give people a chance to really dive deeply into an artist’s practice.” Though his gallery stays away from collectors engaged in this mindset, he has seen some making impulse purchases “based on hearsay” rather than on how an artwork resonates with them or how it fits into their collection. 

This past spring, more than one gallerist said that with so many speculators having fled, the collectors who’ve remained in the game are the ones who care about the art, not the investment value—the ones who buy with their eyes, not their ears. ARTnews spoke with a handful of seasoned, highly influential collectors who do not consider collecting to be a financial venture; who purchase works that move them and focus on the civic impact of sharing their collections through museums. Though many in the market associate such an intellectually rigorous approach to collecting and patronage with the 20th century, these true believers have not only blazed a path for a new generation but are also still movers and shakers themselves. “These are passionate collectors—they are never looking at what everyone else is looking at,” says art adviser Allan Schwartzman. “They’re not interested in what the market values. Sometimes what they value aligns with what the market values, but in general they’re more thoughtful in their approach.”

Jill Kraus, the MoMA trustee who, with her husband, Peter, has long appeared on the Top 200 list, has been vocal about this approach to collecting. At the 2023 Bomb magazine benefit, where she and her husband were honored, she recalls, she delivered a speech in which she said, “If you’re an artist, keep creating. If you’re a dealer, stop telling your artists to make the same painting 50 times in 50 different colors. If you’re a collector, buy with your heart and your eyes, not your ears. I’m adamant about this.”

For young collectors, this older generation of “true believer” collectors has long been modeling arts patronage, offering a blueprint for making an impact among both artists and institutions while also following one’s curiosities. “It’s just like going to school,” Schwartzman says. “People need good mentors to do something well that’s moving the needle.” 

Joel Wachs

The president of the Andy Warhol Foundation has been using part of his paycheck to collect art since 1971, when he was elected to the Los Angeles City Council. 

On his last day in Kyoto in the 1960s, 20-something Joel Wachs ducked into a small gallery called the Red Lantern and purchased two etchings for $25 each. Over the next year, the recent law school graduate discovered that he loved living with art, and after joining a law firm that represented artists in Los Angeles, he started frequenting Gemini Graphics, now known as Gemini G.E.L. Inspired by the  story of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel—the civil servant couple who amassed a collection of 4,000 works, all of which they went on to donate—Wachs started putting aside a portion of his income to purchase art when he was elected to the LA City Council in 1971, at the age of 32.

Wachs, who did not grow up around art, first set foot in a contemporary gallery during law school. But he became intrigued by conceptual works when he encountered Sherrie Levine’s 1981 series “After Walker Evans,” for which she rephotographed reproductions of Evans’ most iconic images. “I said, ‘How can this be art, where someone is photographing someone else’s photographs?’” he recalled during a recent interview at his Manhattan apartment, where pieces from his collection cover every vertical surface, including doors (not unlike the way the Vogels displayed their vast collection). After discussing Levine’s concept with Richard Kuhlenschmidt, whose LA gallery was in the basement of his apartment building, Wachs said, “it stayed with me.” He bought it the following week, and, as it turned out, it was the first piece Levine ever sold. “To this day, we’re very close friends,” he said of the artist.

On the City Council, Wachs developed a reputation for supporting the arts community. “When I ran for mayor, Christopher Wool made buttons for me,” he said. “I was what you’d call a really independent voice on the City Council and never befriended the developers.” Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, and David Hockney sold editions at Gemini to benefit Wachs’s campaign. 

In 2001, when Wachs moved to New York to become president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, his collecting budget increased significantly; he now spends half his paycheck on art. Today, his apartment holds 200 works including ones by Jennifer Packer, James Bishop, Mike Kelley, Albert Oehlen, Ed Clark, and David Hammons. There’s a Lee Bontecou sculpture Wachs acquired using $18,000 from an insurance check he received after the 1992 LA earthquake, and a Marisa Merz painting purchased at a fair on the advice of Barbara Gladstone (“If you don’t get it, I will,” Gladstone reportedly said, before negotiating a deal for him). The closet in Wachs’s entryway is a storage space for even more frames.  

