[announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by... [narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] And the friends of South Florida PBS.

[host] Art Loft.

It's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as a taste of the arts across the United States.

[jorge perez] How do I feel about it?

What is my gut telling me?

Art is, in many ways, like that for me.

[host] In this episode, the art of collecting art.

From seasoned enthusiasts to newcomers.

[david castillo] You could still buy great works of art that doesn't have to be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

[host] And also what happens when a museum doesn't collect.

[lisa tung] It allows us to respond to today's topics and dialogue, and ideas of artists.

Wow.

I think my mother's influential when I started looking at things.

She was very much into literature, movies, theater, and going to museums to look at art, so I think that was ingrained at an early age by probably making all those visits.

When I was in high school, I had no interest in collecting.

But when I came to the United States, I started going on my own to museums and I wanted to have art.

I wanted it to be surrounded by these beautiful things.

And I remember being 19-years-old, probably, when I won some money in a poker game and the first thing I did was buy my first lithograph.

And I have three in my room, which I still have now.

Marini, Miro, and Man Ray.

And you'd say, wow, for he knew from the beginning who was gonna be good or not.

And the fact is that I bought a lot of pieces through time that I look at them now and I say, why did I buy that?

But that's part of the process.

It's how do I feel about?

What is my gut telling me?

Art is, in many ways, like that for me.

I follow my senses a lot, but that does not mean that I don't do huge amounts of research on art.

I probably devote four hours a day just studying and looking at art every day.

So there's a lot of work that goes into making that gut feeling better.

[interviewer] Tell us a little bit about El Espacio 23 and what was the motivation?

Well, we've been growing this collection, we realized that we just had no storage space.

So we bought this as a warehouse and as we cleaned the space up and we said, this is a fabulous space to show art.

Particularly art not being shown at PAMM, at the museum.

Not to be competitive with PAMM at all, but to be complimentary to PAMM and maybe show more of what is deeply interesting to me.

And also artists that are not getting their due because of the countries that they're in.

We take great pains in getting the most important curators to not only curate the shows, but to write the book, so there's an understanding of why each piece is done.

And that to me is a great personal accomplishment.

It really makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

[interviewer] I read a great quote saying that this may be a warehouse, but it may be the most important project of your career.

I think it is because art has taken, I think in the last decade, an even greater part of my life.

And I devote probably half my time now, between business, and art slash philanthropy.

60% of my emails today are from art fairs, galleries, artists telling them what they're producing.

Bodo from Africa.

Brazil, the Campana Brothers.

This is the master, .

This is Bodo, the new master from Africa in African realism.

You're seeing now a change of exhibitions and now the new exhibit is going to be contemporary African art that follows social change.

What is happening in Africa today?

You can't talk about what is happening in Africa today without talking about the issues of colonialism, capitalism, poverty, inequality, sickness, and a lot of that is captured in the art, plus just the plain beauty of the art.

So we're looking at this as a way of promoting these countries that have not been promoted in the past, the art of those countries.

Still with a huge focus on Latin America, which is where I'm originally from.

I found a lot of the same things that I saw in Latin America in Africa.

The diaspora from Africa became very important to me, understanding it, and it led me to start collecting African art.

I think art makes you go outside your box.

And if I can expand that, not just from me, but by showing it to as many people as I can show it, and then when I'm gone, to leave it to a museum that will continue to show it to as many people, then I'm doing something that is good.

[host] To discover more about upcoming exhibitions, head to Instagram.

We began a series with Commissioner, a membership program where emerging collectors meet artists in their community and to learn how to collect.

Be on the lookout throughout this season of Art Loft for more of their segments where they bring artists and locals together around the stories unique to Miami.

My name is David Castillo and I'm the owner and director of David Castillo Gallery in Miami Beach.

So this is Xaviera Simmons fifth solo show at the gallery.

Xaviera's work deals primarily with specific topics relating to identity.

For this body of work, she actually used historical photographs from the Library of Congress that she's incorporated into her long-standing characters and landscapes.

