A deep passion for exploration lies at the core of the concept behind Charting Transcendence and is manifested in a continuous desire to uncover new ways of seeing the world.

This approach comes naturally to me, as I have spent much of my life seeking knowledge and experiences, traveling thousands of miles afield for up to six months at a time while immersing myself in often unfamiliar, even uncomfortable environments.

Now that I hunt for art professionally, what I am seeing in museums, galleries and private collections around the country is constellating into deeper meaning and understanding of what constitutes contemporary art today.

Bear in mind, however, that art doesn’t need to always make sense or even be aesthetically pleasing to make an impact, for encountering it is a data point in building one’s map towards a moment of transcendence that’s bound to come later.

Sometimes the process takes years. Meanwhile, a relationship develops.

Over the past two weeks, I had the chance to delve into two of our country’s leading art scenes that may still be underrecognized by connoisseurs on the coasts. Their art fairs falling back-to-back this year made for an intense trip away from home in balmy Miami, and on some days I wore myself ragged spending upwards of eight hours in a row on my feet, consuming and interacting with art.

Simultaneously, Charting Transcendence’s business in Florida has begun to pick up, with not only exciting sales under the belt, but also several prospective projects on the horizon, including presentations and exhibitions.

While my plans for the foreseeable future are to stay based in Miami, which continues to grow as an international art mecca, I will continue to travel throughout the U.S. (and abroad when possible) to experience the best art and convey my findings to clients.

Dallas Art Week

Rosson Crow (b. 1982), *Dallas Trade Mart, 1:13 PM, November 22nd, 1963* (2022), acrylic, spray paint, photo transfer and oil on canvas, 70 x 84 inches, shown by Miles McEnery Gallery at the 2024 edition of the Dallas Art Fair. This cloyingly colorful painting, devoid of human figures, serves as a poignant reminder of the weight that Dallas exerts on the American psyche more than 60 years after the assassination of JFK.

Inexorably linked to both the fragility and strength of the American Dream, Dallas lords over one of the country’s greatest metropolises, the spacious and sprawling Metroplex. Blessed with a formidable art scene fueled by land, cattle, and hydrocarbon wealth, Dallas’s collectors are some of the most savvy and ambitious anywhere in the country.

That being said, I found the Dallas Art Fair and competitor fair Dallas Independent to be remarkably intimate affairs. Both are held right downtown, within just three blocks’ radius of half a dozen art museums, the most prominent among these being the Dallas Museum of Art, an institution I hold very dear to my heart for being the host of late Canadian master painter Matthew Wong’s (1984-2019) retrospective The Realm of Appearances (the subject of a presentation I gave last year about how encountering Wong’s work essentially changed my life.)

With just 91 galleries presenting at the main fair, there was nevertheless a wide range of work on display, from very affordable editioned print work presented by galleries from as far afield as Europe and Asia, to classic (and perhaps broadly undiscovered) Texas artists presented by Dallas-Ft. Worth area galleries, to gorgeous paintings of superstar artists presented by international powerhouse galleries such as Perrotin and Galerie Max Hetzler.

I had the pleasure of leading several curious individuals and collectors through the fairs and nearby museums, including the outstanding Nasher Sculpture Center, the Crow Museum of Asian Art at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the Green Family Art Foundation, founded in 2021 by Eric and Debbie Green, two of the most ambitious collectors of contemporary art in Dallas.

A watercolor painting on paper by Grace Weaver (b. 1989), an emerging artist to watch, offered by Galerie Max Hetzler. Painted during a six-month residency with the gallery in the remote art colony of Marfa, Texas, Grace’s work is both instantly recognizable as well as depictive of women in every day scenes of contemporary life.

A handmade shiv in an essentialist feminist frame comprises this affordable ($5000) artwork by internationally-famous musician and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova (b. 1989) of Pussy Riot fame. Offered by Turner Carroll Gallery of Santa Fe, NM. Both soft and sharp, the artwork reflects Nadya’s experience as a prisoner in a Russian penal colony in the wake of her infamous 2012 demonstration in Moscow.

The Hole, a contemporary art gallery with locations in NYC and LA, brought Caroline Larsen’s (b. 1980) *As If, Squared* (2024) to Dallas. Created with skeins of oil paint squeezed directly onto the canvas, it pays homage to the 1995 cult classic film Clueless.