“Everything I buy, I buy with the institutions in mind,” Wachs said, referring to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which he helped found in 1979 and has supported ever since, along with the Hammer Museum. So far, each museum has received 100 works from his collection. Eventually, MOCA will be given his painting and sculpture holdings, while the Hammer will get “all the works on paper—prints, drawings, collage, and photographs,” he said. “I’ve gotten great satisfaction out of not only putting together collections, but also using it to support the very institutions that I supported both in government and now at an art foundation.” 

To this day, Wachs is delighted by the thrill of the find. “I just got the most amazing Blinky Palermo work on paper from 1969,” he said, adding that he’d found it at a small auction house in Belgium. It’s a study for Palermo’s 1970 installation at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, depicting blue isosceles triangles.

Wachs’s philosophy on collecting is not about chasing what everyone else is looking at. “It’s not about what you don’t have. It’s about what you do with what you have,” he said. “You have choices to make.” 

Eileen Harris Norton

Though the LA-based collector has amassed a pioneering collection by women and artists of color, education has been her philanthropic focus.

One afternoon in the late 1970s, while shopping at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall in Los Angeles, Eileen Harris Norton and her mother discovered that the second floor of the mall contained LA’s Museum of African American Art. There, they found artist Ruth Waddy making woodblock prints and describing her practice to a group of rapt visitors. Harris Norton was familiar with contemporary art but had never bought an artwork. Waddy’s work captivated her, and, with her mother’s encouragement, she acquired one of Waddy’s prints.

Today, Harris Norton’s collection spans more than 1,100 mostly by artists of color, women artists, and LA artists, including Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Betye Saar, and Glenn Ligon. “It’s intuition, and it’s my value system,” she said of her approach to collecting.  

During the 1980s, Harris Norton, a teacher, and her then husband Peter Norton, a software engineer and founder of Peter Norton Computing, would frequently tour artists’ studios on the weekends. “We became friendly with this one woman, Carla Pagliaro. And we always said, ‘If we ever have any money, we’re going to buy your work,’ ” Harris Norton said. And as Peter’s company grew, they did just that. The couple’s collecting practice soon veered “tougher” and “more content-laden,” she explained, with Peter “in thrall” to Charles Ray in particular. She purchased some of Walker’s and Simpson’s earliest works. 

“Eileen Harris Norton is a pivotal figure within the arts landscape,” said Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “Her vital support of countless artists, many of whom are now household names, has amplified the visions of those whose perspectives have contributed so meaningfully to a dynamic and vibrant art world.”

Studio visits often proved fateful, including one where she met her friend and collaborator Mark Bradford and acquired one of his “ginormous” paintings for $2,500. After Bradford described how working at his mother’s Leimert Park beauty shop informed his practice, the LA–based artist turned to Harris Norton and said, per the collector, “Your hair isn’t cute.” The room fell silent, and Harris Norton asked if he could do better. He said he could. “I started going to his shop, and he used to do my hair and did my daughter’s hair, everybody’s hair,” Harris Norton recalled. In 2013, along with Bradford and Allan DiCastro, she launched Art + Practice, a nonprofit that operates exhibition and programming spaces in Leimert Park. Outside of art, the organization focuses on providing services to foster youth and refugees. As a former teacher of English as a second language and Children’s Defense Fund board member, she said, “education has always been at the heart of my philanthropy.” 

This past May, Yale University Press published All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection, with text by curator Taylor Renee Aldridge. Harris Norton is donating copies to historically Black colleges and universities, local universities, libraries, and schools. “It is important for students to have equal access to quality education and to learn about these wonderful women artists of color in contemporary art history,” she said, because she herself had been unaware of them until she started collecting. Though Waddy’s mall demonstration of woodblock printmaking marked the collector’s first experience with contemporary art, it wasn’t until Aldridge commissioned an essay by Steven Nelson for All These Liberations that Harris Norton learned Waddy had been a “godmother” figure to Black artists in LA. “I didn’t know these women artists before I started collecting them,” Harris Norton said. “I’m still learning about them.”  

Jill and Peter Kraus

Through outdoor installation commissions on their Upstate New York property, the couple has created unique opportunities for long-term patronage and artistic growth.