You could still buy great works of art that doesn't have to be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars by any stretch.

So, one strategy is to look for artists when they're emerging, but you still have to know what you like.

And it's okay that everything doesn't go up in value because that's not everybody's strategy.

Obviously you would want people to be buying what they love.

And if you love it and it's within your budget, then really, at the end, that's what truly matters because they're objects you wanna live with, you wanna look at all the time.

And then, if they become famous, great.

As a collector, you wanna insure your artwork as you start to amass more and more work.

You don't just wanna enjoy it because it's also an investment like any other.

You have to insure your car, you have to insure your home.

Well, fine art is a valuable asset, so you wanna make sure that's insured too.

That when it's a good time, it just depends.

Some people never sell what they've collected, even if it's worth a ton of money.

It's not why they're buying it.

They're buying it because they want to live with it and maybe at some point, as they prepare for the end of their lives, they're thinking about donating the work as a way to continue supporting the artist by donating to a museum that could be interested.

So for somebody like me, it's important that this go beyond just this moment or this cycle.

When I'm dead, when the artists are dead, in 150 years, that I had a hand in helping these artists enter into the cannon of history.

There are three instances in which the human brain can actually change.

One incidences is being out in nature.

Another is like a religious or spiritual experience.

And the third is art.

I'm Bahia Ramos.

I'm from Brooklyn, New York.

I lived in Miami for about 10 years.

And I'm a lover of art and artists.

I do feel like I had the privilege of knowing a lot of artists growing up.

And so art didn't feel precious in that way that it's unattainable.

Coming of age in the eighties and nineties in New York.

Hip hop, graffiti like Basquiat, right?

So I think that's where the whole art thing caught on for me and gave me a way of seeing and knowing that there was a frame out there that I could fit into, even if I weren't an artist.

Pre-15 years ago, for me collecting looked like museum posters as exhibitions I like.

It looked like fine prints from artists whose work, the actual work, exceeded my buying power.

In Miami I was able to have the access, the interest, and this wealth of art to think of myself as a collector.

One of my first real conversations in a studio with an artist, we connected on story, we connected on identity, and as we sat in his studio just kind of looked around and said, wow, I would love to buy something.

I was investing in myself by investing in this piece and having it, so that was the first time I thought, oh, I'm collecting art.

I see how we're like, oh, patron equals wealth, but that's not what patron means to me.

There are artists in our communities, what can you do to help them to sustain their practice?

Do they need space?

Do they need food?

There are many, many ways to be a patron that aren't about the transaction between the person and art.

Collecting is not a special privilege thing.

It is an ordinary practice.

I buy for what I liked and I buy for what speaks to me.

And we all know someone who's making something.

You can find art in almost any kind of space or access point, and you might get a little curious about what people are making, or designing, or thinking about.

Never lose that curiosity.

Show up, not just to see the art, but to talk about the art, to meet the artist.

There's so much room for Miami to broaden its understanding of its identity and what it means in the world right now for the future.

And I think the voice of artists has so much to play in that conversation.

[host] Next up, curating art in the digital era.

How one group is using Instagram to connect collectors.

WOSU Public Media takes us there.

So I shepherd a Instagram account that's about two years old now called Columbus Collects.

This was born out of a need to use what I had at hand to help the arts.

How can we talk about the everyday person that has art in their house and help them see themselves as a collector?

I thought to myself, I have a ton of artwork in my house.

I know a ton of other people that have a ton of artwork in their house.

The first iteration was just reaching out to those people to help demystify the act of collecting art.

So I have known Cat Sheridan for a very long time, probably since I was about 10 or 11 years old.

She knows my whole family really well and knows how much we love art, and we all have a lot of art.

And so she asked if we wanted to do the Instagram takeover for Columbus Collects.

There's a ton of family connection to most of the art that I shared, because I have a lot of artists in family and a lot of friends that are artists.

The more I started thinking about all of this, the things that we had, all of the pieces that we had, the harder it was to choose.

