Celebrating one entire year of Charting Transcendence
View of the NYC skyline (i.e. Billionaires’ Row) from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 11, 2024, the first anniversary of the incorporation of Charting Transcendence, Inc.
Last Saturday, May 11, Charting Transcendence officially celebrated its first anniversary in business.
The day was commemorated in New York, exactly one year after the filing of the company’s articles of incorporation in Florida.
More about last Saturday’s celebration I’m excited to share below; but first, some general thoughts about where Charting Transcendence is headed from here.
Over most of a quarter century spent actively exploring the world, I neither desired or intended to channel my passion for art and creation into an entrepreneurial venture.
Ironically, my approach to experiencing and contextualizing art felt for a very long time either too personal to share or too intuitive to consider that it might matter much to anyone else — much less a broader community.
Nor did I imagine that I might ever be in the position to gather people around the kind of art that I find exceptional, much less to be able share it in a way that underscores the skills I have acquired along my unique path in life.
Something about this artwork resonates deeply with me and the process finding my own way through the world of art advisory. It’s also a phenomenal painting by a very prominent Florida-born artist. Hernan Bas’s (b. Miami, 1978), Trying to fit in (2004), oil, acrylic and gouache on panel, once a part of the Rosa de la Cruz collection, sold at Christie’s this past week for a staggering $390,000 against an estimate of $70,000-$100,000.
Dedicating myself to art advisory came only after coming to the conclusion that it’s the ONLY career that allows me to fully share myself and my gifts with the world; for art allows me feel so profoundly connected. making sense out of what otherwise would make the universe feel scary and chaotic.
And yet there are other art advisors who would tell you to “buy this,” or “pay attention to that." What is the difference and added value that Charting Transcendence offers?
The “art world” is notoriously opaque, its marketplace confusing and distended, made up of galleries, most of which don’t do a very good job at conveying the power and value of their art.
My role as a guide is to help demystify the process of finding yourself through engagement with art. I know this is my strength because I practice this constantly in my daily life, sharing my talents generously with friends and colleagues.
My work is connecting people to art that speaks deeply to them, uncovering truths that they didn’t even know could be apparent to artists who have been grappling with the human psyche for millennia.
Charting Transcendence is just at the beginning of its journey in creating a community of art enthusiasts and collectors who see value in this engagement.
Without a trace of exaggeration, I can say that Charting Transcendence has laid the groundwork for tremendous success in connecting its clients to meaningful experiences - not only in Miami and New York, but around the country and the world.
Thank you for joining me along this journey, and I look forward to sharing more of Charting Transcendence’s accomplishments over the year to come.
More highlights from NYC (and about last Saturday)
Noel W. Anderson (b. 1981) is a highly accomplished artist who coaxes complex images out of reworked Jacquard-technique tapestries. He enjoys significant institutional support in both the U.S. as well as abroad, although his art is still (in the opinion of Charting Transcendence) sorely underrecognized by contemporary art collectors.
A beautiful spring day in the capital of the global art trade provided a microcosm of the world that Charting Transcendence engages with through its continuous search for and appreciation of art.
I began the day waking up in the guest bedroom of an award-winning architectural marvel of a house in Brooklyn, designed by two friends of mine (one who teaches at Harvard, the other at Yale) who have run an innovative architectural practice for over a decade. As I’m fortunate enough to be a regular guest of theirs when I visit New York, suffice it to say that I am very grateful to these two friends for their years of encouragement and support in my own art-world career.
Designed to fit on an undersized lot barely 13 feet wide, the townhouse they call home could not normally be built in New York were it not for a host of structural and design elements, many of them drawn from the inspiration of great 20th century architects, whose work they teach, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, permitting the home a degree of spaciousness and sunlight unparalleled for a building constrained by such limits.
I then hopped on a subway bound for the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I made a beeline down East 84th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the finest museums in the world.
Although I could spend the entire day browsing its treasures, my priority was to see the special exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, which awed me especially for having assembled so many terrific paintings by African American artists of the early 20th century such as William H. Johnson and Archibald Motley Jr.
Narrow House (2021) in Brooklyn, designed New York’s Only If Architecture. The house employs numerous clever design techniques to create a spacious, bright interior on a lot barely 13 feet wide, normally too narrow to build on as per NYC building code.
Portrait of a couple by Harlem Renaissance era painter William H. Johnson (1901-1970), on display in the Met’s current show on the Harlem Renaissance.
Vibrant evening scene in a painting by Archibald Motley Jr. (1891-1981), highlighting the artist’s fantastic use of deep purples, reds and blues. Motley’s paintings are also on view at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
Petrit Halilaj’s commission for the rooftop garden of the Metropolitan Museum, Abetare, features sculpture based on children’s furtive desktop scribbles, found in abandoned schools in the war-torn Balkans.
The rooftop garden, recently opened for the summer, features an annual commission, awarded this year to emerging Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986), who was also recently honored with a show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Halilaj’s work is rooted in an exploration of his childhood trauma, when he was expelled from his family’s home during the Kosovo war in the 1990s.
Another highlight of the day (if not the week) was the Met’s exhibition Weaving and Abstraction in Modern Art (open through June 16), critically acclaimed in a recent Washington Post article, that featured both ancient, pre-Columbian and contemporary thread-based art, which is very much in fashion at this point, especially in Charting Transcendence’s home base of Miami (c.f. the exhibition To Weave the Sky at Jorge Perez’s private museum El Espacio 23).
