When it comes to gifts for art lovers, wrapping original art is the ultimate power move. But here’s the catch: collectors pour their hearts—and usually their bank accounts—into curating deeply personal collections. If you know your giftee very, very well, a piece of art can be a very, very good gift. You could also treat the collector in your life to a gallery outing or surprise them with a session with an art advisor. But if adding to their collection feels too ambitious, there are plenty of artsy presents for everyone on your list, from the absolute obsessive to the casually cultured. Whether you’re working with a shoestring budget or aiming for extravagance, there’s no shortage of options that are thoughtful, stylish and primed to impress. Enjoy our guide to the gifts guaranteed to thrill any art enthusiast.
This is everything art lovers should prioritize during a long weekend visit to the Windy City. Sawyer Bengtson
In Chicago, the very weather urges exploration of the city’s expansive artistic offerings. Each of my visits has been during the deepest part of its no-nonsense winters when the warmth of one of its many museums can be lifesaving in a literal sense. And I’m told that the sticky heat and humidity of peak summer is similarly indoor-inspiring—why not cool off with some of the world’s greatest artworks?
Climatic motivations aside, it is easy for art lovers of any predilections to spend countless days on end wandering the vast artistic opportunities afforded by the Windy City. To see it all during a short visit is impossible, so let’s go through a few essentials that you can and should fit into, say, a long weekend in Chicago.
No matter your tastes, the Art Institute of Chicago should be the most essential addition to your itinerary. Depending on your breadth of interest, it can easily demand three to five hours to give it its proper due. Masterpieces spanning all eras, traditions, and regions abound. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. A smattering of Jacob Lawrence. O’Keeffe, Rivera, Matisse, Hokusai, Warhol, Bacon, Pollack, and so on and so forth. Ancient Buddhist statues. American Gothic. You get the idea.
Art lovers take pictures of Nighthawks by Edward Hopper at the Art Institute of Chicago. NurPhoto via Getty Images
From there take the #3 bus for fifteen minutes to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which famously hosted the first American exhibition of Frida Kahlo. Here again, you’ll encounter some of the greatest works by renowned artists like Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Chuck Close, Dan Flavin, Kara Walker, Rauschenberg, Warhol and the rest. The MCA also tends to have outstanding visiting exhibitions from the most exciting names working today. Currently on view is a major survey exhibition, “Nicole Eisenman: What Happened,” which showcases 100 works produced by the artist from 1992 to today.
Between these two museums, you have a full day of art. The former requires more time than the latter, so I’d suggest seeing the Institute in the morning, breaking for lunch, then hitting up the MCA. For a hearty bite on the way between the two, you can’t go wrong with Crushed By Giants Brewing Company.
From here I recommend three places that you can pick and choose based on your available time, location and inclinations. They’re a bit more niche, disparately scattered across the city, and in one case may still be closed for renovations.
The National Veterans Art Museum was initially launched with the involvement of soldiers who had participated in the Vietnam War, and today it displays works from thousands of veteran artists who engaged across a range of conflicts. Three exhibitions stand out. Inspired by the Tim O’Brien novel of the same name, The Things They Carried portrays the personal narratives of artists from the Vietnam War. On a related note, Above and Beyond—one of the largest memorials to American troops killed in Vietnam—is comprised of 58,307 dog tags bearing the names of the dead and serves as a chilling reminder of the human meat grinder that is war. And then there’s Vonnegut, which displays fifty prints by the famed novelist that tend to be of a more playfully surreal nature.
The National Museum of Mexican Art is an absolute eruption of color thanks to the south-of-the-border tendency to incorporate vibrant hues. Home to nearly 20,000 pieces dating from today on back to the pre-colonial era, here you’ll find one of the most impressive collections of Mexican indigenous art outside of Mexico itself, as well as a slew of stunning pieces from leading artists of the past century. Added bonus: it’s free every day.
One of the many striking works in the National Museum of Mexican Art. Photo by Bruno PEROUSSE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
If you’re visiting after the summer of 2024, check if Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art has reopened. Dedicated to gathering works from artists on the fringes of society, it’s a truly one-of-a-kind collection spanning outsider figures like Miles Carpenter, Minnie Evans, Mr. Imagination, Purvis Young, and Chicago’s own Wesley Willis and Henry Darger, among many others.