But what I really appreciated about it is what constitutes art, it's a very broad definition.

So we have, and I would say my whole family, have a lot of functional art.

Things that you use.

So, my teapot, I've had since, I think close to my first college graduation around 2003.

It's made by my Aunt Brenda.

She makes beautiful ceramic pieces, but her teapots are just amazing and just exquisite.

And we use her mugs.

They sit on the shelves with the rest of our mugs.

But sometimes I'm definitely intentional about using hers.

So this is a really beautiful wooden box that's made out of multiple types of wood.

I think there's four or five.

And this was a gift from a very close friend of mine.

Her name is Janie.

Our daughter came to us through adoption and so Jamie was trying to come up with the perfect adoption gift for Harper.

And she definitely nailed perfect.

So she had her late husband's father, who is a woodworker, build this beautiful keepsake box or a jewelry box.

It has his name on the bottom and he also puts a little penny embedded in his work.

So it's just really special and just holds a lot of meaning.

They're just really dear friends and it's just such a special piece.

I honestly don't know how I ended up with this portrait.

So it's my little brother who also went to art school.

He went to Cleveland Institute of Art.

It's a self portrait he did of himself in high school, but it's totally my brother.

Like the look on the face is just my brother through and through.

And I think that's one of the things that I really like about it.

And doing it in high school, it's just an amazing piece.

He's just very talented.

So each takeover is asked to have a selfie on the front end and on the backend to bookend their collection.

Just give it a nice hug from both sides.

Beyond that, I'm looking for people to expand their palette and support artists.

Particularly local, wherever you go.

I think there's something really special about being able to link back to an experience, whether it's an art fair, or you've gone on vacation and there are artisans with their tents and their wares up.

And there's something really amazing about being able to collect an artist on the front end.

And so we were talking, how do we span that gap?

As a historian, I mostly worked with historical artwork.

When I took the job at Otterbein University in 2014, as a museum and galleries director, all of the artwork that we show for the most part is contemporary artists.

And so I just became much more engaged with the contemporary art scene.

The wonderful thing about collecting contemporary art is that you have the opportunity to actually meet the artists.

It isn't transactional.

There are wonderful opportunities to have really high quality, original work in a home that people connect to directly and very personally.

I think what Cat is doing to develop a culture of collecting is really important in Columbus.

She's gone one step further in showing the way in which collecting can happen by anybody.

I decided to participate after I watched all of the diversity on the Columbus Collects Instagram site.

People were excited.

They were happy to share their work.

You got to hear the collector's personal stories and their connection to the artwork.

And I've really enjoyed seeing that.

So I thought, well, I have a few pieces that would fit into this model, so I'd love to share what I have too.

One of the pieces that I'm most excited about having is a piece by Charles Csuri, Chuck Csuri, which is these blue and green teapots sort of floating in space.

And it's a still from an animation.

So it's really a next step, I think, in the way that artists think about space and time.

Everything about it just is, to me, is about Chuck Csuri and the history of his work.

One of the pieces is a watercolor by an artist who's Canadian.

Her name is Anu Vedagiri.

And she works mostly in pastels doing more realistic artwork.

But she was working on a series with watercolor and experimenting with water reflection.

And I just love the way in which it's clearly a figural representation, but I love the abstraction and how she works with abstraction and reflection in watercolor.

I find it to be just an amazing piece.

That little work is by Lain Singh Bangdel, who's a Nepalese artist.

He was really the first person, the first artist, to bring modern art to Nepal.

I met him through his daughter, we were colleagues, and I just fell in love with his work.

The piece shows a peasant figure resting with his head down, almost as though he's nodding off to sleep.

And I selected that piece because it reminded me of the literature he's also known for, his novels, which speak about the ordinary person and the challenges and struggles that the ordinary person faces in the context of Nepal.

So, to me it represented more of overall ethos.

I think that collecting art helps people captured moments in time.

Anybody can collect, anybody can acquire original art, anyone can afford it.