When Jill Kraus and her husband, Peter, started collecting in the early 1980s, the couple had $600 in discretionary income each month and would pay off their early acquisitions in increments. “I don’t know that galleries do that anymore,” Kraus said, “but I hope for young collectors they do.” 

Kraus holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design; she and Peter bought their first piece of art, a $325 print by Pierre Alechinsky, because the artist had exhibited at the 1970 Carnegie International when Jill was a student. John Lefebre, the dealer who sold it, encouraged the couple to return to his gallery, which exhibited mostly artists in the 1940s group CoBrA, a European postwar avant-garde movement inspired by children’s art. Gallery-hopping “became what we did on the weekends,” she said, even with their young children in strollers. 

Kraus, who has been on the board of trustees at MoMA since 2008, has long believed in art’s power to change one’s perspective. While working as the design director at Avon in the 1990s, she brought along her direct reports on field trips around New York City, including to the 1996 Whitney Museum retrospective of LA artist Ed Kienholz, known for his sometimes-macabre assemblages of flea market items that commented on social and political issues. “They all just sat there going, ‘Why are we here?’ And I was like, ‘Because you need to learn to think differently.’ ”

In 2001, the Krauses—who have never hired an art adviser—realized they were collecting mostly works on paper by artists who made sculptures, so they purchased a 400-acre property in Dutchess County, New York, with plans to commission a series of site-specific outdoor installations in hopes of giving those artists the opportunity to “leave their comfort zones and dream,” Kraus said. “In several cases, it has really changed the work of the artist.” For example, Tatiana Trouvé’s ongoing installation Between Sky and Earth—the former woodland camp of a being called The Guardian, who left behind bronze objects like books, shoes, and a lean-to—originated elements of several newer works. “It’s funny, because dealers would say to me, ‘Do you want a Guardian sculpture?’” Kraus said, referring to the chair sculptures for which Trouvé has become known. “And I’m like, ‘We have the original Guardian. The Guardian lives at our house.’” A Doug Aitken video work is projected onto three sides of the house, while Ján Mančuška created an animation inside an outdoor viewing box. 

The commissions have no parameters other than that artists must visit the property at least twice: once when there are leaves on the trees and once when there aren’t. (One artist visited during the warmer months, selected his site on the property, and announced his plan—only to return in the winter and abandon the project. “He freaked out,” Kraus said. “We never heard from him again. He couldn’t fathom doing a piece that could be in antithetical conditions.”)

The projects have also brought friends and collaborators into the Krauses’ lives. Tony Oursler—with whom Kraus now texts daily about politics—took 10 years to complete his installation, while Matthew Monahan’s project lasted 14 years. Jeppe Hein’s family stayed on the property over the summer. “When you’re having a dialogue with artists for that long a … time, you’d better be friends or you’ll want to kill each other,” Kraus said. “You’re spending that much time together.” 

Gilberto Cárdenas

The sociologist has amassed one of the world’s largest collections of Latinx art and is now working closely with institutions to show it. 

“I’m a bottom-up collector,” Gilberto Cárdenas said. The sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame grew up in a working-class family and got into documentary photography in the 1960s as a self-described “long-haired hippie” with a desire to document Latino involvement in the Civil Rights movement in California. After receiving a tuition waiver to attend Notre Dame’s graduate school for sociology—“I was the only Mexican American graduate student admitted that year at Notre Dame,” he said—Cárdenas’s interest in photography took him to the fields of Indiana, where he worked with social justice organizations to document the living and working conditions of immigrant farm laborers.

“I got suddenly interested in art,” both contemporary and historical, he said, because from a sociological standpoint, artists offered unique commentary via “the way they depicted the culture and the social relations, whether it be cultural relations or class relations.” Curators and art collectors among the students and faculty at Notre Dame encouraged Cárdenas to start collecting seriously. “I was very fortunate to meet a lot of artists at that time who were really doing a lot but were not getting sufficient attention,” he said. At the time, Latinx art was often siloed from the wider art world. “People didn’t understand it, or they misrepresented Latino culture,” Cárdenas said, with some dismissing Latinx artists as “unimportant, because they weren’t highly valued in the art market.” Cárdenas was an early supporter of the print studio Self-Help Graphics in LA, and after moving to Austin to teach at the University of Texas, he founded the commercial gallery Galería Sin Fronteras, located between campus and the Capitol building, “to represent artists who were not paid much attention by some of the major galleries,” he said. Because artists trusted him, he added, “I could buy a large number of works at a really great price.” 

