An Empire of Bamboo in the Home of Collectors

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Ted Loos

Diane and Arthur Abbey’s apartment contains a mix of modern art and Japanese baskets. On wall, clockwise from top left, “Spritze” (1924), Wassily Kandinsky; “Woman-Torso” (1965-66), Willem de Kooning; and “Moonlight Landscape” (1914), Man Ray. On left table, from left: “Fuki or Noble Wealth” (1940), Tanabe Chikuunsai II; bamboo basket for tea ceremony articles (2007), Watanabe Shochikusai II; and “Flower Basket” (after 1946), Suemura Shobun.

Collectors who are just starting out spend time chasing down their objects of desire. Once they’ve made it, they can sit back and wait for the phone to ring. “We’re at the point now, where, if something brilliant comes up, somebody calls us,” said Diane Abbey, who, with her husband, Arthur, is among the world’s top collectors of Japanese bamboo baskets. The couple — who split their time between the Upper East Side and the Hamptons when not traveling the world — own around 300 in total. Some of them were seen in the 2017-18 exhibition “Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [More]

RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK - He is Risen

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

By Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton

“Jacob Wrestling the Angel” (2017) by Michael Cook. Print #15 of 150, 27.5 x 19.5. Original is pencil on paper.

What’s it like to wrestle with God? After 9 weeks with a fractured heel, Ernest will walk back into our church today. It’s not a perfect gait, but he’s walking. Healing any foot injury is a wrestling match that changes you, and this one inspired our purchase of a print by English artist Michael Cook. His interpretation from the books of Genesis and Hosea appears as if Jacob is wrestling himself. Note even the matching bare feet. These weeks changed us, and that’s why, on this Easter morning, “Jacob Wrestling an Angel” by Michael Cook is our art of the week.

After an N.F.L. Career, Keith Rivers Enters the Collector's Field

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Keith Rivers in his Beverly Hills home with, from left, “Untitled” (2017), by Arjan Martins; “Untitled (You drive a hard bargain)" (2011), by Barbara Kruger; and “Raised Eyebrows and Furrowed Foreheads” (2008), by John Baldessari.CreditCredit

“Art gave me something to segue into,” said Keith Rivers, a former N.F.L. linebacker, at his art-filled house in Beverly Hills. “During his rookie season with the Cincinnati Bengals in 2009, Mr. Rivers bought his first piece — an Andy Warhol Electric Chair print — after a trip to the Museum of Modern Art with a woman he had been interested in when he was studying at the University of Southern California. Since he retired from football in 2015, after also having played for the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills, Mr. Rivers has deepened his pursuit of contemporary art and owns work by Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Arjan Martins, among others.[More]

Some People Put on a Show; Others Stage an Art Fair

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Ted Loos

Dean Valentine in his home with “Untitled (Scream 3)” by Simphiwe Ndzube.

LOS ANGELES — For a certain set of collectors, opening a private museum has become de rigueur. But Dean Valentine started a small art fair instead, with an eye to giving everyone a chance to discover new talent the way he does. The fair, called Felix, was founded with the local art-dealing brothers Al and Mills Morán. It drew 40 dealers who offered their wares in a series of rooms and cabanas at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (it was held Feb. 14-17, timed to be concurrent with the first edition of the Frieze Los Angeles fair). “I learned a lot of what I know about art from hanging out with dealers in the mid-90s and asking them, ‘Why is this any good?’” said Mr. Valentine, the former president of Walt Disney Television and the former chief executive officer of UPN. [More]

Why Store Art, When You Can Share It? A Collector's Trove

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Robin Pogrebin

Reginald Van Lee at home with Tyler D. Ballon’s “The Pietà.”

What attracted you to an unknown like Tyler Ballon — his religious-themed scenes of African-Americans? "I was blown away. [Gesturing to a large painting over a sofa] This is “The Pietà.” My role in life is to enhance things. I really like to support young artists." Reginald Van Lee should have bought those Basquiats when he had the chance. Jean-Michel Basquiat, before he was famous, offered two of his paintings to Mr. Van Lee, who declined, having never been a fan. The decision was consistent with Mr. Van Lee’s principles over the 20 years he’s been collecting: buying only art that he loves, never acquiring a piece solely because it is likely to appreciate in value. [More]

A Collector Juxtaposes the Erotic and the Familiar

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Warren Strugatch

Brian Phillips in his living room with, from left, “Black Goo, White Lace” (2015) by Torbjorn Rodland and “Loon” (2011) by Wyatt Kahn.