The value in collecting is giving your space warmth and giving your space meaning.

And this initiative is to really celebrate the community that comes from collecting art.

[host] Reporter Jared Bowen from WGBH Boston takes us to a museum for a lesson in the art of un-collecting.

So excited about this.

Jared, welcome to MAAM.

Thank you.

[jared] Lisa Tung is the museum's executive director and happy to be rid of the old mass art galleries.

A warren of winding ways that, despite the art on view, felt very much like the former gymnasium it once was.

We were really just spaces.

There was a space to show a show, a space to show another show, but there was no lobby like we're standing in right now and there was no front door.

[jared] But after a 20 month, 12 and a half million dollar renovation, MassArt has reopened as a full fledged museum with free admission.

Tung calls it a "kunsthalle."

The German word for a non-collecting museum.

Allows us to be nimble, allows us to not be beholden to a collection that we have to show something every so often because it's in storage somewhere.

It allows us to respond to today's topics, and dialogue, and ideas of artists.

[jared] In the lobby, you'll find an installation by Brooklyn-based artist duo Ghost of a Dream.

We gave Ghosts 30 years worth of exhibition ephemera.

Catalogs, posters, newspaper clippings, postcards, and they have created a kaleidoscopic patterning of madness.

[jared] It's now game time for the new museum and one of its first exhibitions.

Game Changers as a show of video games at play with much to say.

Tracy Fullerton's "Walden" invites a slowing down with demerits for a competitive pace.

Momo Pixel's "Hair Nah" is born out of people's predilections for touching a black woman's hair unsolicited.

And artist and MassArt professor, Juan Obando, hacked the popular "Pro Evolution Soccer" game to create "Pro Revolution Soccer."

His game inserts members of Mexico's Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, a civil resistance group, onto the soccer field.

It's based on a proposed match that never materialized.

EZLN, he says, are not unlike computer and game hackers.

I thought that the metaphor was very, very clear.

People are intervening.

The system is no different from the way that EZLN has intervened the Mexican system.

[jared] Upstairs in the museum's main gallery, a jaw-dropping installation by Lisbon based artist, Joana Vasconcelos.

Any museum can put sculpture on the floor.

But I wanted the first show to show something that we'd never done before, which is completely suspend something up in the sky.

And I was a little selfish.

I wanted to bring an artist who had never shown in Boston before.

How do you want people to feel when they are underneath... Or do you want people to feel when they're underneath?

Well, the idea is that this piece has a movement.

She's flying in that direction.

And of course she has a center.

And this center is like any chapel, any cathedral.

[jared] She would be the latest in the artist's Valkyries series, in which she's created pieces around the world, including in Paris, London, and Bilbao.

The Valkyries are goddesses, flying goddesses warriors, and they will fly over the battlefield and they will bring alive the brave warriors.

[jared] Here, the museum is the battlefield.

A place, Vasconcelos says, where the spirit of art and dreams are revived.

The piece is named for and inspired by Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman.

An enslaved Massachusetts woman who was the first to sue for her freedom.

And I was like, okay, this was an incredible woman without knowledge, without being able to read or to write, she fought for her rights and for freedom.

That's the spirit of the Valkyries.

[jared] Vasconcelos's Valkyries are made in her Lisbon studio, a space for magic, as she describes it.

Teams of assistants craft the works out of deliberately chosen fabrics.

In this case, they come from Mozambique.

A nod to Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman's history.

And they are beings, she says.

You can look into this as an animal, or you can look into this as a plant, or as a monster from the sea world.

You can look into this from a lot of angles.

It's not upon me to decide which one.

[jared] Why not?

You made it.

Yeah, I know, but I like to make up and things, so you can analyze it and choose whatever connects with you.

That's the idea.

[jared] One writ large, very large.

[host] Continue the conversation online.

Art Loft is on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @artloftsfl.

[announcer] Art Loft is brought to you by... [narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression.

The Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] And the friends of South Florida PBS.