(For breakfast) I have fruit and oatmeal with no sugar and a pot of English breakfast tea.
My father was a musician, and he became a concert producer, as well as very much involved with creating the cultural scene in Rockland County, 40 minutes north and west of Manhattan. And my mother was an administrator. My parents started a music and art school in Rockland. The family itself was very artistic. … This was the kind of family that I grew up in, and frankly, even as a toddler, I was already focused on being an artist. I think by the time I was eight, I was already involved in researching art and art history.
I went to New York University as an undergraduate, which had one of the best art schools in the country. And while I was there, I started out as a volunteer at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery (now Grey Art Museum) and got my initial training in the museum field from that experience. My husband was the assistant director of the Grey Art Gallery, and that’s how we met. … We worked together again when we established our own art book publishing company in 1990. So, we’ve had a lot of opportunities to really work on projects together. And our whole life has been about art.
I went on, got my master’s in art history from Columbia University. And right out of Columbia was hired by Leonard and Evelyn Lauder, of Estée Lauder, as their private curator. I was only 23 years old and working with him on his collection. But I also got to see him in action as one of the great CEOs and marketing geniuses. And I feel I really benefited from learning about the way to run a business and how to market. And also, all of them were very open and engaged, took time with everybody. And that also very much affected me, this idea of engaging with everybody and being open to others. It was, I feel, very important.
In most cases, I don’t know the artist when I’ve become interested in their work. Very often, I’ll have seen the work first, and if it strikes me as something I want to really spend time looking at, thinking about, puzzle about, then I’ll seek out the artist afterwards. … I don’t have to wait for a consensus to form on an artist or someone else to tell me they like an artist.
I look at the work, and I let the work tell me.
(American painter and sculptor) Frank Stella, even though he was very much alive when I worked with him, he would say, ‘How come you don’t ask me any questions?’ It’s like I ask the questions of the work and I let the work tell me. And I know he was always surprised that I would come up with things in my writing or my perspective on it that he never told anybody.
When I arrived (in South Florida) … a lot of the major collectors were already here. But there was also a very strong artist community. And there was also the sense among community leaders that they wanted to bring South Florida into the international world, to be a player. And the recognition that art was the way to gain that entrée.
Art Miami in ’93 (helped) create this internationalism that in the art world Miami has become known for — one of the reasons that in 2002, Art Basel chooses out of all the other cities in the world to have a second fair in Miami Beach. And that basically changed all the dynamics. The stakes weren’t that high before. With Art Basel, all of a sudden, everything changed. It was literally everything that was leading up to it now went into overdrive.
The real estate market got so hot that it was breaking up, the artists were losing these inexpensive places to work and live. And for a while, it looked like that ecosystem that was already fragile for young artists had dissipated, those important communities were sort of being spread out rather than together where they could really be fermenting.
Over the last few years, we’ve again seen a rise of a community of artists, partly probably because of COVID; artists who would have after art school left for other cities or artists who grew up here, went away for art school — they came back here. We’re seeing a new period of very exciting emergence of South Florida artists.
My husband and I are actually very private. We enjoy being with each other. … We are married now 44 years. I run, I swim, I cook and think about art and talk about art all the time.