There is no formula or blueprint for becoming an art dealer or for the discipline, creativity, and business style that one pursues. It has been a long and, at times, treacherous journey, but one filled with thrill, adventure, and the unexpected. The art hunt has been has been my obsession, my relentless pursuit.
Perhaps my work has been a combination of fragments driven by imagination, social justice and politics. The art world, for me, has been place of mythology, unpredictability, cynicism and exploration instead of exactitude. When my mentor, Hollis Taggart, first hired me in his eponymous gallery in New York City, I naively asked the question, “What is an art dealer’s career really like.” “Darling,” he said in his dissipated Southern draw while staring me straight in the eyes, “you better damn well strap in.”
To be frank, I’ve been writing the story of my life for years through the visual arts, recording in my handwritten journals most of what I’ve seen, brokered, exhibited, and related to in one way or another. An art dealer’s style and selection of artwork to exhibit and broker is a direct derivative and translation of who she is within the visual arts canon and/or what she intuitively wants to search out and explore. My autobiography has been my theme and, at times, my dilemma and obsession, as I’ve tried to tell my story, document my travels, and express my political ideas through my work—mining art from my beloved South as well as my second home, Cuba.
My first love is the written word, and by default—and sometimes the necessity of blanket and poignant communication—I am a passionate writer. For me, the written word is the purest form of truth-telling, particularly when documented in my own handwriting. Therefore, this project includes excerpts of my journals, some photo copied and archived; most never before shown. Second, all my creative projects start with the written word — notes and ideas jotted on a legal pad then organized into a working, malleable essay. Some excerpts from my published essays, blogs and books are also included in this project.
This project includes an album, painstakingly curated, of visual references — photographs, paintings and works on paper — currently in my working oeuvre of brokerage. In mastering my craft, it is pertinent to distill information about countless works on the market, see the image, mark it as good material then channel it through my platforms to sell and place the work in a top-tier collections. Therefore, art work highlighted in this project is selected for its quality, rarity, provenance and overall marketability.
To mine material, I have visited thousands of artist’s studios and art fairs all over the world, hopped on and off European trains to explore, flown on Russian planes in Cuba, and driven thousand of miles across American soil to mine material. Perhaps my work has been a combination of fragments, pushing the limits of my imagination, unpredictability, and cynicism. It’s what some simply call “Soul Searching” but what I often hashtag as the #ArtHunt.