Over the years, Cárdenas has worked closely with institutions including the Smithsonian and the National Museum of Mexican Art to expand their collections of Latino art and organize exhibitions and publications. In 1994 he became the founding executive director of Latino USA, a weekly radio program produced at UT Austin that was soon picked up by NPR. Last year, after joining the board of trustees of the Blanton Museum, Cárdenas and his wife, Dolores Garcia, donated more than 5,000 works from their collection. After the major gift, the museum hired Claudia Zapata to be its first associate curator of Latino art; Zapata’s initial project involves researching and inventorying the Cárdenas-Garcia donation and producing a catalog of the works.

“With Latinx collectors like Gil and Dolores,” Zapata said, “it’s not a diversification of a financial portfolio where it’s a very removed market experience. It’s very personal, and you can see that in the collecting practice.” 

In the decades since Cárdenas started collecting, he has seen the perception of Latinx art shift in the wider art world thanks to artists, curators, nonprofit leaders, and other collectors. “There is a greater appreciation, greater understanding, and greater location of this art as American art,” he said.

Marieluise Hessel

In establishing a research center and museum at Bard College, the patron believes in art as a vehicle of hope. 

“There was nothing but poverty and loss,” is how Marieluise Hessel remembers Garmisch, the small town in postwar Germany where she grew up. “We lived in one room after the war; we had lost everything,” she said. Her father died, and she was terrified that her mother would soon follow. “The one thing that kind of saved me was this beautiful little church. I would go to the church and pray, and it made me feel so good, and so safe, being in this beautiful environment.” Years later, on a school trip, Hessel visited Schloss Linderhof, one of the castles built in the 1870s by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. “It is there,” she said, “that I learned to dream and fantasize about a better life without war and the misery that is life after it.” 

In the 1960s, Hessel started visiting museums in Vienna (her first husband, Egon Hessel, was Austrian). “I will never forget the day when, for the first time, I saw the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele at the Belvedere,” she said. “I did not know it then, but the impact of these beautiful and sad works changed my life.” 

After connecting with the Munich gallerist Heiner Friedrich, Hessel started acquiring works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, CoBrA artists, and Minimalists. “I collected what I could afford,” she said—one or two paintings per year. “People say, ‘You have an eye,’ and I say, ‘I know nothing, how could I know a Gerhard Richter would [eventually] cost $3 or $5 million?’ I saw it, I liked it, I wanted to have it, I could afford it. That’s the way we went about it. I would never, ever have said, ‘This is a good investment.’ That didn’t exist.” 

With a robust research library inside her New York apartment, Hessel has long followed her curiosities. “The kind of research that Marlies does is as much into the world of thought as into the library of artworks,” Allan Schwartzman, the art adviser, said. “She’s one of a rare handful of collectors who thinks like a curator.” The collection has evolved as society has changed; in the 1990s, Hessel was interested in identity issues and artists documenting AIDS, such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Lately, she has been working closely with artists of the African diaspora, such as Lina Iris Viktor and Zohra Opoku.

“She takes it very seriously,” Schwartzman said. “It’s a job for her. And she wants to do it well. She wants to have the confidence that what she’s sharing with the public is compelling and worthy of sharing.” 

In 1992, after connecting with Bard College president Leon Botstein over their shared interest in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Hessel cofounded the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In 2006 she founded the Hessel Museum of Art on campus as a place for curatorial students to organize exhibitions using real objects. She also made a world-class collection available to the Upstate public. “I wanted to do something for people who had no access,” she said, because “everybody should have access to dream.”

A version of this article appears in the 2024 ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue.

Before he produced a documentary on Maurizio Cattelan or worked with Rashid Johnson on his adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Michael Sherman decided to fill a new home he purchased in Los Angeles in 2011 with art. He bought pieces by Wes Lang, whom he met in New York, and Noah Davis, a recommendation from friends Chris Gibbs and Beth Birkett, owners of streetwear mecca Union Los Angeles.