When Brian Phillips came to New York in 1998, he quickly gravitated toward the downtown art and fashion scenes and, through internships at Paper, Elle and Visionaire, connected with other aspiring, boundary-smudging tastemakers and haunted contemporary art hot spots. He also found mentors who guided him. Although he arrived to study architecture at Columbia, his career took a different turn and he founded Black Frame, an agency that represents clients in the arts, architecture and fashion. As a collector, Mr. Phillips favors contemporary art and photography, often created by artists he has met, including Paul Lee and Matt Saunders. His taste in art is strikingly personal and he has acquired several homoerotic pieces. [More]

Interview: Todd Von Ammon, New York, United States

FINE ART MULTIPLE
By Linda Greene

Jasmine and Todd in their apartment. Image: © Linda Green

New York collector, curator and director of Team Gallery, Todd von Ammon, has a private collection teeming with works from artists he knows and loves. “I think people need to accept and embrace the absurdity of the collecting impulse.” He gives us some insights into the mind of a collector and we find out about his herd of lava lamps. "I think people were led to believe that there was investment potential in young contemporary art, but the resounding conclusion is that there probably isn’t! It’s a totally irrational thing to want to have this stuff. I think people need to accept and embrace the absurdity of the collecting impulse." To follow Todd von Ammon’s Instagram account please click here. [More]

Two Lives in Art, and a Collection Tracing Their Trajectory

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Laura Hoptman and Verne Dawson in their Manhattan home in front of, from left, Jim Lambie’s “Psychedelic Soul Stick” (2001); Bill Lynch’s “Family”; and Urs Fischer’s “Untitled.” Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

On the day in 1983 when Laura Hoptman graduated from Williams College, she took a bus to Manhattan and moved into an apartment on East 10th Street. “I knew I wanted to be in the contemporary-art world, I knew I wanted to be a curator, but most of all, I knew I just wanted to be around artists,” said Ms. Hoptman, now executive director of the Drawing Center. Over the last three decades, she’s achieved the life she envisioned, and it’s reflected on the walls of the home she shares with her husband, the painter Verne Dawson, at another address on East 10th. The couple’s grown-up bohemian apartment is filled with artworks accumulated from their network of friends and colleagues, including Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paul Bloodgood, Trisha Donnelly, Chris Ofili and George Condo. [More]

RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton

Gregory Disney-Britton, co-creator of the Alpha & Omega Project for Contemporary Religious Art, at home with, from left, Quincy Owens + Luke Crowley's “Prime IV” (purchased 2018) and Tony Melendez’s “Capricorn Greeting the Celtic Moon” (purchased 2014). 

Near the end of 2018’s Advent Fast, a gin loving friend asked, “When is that shit over?” We prayed for him. In Matthew 10:17-22, Jesus said, “You will be hated by all because of my name, but whoever endures to the end will be saved.” We began 2018 with a promise to fast, pray, and praise by collecting art created in His name, but we fell short. We did however have long talks with Quincy Owens about his art of the religious imagination. Creating spirit-filled work despite distractions is why “Prime IV" by Owens & Crawley is our acquisition of the year.

A Collector Who Grew Up With Art Now Fosters Its Makers

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Sarah Arison, chairwoman of the National YoungArts Foundation, at home with, from left, John Baldessari’s “Big Catch” (2016) and Deborah Roberts’s “The Rope-a-Dope” (2017). Winnie Au for The New York Times

At Emory University, Sarah Arison, a pre-med student, took a sharp turn and became a double major in business and French with a minor in art history. She also joined the board of the National YoungArts Foundation based in Miami, where she grew up. Ms. Arison changed course after a serendipitous conversation with a student’s mother about how YoungArts had changed her son’s life. The couple’s homes in New York and Aspen display some 60 works by artists she discovered through these organizations. Many are either by alumni of YoungArts, including Hernan Bas, Nicole Eisenman and Lee Pivnik, or master teachers the foundation enlisted as mentors to aspiring artists. [More]

His Passion Emerges Annually. He Hangs It on a Tree. Or Three.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Warren Strugatch

Benjamin Bradley, a collector whose obsession is Christmas, and his dog, Ebenezer, in the antique-filled apartment he shares with his partner, Bruce Wayne. Behind him is an abstract expressionist painting by Priscilla Heine, flanked by framed English military seals. Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

In the early ’90s, Mr. Bradley came to New York to complete his bachelor’s degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology. After classes, he haunted the city’s flea markets, auctions and antique shops, enhancing the collection he’d started in Indiana. Today Mr. Bradley collects mainly over the internet, focusing on German imports made between 1850 and 1920: Santa-themed jars and candy dishes; nodders (windup bobbleheads); Dresden ornaments (highly fragile paper composites hand-assembled by local artisans); and more. This year three Christmas trees are laden with the ornaments. Mr. Bradley’s collection, by his estimate, exceeds 3,000 pieces. It’s housed in the six-room, prewar Carnegie Hill co-op he shares with his life partner, Bruce Wayne, a celebrity makeup artist. [More]

Empty nesters downsize, but there’s always room for art

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Stephanie Ingrassia with her dogs, Olive and Max, in front of Barbara Kruger’s nine-part 1985 work “We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard,” and below it, a shoe sculpture, “Handwarmers” (2018), by Ann Agee.