Speaking of Chicago’s own, spend some time simply wandering around and taking in the fantastic architecture. A perfect encapsulation of this is the Driehaus Museum, a restored late 19th-century house that is a compact masterpiece of art nouveau. The gilded ceiling in the Chicago Cultural Center is the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world. The Wrigley Building stands like a castle teleported straight out of the Renaissance. The biomimicry of Aqua Tower. The Blade Runner imperiousness of 875 N. Michigan Ave. The Dutch/Brutalist fusion of TheMART. The Robie House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The list could go on and on.
Finally, Chicago is well known for its fine comedic arts, so plan to hit up a comedy club some evening. The Second City is its most famed stage, but Zanies, the iO and Laugh Factory are all reliably funny options.
In terms of where to stay in Chicago, the city is packed with stellar accommodations, but if you’re leaning into art experiences book 21c Museum Hotel. It’s a quality hotel by all the usual metrics, but you’re there for the art, which is all over the place and frequently unusual. Also, get a hot dog. Few places in the world make such artistry of tubed meat.
Artist Theaster Gates is partnering with Forman Arts Initiative. Holger Hollemann/picture alliance via Getty Image
Theaster Gates, the American artist known for his wide-ranging social practice, sculptures and installations, will use his expertise in community cultural programming to help guide a new project from the Philadelphia-based Forman Arts Initiative (FAI) in a new multi-year partnership. The organization, founded in 2021 by art collectors Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice, has acquired nearly an entire block in Philadelphia’s East Kensington neighborhood that FAI plans to transform into an arts center complete with a gallery and an emphasis on community activation.
Gates will work FAI’s director Adjoa Jones de Almeida, the Brooklyn Museum’s former deputy director of learning and social education, to shape the renovation and programming of the new campus. Located across three buildings and two lots, the 100,000-square-foot site will open gradually over the next two years. “This collaboration with Adjoa—who also comes from an art and community engagement background—gives us both an opportunity to build on the lessons we’ve learned from our previous respective experiences, and to develop a unique model for what a community-grounded, globally-relevant art space can look like,” said Gates in a statement.
An interior view of one of the FAI campus buildings. Photo: Isabel Kokko/Courtesy Forman Arts Initiative
Gates has pursued similar projects in the past. Through his Rebuild Foundation, the artist has spent years acquiring abandoned properties across Chicago and turning them into creative community centers for an initiative known as the Dorchester Projects, often using scrap materials to create new artwork that generates additional funds for the project. In 2021, the Rebuild Foundation partnered up with Prada to create the Dorchester Industries Experimental Lab, a Chicago-based three-year incubator emphasizing designers of color. There’s also Gates’ 2016 acquisition of the city’s shuttered St. Laurence Elementary School, which is set to transform into an arts incubator complete with studios, classrooms and labs.
This won’t be the first time the artist has worked with FAI, which helped fund his 2022 installation Monument in Waiting at Drexel University and counts works by the artist among its collection. “Since meeting Theaster over seven years ago, Michael and I have been continually impressed by his expansive exploration of history, especially Black and Brown history, through social practice, performance, land art, and exquisitely crafted sculptures,” said Rice in a statement.
What is FAI’s place in Philadelphia’s art scene?
FAI’s current initiatives include its grantmaking program Art Works in partnership with the Philadelphia Foundation, which will distribute $3 million in funding over five years to community artists and organizations across Greater Philadelphia. As of last year, the organization partnered up with Mural Works to establish Public Works, a residency program that places artists with government agencies to develop artwork. FAI’s star consultants include board members like artist Rashid Johnson and expert advisors like Adam Pendleton and Jessica Morgan of Dia Art Foundation.
Adjoa Jones de Almeida, Michael Forman and Jennifer Rice at an event celebrating the new campus. Photo: Isabel Kokko/Courtesy Forman Arts Initiative
Outdoor spaces and community engagement rooms at FAI’s new site will open later this year, followed by a larger programmatic space and gallery in 2026. Renovations will begin this summer, with campus design aided by architectural firms DIGSAU and Ian Smith Design Group. Meanwhile, the organization will speak with residents, leaders and activists across West Kensington and Philadelphia for input on how to utilize additional spaces to best meet the needs of local communities.