At first, Sherman was put off by the art market, which he found difficult to break into because “if people didn’t know you, they don’t sell you anything,” he said. In 2014 he continued to buy art, and began acquiring from smaller galleries; he also reached out to artists directly on the then-nascent Instagram. “I still love the discovery. My favorite collecting style is to discover somebody myself,” he said.

As a producer, Sherman has financed documentaries that focus on some of today’s most pressing issues: the 2020 Netflix hit Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen concerns media representations of trans people, and Hulu’s 2020 The Fight is about the American Civil Liberties Union during the Trump era. Other projects include the Elisabeth Moss drama Her Smell and the hit HBO series Betty.

Occasionally, his worlds collide. In 2016 Johnson approached him about producing a film adaptation of Native Son, which had already tapped Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks to write the screenplay and would mark Johnson’s directorial debut. Having always admired his art, Sherman agreed. Before filming began in Cleveland, Sherman visited Johnson’s 2018 show at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles and acquired one of his multimedia works. “He put a copy of Native Son in the work that I own. It’s a very personal piece for us,” he said.

Sherman sees collecting as similar to producing films, since there’s “a curation process” to both, and he gravitates toward undertold stories in both mediums, with an emphasis on collecting work by Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Indigenous artists. “I’m trying to collect artists that aren’t the ‘hype artists’ or ‘art darlings,’” he said. One day, he hopes to open a space for his collection, where work by these artists can be in dialogue with one another.

Outside collecting and producing, Sherman serves on the board of advisors at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he now lives, and is a trustee at the Baltimore Museum of Art, in his hometown. He considers it his personal mission to “get every Baltimore artist that I know and collect” into the B.M.A., including Jerrell Gibbs and Kandis Williams, who now lives in Los Angeles and recently won the Hammer’s Mohn Award for her participation in Made in L.A. “I feel like it’s my duty to make sure that these young Baltimore artists become a permanent part of the museum,” he said.

In 2004, a young business executive named David Lenhardt attended an auction at Christie’s New York. Surrounded by art world veterans, the former PetSmart CEO remembers being intimidated when he placed his winning bid for a print of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn in Day-Glo pink. “When we won, they all looked at me and were like, ‘Wow, who’s this young kid?’ That was our introduction to the auction world. And it was a good one,” he said. Since then, Dawn and David Lenhardt have only acquired more art, moving from editioned works on paper to painting, sculpture, and more. The Warhol print, however, still hangs in their Phoenix home as a small but sentimental reminder of the collection’s origins.

Now totaling around 60 pieces, the collection comprises mostly the work of living artists, allowing the two to learn more about the works by speaking directly to their creators. “I think one of the important things when you’re collecting is the story behind the art,” Lenhardt said. “Getting to know the artists just helps you with the story.” In the collectors’ dining room, Arcmanoro Niles’s 2018 Go Home to Nothing (Hoping for More), portraying people in a bar, none of whom look at each other, hangs opposite Eric Fischl’s 2018 Island of the Cyclops: The Early Years, which shows a young boy whose hand covers the top half of his face as he stands behind his mother, who smokes blithely in a swimming pool facing away from him. At the gallery opening where the painting first showed, David recalled Fischl telling them, “That boy up there? I’m convinced that boy doesn’t have an eye.” David continued, “This nugget that Eric gave me exploded the meaning of the painting and the way I look at it.” Together, the two pieces parallel each other in the “disconnectedness” of the subjects they depict.

David recently invited Niles to present a lecture at the Phoenix Art Museum, where he’s vice chair of the museum’s board. In 2017 the couple launched the Lenhardt Contemporary Art Initiative, which aimed to raise the profile of the museum’s contemporary art collection through a series of lectures and acquisitions. In 2021 the museum announced an expansion of the program, highlighting artists promoting discourse around race, gender, and other important social issues.