Employing what is likely a novel medium in all of art history is this sculpture of a well constructed out of vintage 1980s Pound Puppies by Brent Birnbaum (b. 1977) on display at Dallas’s Keijsers Koning gallery.

The first major highlight of the VIP program was an invitation to the Green Family’s home. Honestly, I don’t believe I have ever seen a more magnificent, cutting-edge collection of contemporary art under the roof of any single family domicile.

Upon entering I was given a two-sided, Texas-sized broadsheet with a diagram of the layout of the residence, which was something akin to the Clue Mansion on steroids. More than 350 works of contemporary art were spread out over two floors as well as in the gardens.

I spent the next two hours absolutely enthralled by the collection. While I was grateful for the map, the creators of more than half of the artworks were easily recognizable to me, indicating just how up-to-date the Green’s collection is with prevailing contemporary art tastes.

Most impressive of all was how prominently African American artists were displayed in their collections, with works I had never laid eyes upon by Alma Thomas, Barkley Hendricks, Jack Whitten and Ed Clark, among many others.

The second highlight was a tour of work of the Rachofsky Collection at The Warehouse Dallas, a museum-quality private collection normally open just one day a week to the public. Their current exhibition, although quite heady and conceptual, would knock the socks off of even the brainiest New York City art connoisseurs, as it was curated thoughtfully from the collection’s holdings to demonstrate the power of value systems and measurements in contemporary art.

On display at the Dallas Museum of Art, Tschabalala Self’s (b. 1990) canvas-based *Pocket Rocket* (2020) features one of the artist’s signature voluptuous derrieres. Self was recently awarded the tremendous honor of the Fourth Plinth commision for London’s Trafalgar Square.

View of the living room in the Dallas home of Eric and Debby Green, with a punching bag by U.S. representative to the 2024 Venice Biennale Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) in the foreground and a painting by Washington Color School painter Alma Thomas (1891-1978) over the fireplace.

A triptych by Swiss painter Nicolas Party (b. 1980) casually hanging in one of the spare bedrooms of the Green Family home in Dallas. Represented by megagallery Hauser & Wirth, Party’s work is currently in immense demand.

Simon Denny, (b. 1982) *Amazon worker cage…* (2019), a sculpture materalizing the online retailer’s patent for an unrealized device intended to protect warehouse employees while interacting with robots. New Zealand-born Denny is the world’s leading contemporary artist focusing on dystopian aspects of technology (and artificial intelligence in particular).

Having written about the Texas art scene in a previous edition of this newsletter (please contact me if you missed it), I am pleased to be taking on new clients in the Lone Star State and will look forward to future iterations of Dallas Art Week for many Aprils to come. Not only is the state’s cache of contemporary art substantial, there is clearly room for its art institutions and collections to keep growing.

EXPO Chicago

Roger Brown (1941-1997), *Jack and the Beanstalk* (1982), oil on canvas, 96 x 72 inches. This deeply allegorical painting, offered by New York’s Vallarino Fine Art at Expo Chicago, was executed in the signature style of one of Chicago’s greatest painters of the late 20th century, part of a movement that arose at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s known as Chicago Imagism.

Often called “The Third Coast,” Chicago is, in my opinion, the country’s most industrious and progressive megacity. It’s also one that I called home for two years after completing my degree at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York.

Thus I am quite familar with the city’s art institutions, galleries, as well as its contemporary art fair, EXPO Chicago, whose name pays homage to the two grandiose Chicago World’s Fairs hosted in 1893 and 1933. (Fun fact: in 2019 I worked for EXPO Chicago under CEO Tony Karman, the unofficial doyen of the Chicago art scene).

With over 170 galleries displaying work on Navy Pier, EXPO Chicago is an outstanding fair to attend, both for experienced as well as new collectors. Recently acquired by the parent company of Frieze (a direct competitor to Art Basel), the fair has a bright future and will continue to differentiate itself from other fairs on both coasts.

While Chicago admittedly cannot compete with New York or Los Angeles for its number of galleries, nor can it compete with Miami as a year-round international art touristic magnet, it more than makes up for these shortcomings with sheer hospitality and depth of art historical field.

The Art Institute of Chicago rivals New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the top encyclopedic art museum in the country, complimented by dozens of other museums, featuring art of all sorts, scattered across the broader Chicagoland region.