“Since its founding, collaboration and dialogue with Philadelphia’s diverse communities have been central to how FAI supports the city’s cultural landscape, and those are the principles that will guide the vision for what this campus will become,” said Jones de Almeida in a statement. “We understand that through this dynamic collaboration with Theaster along with the rich network of artists and communities already engaged with FAI, we have the potential to create something really unique for Philadelphia.”
“’Museums Without Men’… ‘The Story of Art Without Men’… these are tongue-in-cheek attention-grabbing titles. Because it raises awareness: why museums without men?” Katy Hessel tells Observer. Championing a fiercely feminist re-reading of art, past and present, is Hessel’s signature. If you’re not familiar with her name, you’re likely familiar with her work. She is behind the Great Women Artists podcast and a runaway-hit Instagram account (@thegreatwomenartists), in addition to having published the best-selling The Story of Art Without Men. Said book—a compendium of women artists from the Renaissance to today in direct response to E.H. Gombrich’s women-absentee The Story of Art—was mostly championed for its corrective historical narrative, shrugging off the occasional dismissive accusations of being “tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism.”
To celebrate Women’s History Month, Katy Hessel launched Museums Without Men, a new but ongoing series of audio guides highlighting women and gender non-conforming artists in the public collections of international museums. The series launched with five participating institutions. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were first, and the Hepworth Wakefield in England, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and Tate Britain soon followed.
Observer recently spoke with Hessel—who was included in our 2023 list of The Most Influential People in the Art World—about making museums accessible, non-binary artists to know, and thinking more carefully about museum captions.
To start, how did these guides come to be?
The Met was first—it was only sort of meant to be a one-off thing that I was doing with them. The guides are created for lots of different reasons. One was the fact that when you go into museums, oftentimes you’re overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and what you really want to do is spend time with seven or eight works—as much as it kills you—but really sort of get into it and leave the museum being like I really looked at something properly today. The whole point of my work is to get as many people into the museum as possible.
Hessel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Aurola Wedman Alfaro / Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Whenever I go to museums, obviously I always look at the label and see if it’s a woman, because that’s how I’ve discovered and learned about so many artists. Not only does that bring me into these artists’ lives and work but it also makes me realize how many women artists are being collected by these institutions—and reveals the shocking gender imbalance.
You communicate through many media: an engaged Instagram, a book, a column in The Guardian, a podcast. Are these guides a complement to what you’re already doing? Or do you see this as something separate?
I always think: what can I give people that will help them? Instagram serves a purpose, which is a daily dose of artists or artworks; it’s very condensed, it’s surface level. The book is a compilation of everything. It breaks my heart to have written just 400 words on Cindy Sherman—it shouldn’t be allowed—but you could also go to my podcast and listen to an episode with William J. Simmons, who’s one of the leading scholars on Sherman. The podcast is a whole hour to learn about an artist: it’s with a world expert, or it’s with the artist, and it’s hopefully this fantastic insight. It’s about saying to people, no matter where you enter from: welcome. You can go as deep—or not—as you like.
Do you think men will pick up the guides too?
I think it’s for everyone. There’s nothing inherently different about art created by a different gender; it’s more that society and gatekeepers have prioritized one group in history.
The National Gallery—not that I work with the National Gallery yet—has 1 percent women artists. However much I wish I could take out all the works and replace them with women artists, or make it equal, I can’t do that. What we can do is draw attention to these different artists in the museum and hopefully that will help. It’s a tiny way to raise awareness for the visitor, to realize that there’s more work to do, to introduce new names—and also for the museums to be like actually, we really need to focus on our representation here. They’re just missing out on great works.
But how do we get men to feel implicated? Men may acknowledge it’s unfair that parity is far from being reached in a museum setting, as elsewhere, but that may not necessarily galvanize them to listen. I imagine with other media you’re involved in, it’s primarily women who are engaging?