The Lenhardts also sit on committees at the Whitney Museum in New York: both are on the National Committee, and David is on the Paintings and Sculpture Committee. “The relationships we’ve developed through these groups have been very rewarding,” Lenhardt said. As collectors, he added, “you always have some art you’re thinking about, but it’s the journey and the friends that you make. It’s broadened who we are.”

While traveling the globe on business trips for their banking and finance careers, Singaporean art collectors Linda Neo and Albert Lim would always make time to visit museums. Inspired by what they saw there, the couple started collecting Western and Renaissance art 18 years ago; but these days, their collecting attentions focus on contemporary art from Singapore and throughout Southeast Asia.

“We feel that it is very important to support emerging artists,” Neo said, as they did with local artist Jane Lee, whose exhibition they sponsored at their gallery, Primz, in 2017. They’ve also acquired several works by performance artist Tang Da Wu, whom Lim described as “the father of contemporary art in Singapore.” Other artists in their collection include Promthum Woravut, Lim Tze Peng, Cheong Soo Pieng, Melissa Tan, Suzann Victor, Hong Zhu An, and Han Sai Por.

“The visual language is so different between the West and the East, especially Chinese art with calligraphy and ink works,” Neo said. “So we are beginning to learn more and more about our Asian roots.” She stressed that Southeast Asian art isn’t a monolith but represents a region home to 680 million people, with distinct art scenes in each country.

When visiting art fairs across Asia from Hong Kong to Indonesia, Lim and Neo (who sits on the board of the forthcoming Singapore fair Art SG) were struck by the sprawling art spaces collectors had built. But in Singapore, where space is scarce and expensive, they decided to start small by opening the Primz Gallery in a modest space in Woodlands, a residential area in Northern Singapore. Visiting is by appointment only, allowing for a more intimate experience with the art on view, and the exhibitions—to date, they’ve mounted four—are shown for extended periods and are accompanied by “local programming to work with the artists,” Neo said. “It works really well.”

Their vision for Primz is part of an effort to create more art scholarship from Southeast Asia, and they produce catalogues for each show. “There’s not enough books in English or information that explains the art here,” Neo said. Future plans for the collection may include donations to Western museums to raise the profile of Southeast Asian art or even starting a museum of their own.

Over the last 20 years, Miami has become a bona fide art capital, but collector Elizabeth Dascal remembers growing up in the city in the 1980s, when the art scene was much less developed. Dascal hails from a prominent Miami family with businesses in banking and automobiles. After college, she and her friends, sisters Dina and Rhonda Mitrani, converted a warehouse the Mitranis owned in Wynwood into studio spaces for artists, long before the neighborhood’s iconic Wynwood Walls murals opened in 2009. “It was a flourishing time,” she said.

Dascal started collecting in her early 20s, and helped shape her family’s art collection. Her first purchase, a Miranda Lichtenstein photograph, hangs over her bed to this day. “It was a woman, and you could see that there was a lot of contemplation in her face—that’s what drew me to it at the time,” she said. Over the years, the interior design consultant has traveled to some of the world’s top art fairs—Art Basel in Switzerland, Frieze London, the Armory Show in New York—acquiring work by Vaughn Spann, Josh Smith, Christina Quarles, Donna Huanca, Katherine Bernhardt, and Chloe Wise.

Nearly two decades later, art has turned into a family passion, Dascal said. Her first date with husband Vladimir Spector was a visit to Dia:Beacon, and now, the couple brings their four-year-old son Charles to art fairs and studio visits. “Our life is not just collecting art, but a lot of my friends are artists. It’s all-encompassing.”

A recent acquisition is a 15-foot painting by Spann that will be the centerpiece of the family’s new house, currently under construction. “We loved it so much and we wanted to live with the work in the size and in the grandeur that it needs, so we’re building a house that will fit it,” she said.

As Miami continues to be an important center for art in the United States, Dascal said it’s important to note that pioneering gallerists in the city, like David Castillo, Kevin Bruk, and Fredric Snitzer, started out small, though they now represent some of the world’s top artists. “A big part of my story is really about relationships and about friendships,” she said. “As I’ve grown, my relationships with the galleries have grown. That’s how you build collections: through relationships.”