At EXPO Chicago Minneapolis’s Dreamsong Gallery presented a solo show of paintings, straddling figuration and abstraction, by St. Paul, MN-based African American artist Ta-Coumba T. Aiken (b. 1952) well-known among Twin Cities art collectors but still rather new to the national scene. Such discoveries of work presented by small galleries at art fairs are always a delectable treat.

A small painting by Rachel Hayden (b. 1992) in the private collection of Chicago dealer Sebastian Campos, who runs his business The Mission Projects from his Lincoln Park penthouse condominium.

David Wallace Haskins (b. 1975), *Image Continuous* (2010-21), from hisSkycube series, on display at Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, IL. A mirror set at a 45-degree angle within the cube reflects the sky towards the viewer upon approach.

Combining traits of painting by David Hockney (b. 1937) and the appreciation of architecture of Julius Shulman (1910-2009), Tucson-based British painter Andy Burgess’s (b. 1969) work is selling briskly (and is highly recommended by Charting Transcendence for acquisition - please reach out for details.)

Chicago’s artistic legacy is closely tied to its role as a gigantic sandbox for architectural innovation, especially in the 20th century. One need only walk around downtown Chicago for ten minutes, craning one’s head upwards and side-to-side, in order to appreciate how architecture and art coalesce in the Windy City.

Befittingly, before the fair opened, I joined a tour of the Edith Farnsworth House, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, located 60 miles south in Plano, Illinois, arranged for the EXPO’s VIP visitors. It was lovely spring day, and the house, one of the most architecturally spendid private homes in the country, hosted work by two artists, Assaf Evron, as well as a site-specific, light-and-space inspired Sky Cube by David Wallce Haskins.

The top museum show I saw while in town was undoubtedly Nicole Eisenman’s (b.1965) retrospective What Happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Although Eisenman excels at drawing and sculpture, she is especially beloved as a painter. Somewhat unusually, nearly all of the works in this show were lent by private collections. Before seeing What Happened I don’t think I really understood why Eisenman’s work is so highly desirable, or how skilled of an artist she is, but I’d definitely put her work in the category of you have to see it to believe it.

Other highlights included a visit to a private contemporary art dealer’s home; a tour of the country’s leading art restoration and conservation laboratory, The Conservation Center; and open gallery night in West Town, one of several dispersed neighborhoods of the city that hosts a cluster of galleries.

Currently Chicago’s top contemporary art museum show, Nicole Eisenman’s *What Happened* is a major retrospective for this highly celebrated painter of modern-day psychological drama. Rarely seen in museums, Eisenman’s paintings are dearly prized by top private collectors.

Distressed and picked cotton tapestry on canvas by NYC-based artist Noel W. Anderson (b. 1981), previously featured in this newsletter, and displayed at EXPO Chicago by European gallery Zidoun Bossuyt. Complex and deeply fascinating, Noel’s work is, in my opinion, underappreciated by American art connoisseurs, even as his work continues to be shown widely in museums abroad.

Oakland’s Johannson Projects featured paintings by Barbadian artist Sheena Rose (b. 1985), depicting sillouhetted African American athletes in a highly recognizable style. Already collected by several museums, Sheena’s work is still relatively affordable.

Hilma’s Ghost, a two-woman collective founded in 2021, came to the attention of Charting Transcendence via a subscriber to this newsletter, who shared images over Instagram. In dialogue with the spiritual abstract work of Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Their work opened at Secrist | Beach’s newly renovated warehouse space in West Town.

Arguably now host to the premier, or at least the most interesting contemporary galleries in Chicago (among these: Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Western Exhibitions, Mariane Ibrahim, Monique Meloche, and GRAY), West Town’s newest space is a 10,000 sq. ft. renovated warehouse home to the newly expanded Secrist | Beach (formerly Carrie Secrist Gallery).

As an antipode to EXPO Chicago, Chicago Exhibition Weekend, organized in part by GERTIE (run by a member of Chicago’s prominent Pritzker family) now takes place each fall. I attended the inaugural edition in September of last year and deeply enjoyed the hospitality showered upon gallery visitors.

The weather in Chicago is usually excellent in mid-autumn, and its next iteration will be October 3-6, 2024, which is when I will be planning my next trip to Chicago.

Art Fairs in the Heartland: A Tale of Two Cities

Dallas Art Week

EXPO Chicago

NYC Spring 2024 Art Fair Highlights

Mapping the San Francisco Bay Area’s Art Scene