It’s definitely majority women—but I engaged with so many male curators for this, and museum directors who were men and who were supportive of it. I hope that it’s for everyone. Curator Furio Rinaldi at the Legion of Honor, with whom I worked closely on the Mary Cassatt and the Leonor Fini work is curating the first-ever North American solo exhibition of Tamara de Lempicka, who was one of the most incredible artists of the 20th century yet has never had a major solo show in the U.S.
“Museums Without Men,” “The Story of Art Without Men”—these are tongue-in-cheek attention-grabbing titles. Because it raises awareness: why museums without men? Well, because historically most of these museums were Museums Without Women. And so, we need to talk about that. I want to invite everyone in because it’s about introducing people to artists they might not know. I hope that men enjoy it—it’s for them too, completely. And from a position of privilege that anyone stands in, there should always be interest in a different perspective. I don’t only want to learn about people who look like me. I want to learn about all sorts of people.
The press release mentioned that the artists featured are women and non-binary. Could you give an example or two of some of the non-binary artists?
Absolutely. We’ve got people like Gluck [Hannah Gluckstein], who was a fantastic artist working at the start of the 20th Century. They were based in London, where they did portraits of the queer community in the 1920s and 1930s. Virginia Woolf was writing Orlando.
There’s a fantastic artist called Rene Matić, a photographer whose work is at the Hepworth Wakefield. It’s this really beautiful series where they follow their friend Travis Alabanza, who’s a performance artist. There are gorgeous pictures of dressing rooms and quiet moments and the trust that people have to let each other into their very personal lives.
There’s a forthcoming expansion of the guides to Vienna, Austria—do you have other target venues that you can speak about? What is the scope that you have in mind for the guides?
I would love to take it global: the dream would be to work with museums and have translations. I only speak English, sadly, so I’ve done lots of projects and speaking engagements in America. That’s why we started with English-speaking places. There has been interest from other institutions since we launched. But yes, I hope it’s just the beginning of something—we’ll see.
Has there been more interest in contemporary versus historical women artists? Obviously, there’s a smaller pool historically, but have you noticed people gravitating toward anywhere in particular in the timeline of women artists?
I have never noticed that. My pool spans a whole millennium… I think it’s a mix. It’s always exciting talking about someone historic because you can talk about that from a very contemporary point of view. The work has outlived this person maybe for 500 years, but that doesn’t make it any less contemporary than works we’re looking at. And thinking about where the work is in the space, as well, and how it feeds the other works around it and how maybe we can look differently at them… When I was in San Francisco in November, I did the Louise Nevelson tour, and I looked at Robert Motherwell next to her and I saw him in a completely different light because of that.
Lee Krasner, ‘Siren,’ 1966, Oil on canvas, from The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981. Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. / Cathy Carver
In terms of the way museums have been pledging to aim for parity—however far away that may be—you used the word “accelerate” relative to the guides changing the pace at which people are focusing on women artists. How much have you seen that acceleration at play? As you’re speaking with curators and directors in institutions, what is your sense of the future?
I think it’s about having certain people who have the power at the moment. They’re conscious of what is in museums and what work needs to be done. I remember speaking with Emily Beeny, a curator at the Legion of Honor, about Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Cupid and Psyche. It’s a really interesting painting of this well-known Greek myth, but Cupid is not even present. Benoist was really telling this work from Psyche’s point of view. I find it fascinating that certain curators, and those who have power in museums, are saying: We need to be collecting this kind of workbecause we need a balanced perspectiveof what history is. Otherwise we’re getting a skewed idea of what happened before us. I wouldn’t say it was by chance that there’s a plethora of female directors, which ties in with the correlation of more representation.
Not to say that the men in charge aren’t conscientious—of course they are. Let’s just say the people who are in charge of a lot of museums are now very conscientious about representation. We can all do things that are in our own remit to help accelerate equality for anything, whether it’s supporting a business or buying a book. My thing is: I can make audio guides and I have a platform to do that, so why not use that in a positive way?
Do you get pushback from people who feel that using a gendered lens to go through a museum is flattening in some way? What is your response to that criticism?