For Lebanese entrepreneur Dani Chakour, collecting art is a marriage of love and reason. “The marriage of love usually ends up failing, and the marriage of reason usually also ends up failing,” he said. “But if you combine a marriage of love and reason, it will last longer.” When he first started buying, he would purchase work by following his instincts; he has since abandoned that strategy. “I don’t buy only because I love the work,” he said. “There has to be a reason to buy it.”

A powerful narrative is one reason to buy. Two years ago, he came across a piece by London-based artist Joy Labinjo. “The work was beautiful,” he said. “If you look at the canvas, it’s amazing—the colors, the figures, everything. But the reason I bought it? She was telling the story of African [people].”

Chakour, 49, made his first acquisition, a large canvas by American artist Zio Ziegler, four years ago. He had seen Ziegler’s densely layered abstractions in a friend’s collection and asked for an introduction. “I never thought I would become a collector,” he said, thinking he would make just that one purchase and move on. But he was hooked. He took a six-month art management course at École Supérieure des Affaires and now “can’t stop” acquiring. He houses his collection, currently numbering 400 works—two-thirds of them by emerging artists, the remaining third by mid-career and established artists—between Lebanon and Zurich.

Chakour spent 20 years working in telecommunications across Africa, and now owns a chain of restaurants called Em Sherif, with locations in 12 different countries in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. He will soon open outposts in London, Monaco, Athens, and Paris.

Chakour is also an active patron, having given financial support to galleries in Beirut recovering from the devastating 2020 port explosion. “They are all now back in business. They are fighting to survive,” he said.

Since that incident last August, he has been thinking about other ways to help support emerging Lebanese artists on the international art market, so he recently launched the Emergentes Art Foundation. “The aim of the foundation is to bring European and American galleries to Lebanon and try to find markets for Lebanese artists abroad,” he said. “There are many, many interesting things we can do for our local artists besides collecting them.”

When he was a pre-med student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Charles Boyd said, he didn’t have time for much else; his life was “science, science, science.” But an art appreciation class on African-American art in 1987 changed the course of his life, ultimately inspiring him to build a formidable collection of historical and contemporary art.

“I’ve always loved art, loved beauty,” the Michigan-based plastic surgeon and entrepreneur said. He made his first acquisition in the late 1990s, when he purchased an African carving while visiting the Côte d’Ivoire. When his father passed away in 2004, Boyd inherited pieces by Romare Bearden and local L.A. artists; he started seriously collecting five years later. Given his professional interest in faces, he said he was drawn to portraiture, from Eddie Martinez’s heavily populated, graffiti-influenced paintings to composite faces in Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s canvases, like 2017’s I Wish a Muthafucka Would. 

“I was really just looking at the aesthetics and how we look at aesthetics, how we look at beauty, how we look at images, and whether they’re beautiful or grotesque or sad,” Boyd said.

Today, his collection is a mix of artists from different generations and includes pieces by Elizabeth Catlett, Kerry James Marshall, Ming Smith, Kenneth Victor Young, Titus Kaphar, Eddie Martinez, Deborah Roberts, and Sanford Biggers. Black artists and those from the African diaspora compose about 75 percent of his collection. “The thing I enjoy most is meeting with the artists,” he said. During studio visits, he always asks about their influences. “And that got me looking at more historical artists,” including Catlett. Boyd thinks of his collection as “a link to the past.”

He is also an active patron in the museum world, serving as a board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and a trustee for his alma mater, Howard, where he heads up the board’s art committee, which stewards the school’s 4,000-work art collection.

“We’re looking at reintroducing these works to the world because most of them have not been seen recently,” Boyd said of his work at Howard. By way of example, the committee lent Charles White’s mural Five Great American Negroes (1939–40) to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its 2018 exhibition “Charles White: A Retrospective.” “To come back to Howard in a different position—being on the board and trying to help be the caretaker of this important collection—is definitely very meaningful in my life,” he said.

When brothers Jorge and Naim Zarur were children, they accompanied their father, a cardboard packaging executive, on trips to Europe, where they visited museums like the Prado in Madrid, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, spending hours exploring their storied collections. “Goya, Velázquez, and Monet were part of our introduction to visual arts. I learned history through painting,” Jorge, now 37, recalled recently.

