collecting, connoisseurship, climate
art climate intelligence
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While deeply rooted in America, I am international, multilingual, and culturally adaptive. I have lived, worked, and travelled not only in the United States but also in Europe (I have worked in France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland; I have travelled in and through many other countries) and Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea). I have family in Europe and Asia.
Education and hard work have been a focus and priority for years. My children are grown, graduated university (Bowdoin, Williams, Harvard, NYU School of Medicine, UCSD School of Medicine, MIT), and embarked on constructive work of real responsibility. I am a graduate of Wellesley College and have studied at Princeton and the Graduate Institute of History of National Taiwan University.
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I have long worked with the arts in the United States and Europe – in private equity, business development, and sales. I have profound respect and appreciation for works of art, artists, and artisans who, from across the globe, have given us so much through the years and centuries.
By their very nature and material being, works of art are cross-temporal, cross-material, cross-intellectual, and cross-cultural, dependent on complex supply chains and art systems.
Protected in homes and institutional collections across the globe, many works have come down to us through the ages – to be admired, appreciated, loved, exhibited, studied, and learned from. Each a marker of a time and place, each a marker of precise use of materials and precise supply chains, each a marker of cross global trade – material, intellectual, cultural, technical.
As they have for generations and centuries, once acquired, works of art become part of the family. Ownership is a privilege and a responsibility. It becomes our work to care for them, enabling their longevity and accessibility to future generations.
Unfortunately, we all live in a time and space of compromised biosphere subject to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, concomitant warming, increased and increasing risk of physical damage due to global warming (climate risk), and massive species extinction.
Material in nature, works of art are, like us, vulnerable to the effects of a warming world. Art systems and supply chains (material, intellectual, cultural) are also vulnerable to the effects of a warming world.
As we seek the next hundreds of years for the works and collections in our care, I turn my attention to developing intelligence about art, connoisseurship, and collecting in a time of increasing climate risk, to working with expert partners towards effective resilience and deep mitigation, to assisting in the many facets of buying, selling, and maintaining works of art, and to assisting in the transition to a robust and necessarily sustainable art economy.
I invite you to be in touch.
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Image: Johannes Vermeer’s “View of Delft” (c. 1660, oil on canvas, detail), since 1822 in the collection of The Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.