I haven’t personally received any feedback like that. This is totally not prescribing that this has to be the way that people enter museums. I think it’s nice that it’s an option. People are excited about it because perhaps they won’t realize that a work is by a woman. In the Met audio guide, we were in this room in the European galleries—a sea of Courbet nudes! The female nude in her glory. Then there is this huge painting by Rosa Bonheur of the horse fair, and it just towers over every other work. To know that that’s by a woman, in this room, is extraordinary—the lengths she had to go to, to paint that.
Rosa Bonheur, ‘The Horse Fair,’ Painting: oil on canvas, 96 1/4 x 199 1/2 in. (244.5 x 506.7 cm), gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887. Trujillo Juan / Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art,New York
Similarly, in the de Young Museum, there’s a fantastic moment of American realism in the 1930s with these images of farms and quite mundane family dinner settings in a working environment. And in the middle is this amazing sculpture from 2020 by Elizabeth Catlett. It’s the center of all these works that are by men, and the story is very much dominated by the male narrative—but then you have Stepping Out, which puts her in a very important place.
People don’t need to abide by my guides; they’re just to help them through. I often take friends to museums and pick out five to seven works I want to show them. What I do for my friends, I made into a guide.
There was a Rosa Bonheur exhibition in France last year at the Musée d’Orsay, and I was appalled by the text in the museum, which was very elliptical about her queer identity, saying instead that she ‘lived with a friend for a long time.’ The text refused to engage overtly with her queer identity. Some museums remain very conservative.
It’s ridiculous. How we contextualize artists is so important. I was at the National Gallery the other day, and I went to look at works by women artists—and every single gallery label for women artists, all about fifty words, included a male artist’s name. For Artemisia Gentileschi, it said she was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, who was the contemporary of Caravaggio. Or for Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who—it said in the first line—this work is a response to a Rubens self-portrait. No one is writing of Orazio Gentileschi that Artemisia Gentileschi is his daughter—which is really what they should be saying.
It’s about making sure you contextualize them in a respectful way. Personally, to say someone has a queer identity, it’s just a normal thing, and it’s about normalizing the way that people live. Because there is no shame in that. And I hope I can be respectful to all different people with these guides.
I don’t assume that people know who Artemisia Gentileschi is. It’s not a definitive thing for the artists. It’s a nice resource. I hope it encourages people to take something from it and have their own interpretations. Creating these was even great for me to get to know new work—it led me down rabbit holes for artists I thought I knew so well!
Mera and Don Rubell at the Washington, D.C., campus of the Rubell Museum. Shuran Huang for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Don and Mera Rubell first met in the early 1960s in the library of Brooklyn College. The duo, now aged 83 and 80 respectively, sat at the same table for six months without saying a word to each other. “Then he says, would you marry me?” Mera tells Observer.
When they revisited the library 50 years later, they were astonished to discover that their initial meeting had taken place on the art floor. “We didn’t know at the time, because neither one of us had anything to do with art,” says Mera. She was a psych major at Brooklyn College, while Don was a mathematics graduate from Cornell.
Today, however, art is very much a part of their lives. The Rubells oversee one of the preeminent collections of contemporary art in the U.S., with 7,400 works by more than 1,000 artists, and they have a widely acknowledged and well-earned reputation as spotters of young talent. “We’ve only had one week where we haven’t owed the art world money,” Don tells Observer. What’s less well-known is just how much their relationship is at the heart of their collecting activities. Don and Mera will celebrate 60 years of marriage and 59 years of buying art this year, and they aren’t planning on slowing down anytime soon.
The Rubells’ humble beginnings
They fell into art collecting while living in Chelsea, where the couple walked around the studio-filled neighborhood in between breaks of studying and began building relationships with the artists working and living there. “At some point, they said, ‘Well why don’t you buy something?’” recalls Mera. But with Don attending medical school and Mera working as a teacher on a $100 weekly salary, they didn’t have an art collector’s budget. So they agreed to begin acquiring works in the $50 to $100 range by putting aside funds for modest payment plans.
After relocating to Miami from New York in the 1990s, the couple now sustain their passion for art through real estate. They run Rubell Hotels, which Mera describes as “a day job to pay for the collecting.” And as for the collecting? Masterpieces by the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Yayoi KusamaDamien Hirst and Takashi Murakami can be seen at their Rubell Museum, a private art institution with locations in Miami and Washington, D.C.