Just a few blocks from the Met, several of the best galleries on the Upper East Side had quite a bit of outstanding work on display, including a full-room installation by Antony Gormley (b. 1950) at White Cube and decades worth of summer-themed paintings by the late Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) at Acquavella Galleries.
This 12th-15th Century cotton tapestry from Peru, on display at the Met through June 16, validates’ Charting Transcendence’s opinion that, not only is fiber art very much worth collecting, geometric abstraction is deeply rooted in the human psyche.
Total room installation of a metallic structure with sharp geometric edges by Antony Gormley at White Cube New York. Gormley is considered to be one of Great Britain’s greatest living sculptors, and his work is highly prized by institutions and the art market.
San Francisco’s late beloved painter of American iconography such as diner food, pies, and landscapes, Wayne Thiebaud painted these two soda-fountain syrup dispensers when he was already over 100 years old. His work is currently on view at Acquavella Galleries.
The day was topped off by a repeat visit to the South Bronx studio of Noel W. Anderson (b. 1981), with several young collectors from Charting Transcendence’s network joining to hear Noel speak about his unique practice rooted in complex imagery and the medieval European practice of tapestry.
Having written about Noel’s artistic practice in a previous edition of this newsletter, I won’t repeat what I said before, even as I underscore how powerful and artistically rigorous his fine art objects are and how far I think his star has to rise in terms of critical acclaim by collectors and the market.
By digitally manipulating images of normally seen on television screens and transferring them onto Jacquard-woven tapestries, Noel commentates on the nature of black labor and exhaustion by picking and brushing thousands of tiny cotton threads. By doing so, he conceptually he embraces the entire value chain of artistic production.
With robust institutional support, including recent museum shows in New York and Europe, Noel’s work — for as sophisticated as it has been crafted, is still not well understood or sufficiently appreciated by American collectors.
Nevertheless Charting Transcendence believes that he is one of the most talented yet underrecognized artists working in fiber art, not to mention of the most astonishingly innovative African American artists working today.
The one year anniversary celebration concluded with a long subway ride out to JFK Airport and a surprise first-class upgrade courtesy of Delta Airlines on the flight home to Miami. The route between these two city pairs has become quite routine for me, much as other routes around Europe, Russia, and the United States were in previous iterations of my personal and professional traveling life.
This anonymous mug shot portrait of an unknown Black man by Noel W. Anderson, with numerous threads of the Jacquard-woven tapestry gently brushed, conveys mixed feelings encompassing both serenity and wonder.
Many of his recent tapestries feature digitally manipulated images of prominent basketball players, their motion underscored by picked threads. By reworking images of such prominent Black celebrities, Noel W. Anderson is able to address complex imagery and emotions around Black labor and exhaustion.
Another anonymous mug shot portrait by Noel W. Anderson, executed in his contemporary, signature dyed-blue style. Encountering these pieces in person inevitably conjures mixed emotions.
A skewed view of the Florida peninsula on descent towards Charting Transcendence’s home base in Miami after another successful trip to the Big Apple.
Artwork recently placed by Charting Transcendence with private collectors & institutions
Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984), Construction in Normandy Shores (2017), an image recently placed by Charting Transcendence with a private collecting institution in Florida. Anastasia’s work will be featured in a solo show opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in late October.
Charting Transcendence recenly placed several important pieces of fine art photography with both private collectors and institutions in Florida and Washington, D.C.
The company’s success in doing so derives from the cultivation of long-term relationship, fortified by honesty, humility, and a genuine interest in forming a deeper relationship with art.
I am especially proud to congratulate one of the artists whose work was placed with a private institution, Miami Beach photographer Anastasia Samoylova, on her being recognized with a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening in late October of this year.
As previously shared in this newsletter, Ana’s photographs highlight contemporary Florida’s status as ground zero for some of the 21st century’s starkest contrasts and contradictions.
With the magic of Disney World on one hand and the mundanity of the strip mall on the other, her images appear both exotic and familiar, with a particular shade of sun-washed pastel pink periodically resurfacing throughout her work.
Through her medium-format digital camera, Ana frames exceptional and banal scene all across Florida with a very keen eye towards color, formal structure, contrasting images, and a popular-yet-difficult-to-overrate art-historical technique known as trompe l’oeil, giving these photographs a painterly look.
Several of her best photographs are still available through Charting Transcendence, though her prices have risen somewhat since the official announcement of her show at the Met.
Additionally, prints by Miami-area vintage photographers Andy Sweet and Bunny Yeager, also recently placed with collectors, are still available and are generally not found elsewhere.
Please reach out to me for details on what’s available — it’s very exciting to see the artists that I have followed for months and years resonate with growing numbers of collectors.
1963 color photograph of a Florida nudist colony, shot by Bunny Yeager, a copy of which was placed with a collector in Palm Beach. (One final copy of this photograph, signed by Bunny, is still available for purchase.)
Bunny Yeager (holding the camera) on set with Bettie Page, mid-1950s. Charting Transcendence placed two copies of this photograph — one signed and one unsigned — with collectors in Washington, D.C. and Florida. (One smaller (8” x 10”) signed copy of this image is still available.)