“For the first time in 28 years, I’ve had three months without a school and sports schedule to deal with,” Stephanie Ingrassia, vice-chairwoman of the board at the Brooklyn Museum, said recently in an interview at her home. Their glass-faced duplex, while plenty spacious by New York standards, is a substantial downsize with far less wall space for their contemporary art collection, which numbers in the hundreds of pieces. But the radically different architectural space of their condo has offered an invigorating opportunity to re-envision the mix in Brooklyn, which now includes paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Nicole Eisenman, videos by William Kentridge and Marilyn Minter, a figurative sculpture by Sanford Biggers and a Takashi Murakami silver tondo (a circular work) incised with a skull motif — hung on the ceiling and reflecting the river outside. [More]

Collector Terrence McNally cherishes the light in art. Until it goes out.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Ted Loos

Terrence McNally (seated) and his husband, Tom Kirdahy, in their living room in front of two Jane Freilicher paintings: “Still Life in Greenwich Village” (1977), center, and “The Black and White Set” (1990-91), upper right.

Having a documentary made about you can prompt reflection, and “Every Act of Life” is having that effect on its subject, the four-time Tony-winning playwright and librettist Terrence McNally, who just turned 80. “Every Act of Life” was released digitally [recently], after making the festival rounds. “It brings up conflicting emotions,” Mr. McNally added, that are “sometimes funny, sometimes painful.” But there is no conflict in Mr. McNally’s art-collecting principles, which are as clearheaded and articulately stated as the words he gives his characters in plays like “Master Class” and “Love! Valour! Compassion!” “I like cityscapes in the city, and country landscapes in the country,” Mr. McNally said. He and Mr. Kirdahy also have a place in the Hamptons. “What I don’t have much of is portraits.” [More]

Collectors: Ann Ziff loves a good Aria. And Eskimo goggles

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Robin Pogrebin

Ann Ziff, with art from the collection she amassed with her husband. From left, an African Suku figure; on the wall, two panels from second-century China depicting musicians; and a grouping of Eskimo snow goggles estimated to be between 1,700 and 2,000 years old.Credit: Alice Gao for The New York Times

Ann Ziff is typically associated with the Metropolitan Opera, in no small part because she is its chairwoman and gave the organization a whopping $30 million in 2010, then the largest single gift from an individual in the opera’s history. Ms. Ziff also serves on the boards of Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles Opera. But Ms. Ziff — who has her own jewelry label, Tamsen Z — also collected pre-Columbian, African and Oceanic art beginning in the 1980s with her husband, William B. Ziff Jr., a publishing executive. (Mr. Ziff died in 2006.) The Ziff collection — which amounted to some 8,000 pieces at its peak and also includes Tiffany lamps and stemware as well as Art Deco, Art Nouveau and Chinese furniture — was initially fueled by the need to fill the house the couple were building in upstate New York (as well as their homes in Aspen, Florida and Manhattan). [More]

RELIGIOUS ART | NEWS OF WEEK

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By Gregory & Ernest Disney-Britton

Verneida Britton wrapped in her beach-towel, "The Virgin Martyr St Cecelia" by Kehinde Wiley. Photo taken by her son, Greg Disney-Britton at Newport on the Levee. 

Visual artist Kehinde Wiley forever changed the way we see portrait painting. He re-conceptualized history to form a contemporary vision, and inspired us to do the same in our own lives. This weekend, as we celebrated our son Kai’s job promotion he interviewed his grandmother sharing family history. Today, we’ll dine at his grandfather’s (1936-2009) favorite restaurant, Frisch’s Big Boy for what would have been his 82nd birthday. Next month, we’ll take Kai’s nana to Tybee Beach for her 80th birthday wrapped in Kehinde Wiley’s “The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia.” It's a beach towel version of Wiley’s 18-foot original, and that's why Kehinde Wiley’s “The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia” is our art of the week.