The idea to open their collection to the public came from the Rubells’ son Jason, who alongside his artist sister, Jennifer, got the art bug from his parents. As a young teen, Jason acquired his first piece—a painting by the then-rising star George Condo—with a payment plan funded by a tennis racket-stringing business. He went on to study art history at Duke, where his senior project focused on how private collections become public museums. “That was the seed that got us involved,” says Mera. “He was so seduced by the idea of these private collectors becoming public institutions that he encouraged us to do the same.”
In 1993, they opened what was then known as the Rubell Family Collection in a two-story warehouse formerly used for storage by the Drug Enforcement Agency in Miami’s Wynwood area. The area’s transformation from a once-underdeveloped neighborhood into a leading arts district is often credited to the Rubells, who also played a role in convincing Art Basel leaders to bring the fair to Miami Beach. To keep up with their growing collection, Don and Mera moved the renamed Rubell Museum to an expanded space in the Allapattah district of Miami—another neighborhood that has seen a proliferation of arts spaces and increasing gentrification in recent years. In 2022, they opened a Washington, D.C., outpost in a former school once attended by Marvin Gaye.
The Rubell collection is built on consensus
The couple were early collectors of artists like Keith Haring. Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Despite having been in the art collecting game for more than half a century, the Rubells continue to focus on truly contemporary work. “A lot of collectors fixate on their generation and they stick with that generation,” says Mera. “All of a sudden, 50 years later, you wake up and say, ‘Oh my god, I’m only focused on artists that are dying or dead.’”
They primarily focus on work by young artists and those who haven’t yet received mainstream recognition—the same tactic they applied when becoming early collectors of now-famed artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman. “The dream and the fantasy is really to find the new Basquiat. And there always is a new Basquiat,” says Mera. The couple pointed to the French-Senegalese Alexandre Diop and Havana-born Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, as well as several young Los Angeles-based artists, as emerging talents to keep an eye on. While the Rubells try not to sell their artwork, they occasionally deaccession pieces to fund the acquisition of new ones.
Don and Mera say they are offered the best works by artists and gallerists who know it will be shared with the public. “They don’t want you to hide it in your basement, they want to show other people,” says Don. The couple is known for their intensive approach to art acquisition, which involves studio visits, in-depth conversations with artists and a rule that Don, Mera and their son Jason must unanimously agree on every purchase. If even one family member vetoes, the acquisition is a no-go. The three bring different strengths to the table, according to Mera, who describes herself as “more impulsive,” while Don focuses on research and Jason brings an art history perspective.
“I would say 50 percent of the time, we agree immediately, and 50 percent of the time, it’s a bloody battle,” says Don. The trio has only broken protocol once, when Don viewed a work he considered “absolutely fantastic” but his wife and son weren’t quite as enthusiastic about. “I bought the work without consulting everybody, and then Mera and Jason made my life so miserable that it was the only time we canceled,” he recalls.
Consensus also shapes how the Rubells operate as a couple. “It’s frightening when someone is out of control passionate about something and has the checkbook to spend it,” says Mera, adding that their process is reflective of how they started their life together. “It could have been his money, my money or our money. And it became our money,” she says. “So if we’re going to collect art, that decision has to be in the ‘we,’ not with an ‘I.’”
Art as a multigenerational affair
The art collectors also seek input from their daughter Jennifer, who chooses not to participate in their collecting activities but still participates in acquisition conversations, and their five grandchildren. “We have the eyes of different generations looking at the work,” says Don. “Ultimately, the history of what this work will be depends on a lot of different eyes, thousands of eyes, looking at a piece of work over time. So this is a very unfair advantage over others.”
Kaari Upson, Rubells, (2014). Courtesy the Rubell Museum
When it comes to the future of the Rubell Museum, both Don and Mera concede that they “won’t live forever.” They’re hopeful that their children and grandchildren will continue as stewards of the collection. Although “we’d be very upset if it became a chore for the next generation, or the generation after that,” adds Don. “They have to have the joy that we have.”
