Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
There are obvious hurdles to becoming an art collector, chief among them money and space. But then there are the less obvious ones, and chief among these is the intimidation factor: Contemporary art, and the galleries that show it, can seem scary or snooty or both, and a lot of people just don’t feel comfortable in art spaces. The New Art Dealers Alliance has recently started to tackle this problem head-on by hosting a series of collectors’ salons, NADA Collects.
If your first thought is that this might threaten to dumb down the enterprise, it’s helpful to recall—as the writer Domenick Ammirati reminded on his Substack a year or two ago—that Colin de Land,the freewheeling proprietor of American Fine Arts gallery and the avant-gardest of the avant-garde art dealers of the 1980s and ’90s, hosted occasional classes for would-be collectors. For Heather Hubbs, longtime director of NADA, the idea emerged organically from NADA’s overall mission of “empowering galleries.”
NADA has a monthly newsletter for members and an Instagram that promotes its galleries; it also funds an acquisition to the Pérez Art Museum Miami from its annual namesake fair in the Florida city, and has a collection that acquires work from members. A year ago, NADA started a mentorship program where longtime members mentor newer ones, as well as a weekly Sunday morning meet-and-greet program in LA to support the gallery community called “Dealers and Donuts” (dealers host other dealers, and NADA picks up the donut tab).
Last spring, Hubbs was on the phone with a NADA board member, and the conversation turned to collecting. The board member pointed out that lot of people didn’t know, for instance, that you don’t have to uber-wealthy to start—you can jumpstart a collection with a $2,000 painting. “We talked about how NADA should be educating people on how to collect and why it’s important.” The board member suggested that Hubbs get in touch with art adviser Anne Park, who had started doing a series of salons, and in October, Hubbs hosted a dinner at NADA’s downtown Manhattan offices. That lead to the sales of two artworks, and since then Hubbs has been trying to do around one event a month, whether it’s a gallery walk, or a dinner, where she invites a gallery to come and present its program or specific artists from it. The idea, she said, is to meet people where they’re at. “There is no dumb question,” she said. “It could be: What do you wear to a gallery? If that’s what’s holding you back, let’s get that out of the way.”
The events aren’t just about making collectors more comfortable with gallerists—they also work the other way around. The goal with gallerists, she said, is to help them “create a situation where it feels normal and safe for everyone to just voice whatever.” And, as it has turned out, they aren’t just attractive to total beginners. “It’s been interesting to see who shows up and where they are in their process,” Hubbs said. “Some of them are more educated about collecting than others.”
For Hubbs, the next step in the NADA Collects program is addressing the generational question of “educating people on legacy and why it’s important,” she said. “Because I feel like now we’re seeing all these older collectors pass away, and then the kids don’t care about the collection, and they just auction it off. We are not there yet, but I want to get there.”