Ohio-Natives Ron and Ann Pizzuti collection requires a warehouse

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Hilarie M. Sheets

Ron and Ann Pizzuti with Marina Abramovic’s “Artist Portrait With a Candle (C),” left, and “Artist Portrait with a Candle (B).” At bottom left is Sofie Lachaert’s “Shunga Candleholder” atop Ron Arad’s “Paved With Good Intentions Table 44.”CreditMarina Abramovic and Sean Kelly Gallery/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Sofie Lachaert, via Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

“Without Frank Stella, we wouldn’t be collecting art,” said Ron Pizzuti, who fell in love with a small Stella painting in Paris in the early 1970s but couldn’t imagine spending $10,000 on an artwork. The Ohio native, then working in retail, got his initiation buying a Karel Appel print for $900 on installment in 1974 from a gallery closer to home, in Columbus. After he founded the Pizzuti Companies, a real estate and development concern, in 1976, he soon found he could buy Stella as well as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly. Numbering some 2,400 pieces, the collection is installed in their homes here; in Sarasota, Fla.; and in Columbus, also home of the Pizzuti Collection — an 18,000-square-foot, nonprofit public space with rotating exhibitions. [More]

Collector's Kim and Michael McCarty tastes of California, imported to the East coast

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Ted Loos

Kim and Michael McCarty at home in New York with, from left, Laura Owens’s “Untitled” (2005), a drawing and collage on paper; Tim Hawkinson’s “Advance Receding,” in oil on structured canvas; and David Hockney’s “Study for Santa Monica Blvd.” (1979), in colored pencil on paper. Credit Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times

Woody Allen may have called Los Angeles a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light (that’s from “Annie Hall”), but the bicoastal restaurateur Michael McCarty and his wife, Kim McCarty, an artist, have spent 40 years proving that wrong, bringing top examples of West Coast creativity to the Big Apple. This couple have a Midtown Manhattan apartment filled with California-flavored art and objects, many of them works on paper, by Los Angeles residents like Tim Hawkinson, Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Laura Owens and Ed Ruscha. [More]

For Ernest Disney-Britton, ArtPrize is a great place to find artists worth collecting

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS

Ernest Disney-Britton is surrounded by works he has collected during his travels including last year's "The Next Supper" by William Fristch. It is a print acquired during ArtPrize 2017. (upper right)

Every September, Gregory and Ernest Disney-Britton sets out for ArtPrize in Grand Rapids to find one artist whose work he'd love to bring home to Indianapolis. For 19 days, close to 1,700 artists from around the world display their work in Grand Rapids and compete for $500,000 in cash prizes—decided equally by public vote and expert jury. There is also an large percentage of the work with religious themes and messages, although much of that is bad art, some of the pieces have been exceptional. Past entries have included Mako Fujimura's "Walking the Water" and Anila Quayyum Agha's "Intersections," two artists whose related works are now also in the Disney-Britton collection. Last year Gregory took home William Fritsch's "The Next Supper" inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." It's a print of a larger drawing that was on display in Metropolitan Community Church, one of the 200+ venues for ArtPrize.

Starting an interfaith dialogue by collecting religious art

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
Showing Our Walls
By Ernest Disney-Britton

Greg Disney-Britton stands flanked by art in the living room of his Indianapolis home

INDIANAPOLIS, IN---A week ago, on Epiphany Day a Christmas tree stood in the spot where Greg Disney-Britton was photographed in his downtown Indianapolis home. He is flanked on his right by Tom Torluemke's "Let Freedom Ring, The Wedding Bells" (2011) and to his left by Anila Quayyum Agha's "Moon Beam For My Love 1" (2016). It is representative of a  recurring theme in the Disney-Britton collection. It is an ongoing dialogue between Christian art and the art of other faiths including Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish. The Torluemke was purchased to celebrate the freedom to marry when it became the law of the land; and the Agha work was purchased because of its message about interfaith dialogue and religious tolerance.

Collectors: Christmas ornaments, everyman's collectible and the end of Christmas

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
Showing Our Walls
By Ernest Disney-Britton

Friends gathered for the end of Christmas 2017

Who doesn't collect Christmas ornaments? Eleven friends gathered on January 6th for a Three King's Day party, and in this photo, each is holding an ornament they've each removed from the Christmas tree at the home of Ernest & Gregory Disney-Britton (Ted Givens was present too but not in photo). Top Left: Rev. Joshua Burkholder, Rev. Jackie Jackson, Donald Bievenour, Ernest Disney-Britton. Bottom Left: Greg Disney-Britton, Ginger Bievenour, Rev. Carolyn Burkholder (holding Xavier Burkholder and his ornament), Tracy Robinson, and Tina Sherrard.