But for now, the Rubells are happy to continue pursuing fresh talent and experimenting with new programs. A recent collaboration with theater company Miami New Drama, for example, saw playwrights stage shows inspired by and performed in front of artwork hanging in the Miami Rubell Museum. One of the dramatic works centered on the 2014 piece Rubells by the late Kaari Upson, who was commissioned to create a portrait of Don and Mera for their 50th anniversary. Instead of photographing the collectors for a traditional painting, she asked for the couple’s shared mattress and cast it in silicone. The Rubells describe the journey their anniversary portrait took from mattress to play as “a way to understand what art does to the brain and imagination.”
It can also be seen as mirroring their own journey in the art world, which has strengthened their marriage instead of strained it. “My story is not about a successful woman with a vision to make something happen,” says Mera. “My story is really about how to make something happen inside of a relationship. And then, by extension, inside of a family.”
UBS, a Switzerland-based global financial services firm, is drawing from its art collection to show more than 40 works by British painter Lucian Freud. The pieces will be collectively displayed for the first time in the U.S. in Lucian Freud: Works from the UBS Art Collection, which opened yesterday (Feb. 1) at the firm’s New York gallery.
Known as one of the great portraitists of his era, Freud specialized in figurative art and is the grandson of psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud. The UBS show is largely dominated by his late etchings. Created by Freud using an unconventional process that involved propping up etching plates on easels, they range from still lifes and landscapes to portraits and nudes. Two of the artist’s oil paintings, his 1990 Double Portrait and 1999 Head of a Naked Girl, are also included in the exhibition.
“We are pleased to share with the public this exceptional body of work, which defies perceived norms of corporate collecting,” said Mary Rozell, global head of the UBS Art Collection, in a statement. “Like most of Freud’s oeuvre, the artworks on display are uncompromising and challenging to view, and we hope they will spark both conversation and introspection.”
The free exhibition is taking place in the UBS Art Gallery, which is in the lobby of the firm’s New York headquarters on 1285 Avenue of the Americas. Opened in 2019, the gallery is home to permanent installations with work by artists like Frank Stella, Sarah Morris, Fred Eversley and Howard Hodgkin and hosts three to four annual rotating exhibitions.
In addition to its Freud works, the UBS Art Collection contains more than 30,000 contemporary pieces by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman. Having first started collecting contemporary art in the 1960s, the firm now often loans out its work to major institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and London’s National Portrait Gallery.
UBS has been managing $5.5 trillion worth of invested assets since its 2023 acquisition of Credit Suisse (CS), which had its own 10,000-piece corporate art collection. In addition to the pieces hanging in its gallery, UBS displays its art holdings across its global offices to both boost morale and impress clients.It is also affiliated with art fair behemoth Art Basel, acting as its global lead partner and co-publishing reports on the art market and collecting activity.
The UBS Art Gallery is located in the lobby of the company’s New York headquarters. Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Financial service companies and corporate art collections
While UBS’s vast collection of contemporary art might come as a surprise, financial service companies have long been some of the most active art patrons. The modern corporate art collection as we know it was pioneered by David Rockefeller. In 1959, while serving as president of Chase Manhattan Bank, he began accumulating artwork under the “Art at Work” program. Now known as JPMorgan Chase (JPM), the company’s collection is among the most well-established of any financial services company and helped create a new way for banks to display their ability to manage wealth.
“What’s most important about our collection is not how much we’ve accumulated, but what, in the process of living with art for the past four decades, we’ve learned,” wrote William B. Harrison, Jr., then Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JP Morgan Chase, in the forward of Art At Work: Forty Years of the JP Morgan Chase Collection.
From the Royal Bank of Canada to Spain’s CaixaBank, corporate art collections have become a globally accepted cultural phenomenon. One of the more significant holdings includes the 60,000 works owned by Bank of America (BAC), which focuses on contemporary artists and has hosted shared exhibitions with nearly 200 museums worldwide. Deutsche Bank (DB) houses much of its 57,000-piece collection in the Deutsche Bank Towers in Frankfurt, where art is arranged by region and entire floors of the 60-story towers are devoted to singular artists. And that’s not all. According to the International Art Alliance, there are more than a thousand major corporate art collections around the globe.
