01Art collecting in Los Angeles and Miami: two cultures
I am based between Los Angeles and Miami, and I sit on the LACMA Future Arts Collective and the ICA Miami Young Collectors Board. Art collecting in Los Angeles and Miami can look similar from a distance: sunshine, architecture, serious private collections. Up close, in my experience, the two cities collect in quite different ways.
None of what follows is a rule. Plenty of collectors live in both cities, and the differences blur. But understanding the rhythm of each place helps me advise clients on when to look, how to buy and how to care for what they own.
I describe them as two markets because that is how they feel from the inside. Both are part of a wider network that runs through New York, Europe and beyond, and my clients in each city buy from everywhere.
Los Angeles: a studio city
Los Angeles is a city where a great many artists live and work, and its art schools keep new ones arriving. That shapes how collectors engage. Studio visits are a normal part of collecting here, and many collectors meet work early, before it has been filtered by a fair or an auction.
The city is also a subject. Mark Bradford makes large-scale abstraction from found paper and street signage sourced in South Los Angeles. Lauren Halsey builds architecture out of South Central Los Angeles signage, funk and Egyptian form. Sayre Gomez paints photorealist Los Angeles signage, stucco and smog-lit sky, and Hilary Pecis paints the city's interiors, tabletops and hikes in flat, pattern-dense colour.
For a collector here, living with work about the place you live in is part of the appeal. The sprawl also means collecting is spread across the year rather than concentrated. It rewards patience and relationships more than a single intense week.
Studio visits come with etiquette, and I prepare clients for it. The visit is for looking and listening, not negotiating. The artist's time is their working time. And any purchase will usually still go through the artist's gallery, if they have one, which protects everyone involved.
Miami: a season and a week
Miami collects to a calendar. Art Basel Miami Beach in December, along with the satellite fairs around it, brings a large part of the international art world to the city at once. Many collectors are here for the winter season rather than the whole year, and a great deal of looking and buying is compressed into those months.
Miami also has a strong tradition of private collections opened to the public, which makes its collecting culture unusually visible. And it is a natural meeting point for collectors from Latin America and the Caribbean, which shapes what gets shown and bought.
For my clients, the practical consequence is preparation. Fair week moves fast, it is as much a social occasion as a market, and the best conversations with dealers often happen before it starts. The rest of the year, the city's institutions and private collections are where the slower education happens.
I encourage clients to visit those private collections as studies in how a collector's point of view is built over time, not only to see the art. Seeing what another collector chose, and how they chose to show it, teaches more than most fair booths can.
Light, air and architecture
For a collector, the biggest differences between the two cities are physical. Both have intense sun and a lot of glass, and the light in both is beautiful and unforgiving. Beyond that, the risks diverge. These are points I raise with every client, because the cost of getting them wrong is borne by the work.
- In Los Angeles, plan for earthquakes: secure hanging hardware, anchored sculpture and objects fixed to their plinths
- In both cities, use UV-filtering glazing or window film and keep works on paper out of direct sun
- In Miami, control humidity and salt air, particularly for works on paper, textiles and organic materials
- In Miami, keep a written hurricane plan: which works move, where they go and who moves them
- In high-rise buildings, check service entrances, lift sizes, delivery rules and insurance requirements before a large work is bought
- In seasonal homes, keep climate systems running and have the collection checked while you are away
How I work across both
Architecture in both cities favours open plans and long walls of glass, which means fewer solid walls to hang on. I often start a project by finding the walls before finding the art.
In Los Angeles, my clients often want access to studios and to be part of an artist's development early. In Miami, they are often collecting with the international calendar in mind and treating the home as the place the collection is seen. Neither is better. They simply ask different things of an adviser.
The clients I find most interesting use both habits. They take the Los Angeles instinct to look early and slowly, and the Miami instinct to see the whole international field at once, and they end up with collections that are neither local nor generic.
When works move between homes in the two cities, I treat every move as a risk: condition reports before and after, proper crating, and a check that the new wall and climate suit the piece. A painting that was comfortable in drier Los Angeles air may need a different conversation in Miami. For clients who split their time, I suggest treating the two homes as one collection with two climates, and deciding which works live where on that basis rather than on decoration alone.
Insurance is the other conversation that changes between the two. A policy that suits a collection in one home may need review when works move to another, especially on a coast exposed to storms. I always suggest clients speak to a specialist fine-art insurer rather than assume their existing cover follows the work.