The brothers started collecting a little over a decade ago, in their mid-20s. Jorge said his first major acquisition happened six years ago, just before he got married, when he bought a work by Fernando García Ponce. “I love that piece so much because it introduced me to abstract art from Mexico,” he said.

Initially the brothers focused on Mexican art from the 1970s and ’80s, mostly done in the Neoexpressionist style. But they soon began buying work by some of today’s leading Mexican artists, like Claudia Peña Salinas, Enrique Hernandez, Alejandro Garcia Contreras, and Rodrigo Valenzuela. “These days, we’re more interested in the [current] voices to narrate the problems that we have now,” Jorge said. They also have a robust art library, “because you have to create a map for yourself and for your collection.”

The brothers moved to Guadalajara almost 20 years ago. “Little by little, contemporary art started to appear every day in our lives, and a great search for culture began,” Jorge said. In recent years, they have started to focus their attention on supporting local talent. One artist they have become especially interested in is Guadalajara native Isa Carrillo, who depicts “all the things that you cannot see and cannot be explained through science,” Naim said, such as “auras or energies.”

At the end of October, Guadalajara will play host to the Estación Material art fair, where the brothers will sponsor an acquisition prize for local artists. “We want to make an example for people that they have to get involved in art,” Jorge said. “Because when you buy one art piece, you’re making everything move: You put your money in what you believe. The galleries can pay the artists. They can pay for the things they need to grow.”

Upon their father’s retirement in 2013, the brothers took over their family’s cardboard company. Within the next two years, they will open an industrial space near their offices to display their growing holdings, currently numbering around 100 works, as a way to fulfill their vision of having “a great collection in our city to visit.”

A version of this article appears in the October/November 2021 issue of ARTnews.

As a child growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, Suzanne McFayden loved poring over two volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica that her father had purchased from a traveling salesman: one covering foreign countries, and the other covering artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, and J.M.W. Turner. “In my mind, that was what ‘real’ art was,” McFayden said, though she identified more closely with family photographs and work by local Jamaican artists around her.

Later, as a student at Cornell University, the philanthropist studied art history and, throughout her 20s, purchased prints from Wassily Kandinsky’s Blue Rider period. While living in Switzerland in 2010, McFayden attended her first Art Basel, the art world’s marquee fair. “There, a light bulb went off, because I was able to get up close and personal with works by Basquiat and Glenn Ligon. All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is also art, and it’s fantastic.’”

By the time she moved to Austin, Texas, with her three children in 2011, McFayden finally had the “head space” to devote to building a collection. She considers I Have Peg Leg Nightmares (2003), a haunting collage by Wangechi Mutu, to be her first purchase as a serious collector. “It started me on the journey that I’m on today,” she said.

As a collector, she gravitates toward work that reflects her various identities. “How do I collect these different pieces of myself? I am an immigrant, I am a Black woman, I’m a mother, I have three kids, I’m also divorced,” she said. “But the overarching theme of my collection is joy.” Work by artists like Alma Thomas, Frank Bowling, Sheila Hicks, Genevieve Gaignard, and Deborah Roberts are cornerstones in her collection.

McFayden is the new board chair of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin; serves on the board at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York; and provided support for Julie Mehretu’s mid-career solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art earlier this year. Recently, she has become interested in helping support artist-led initiatives such as Titus Kaphar’s NXTHVN arts incubator in New Haven, Connecticut, and Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang Community Center program, which during the pandemic started delivering organic produce to families in and around South Los Angeles.

When deciding whether to acquire new work, McFayden often has conversations with artists to understand what they’re thinking about, looking at, reading, and engaging with in their research. She wants to see intellectual rigor. “There’s a rush today to collect Black artists, but that’s not necessarily what I’m looking at,” she said. “I’m looking for artists who are really interested in their craft, who want to push themselves and want to go beyond their boundaries.”

Though she feels a kinship with Black artists, she is more concerned with the ideas that undergird work. “It’s not necessarily about being a Black artist; it’s about being an artist who happens to be Black,” she said. “Just like I’m an art collector who happens to be Black and who happens to be a woman.”

A version of this article appears in the October/November 2021 issue of ARTnews.