MEMBERS OF collectors circles receive special viewings of works. Artist Fred Tomaselli’s art on display at the James Cohan Gallery in New York.

Vital Insiders
Whether they are called visiting committees, collectors circles or, as in the case of the Houston Museum of Fine Art’s Latin-American art aficionados, the Maecenas, these often invitation-only groups of insiders are an increasingly vital part of the relationships between museums and their future donors. The trend started and remains strongest in cities like New York and Los Angeles, but has spread to other cities like Cleveland, Baltimore and Houston, and is helping even larger institutions as they strive to build up their holdings in particular areas, from contemporary art to Latin-American or African and African-American art.

Our involvement can begin with something as simple as an invitation to attend a cocktail party or an after-hours, behind-the-scenes tour of a hot new exhibition at our local museum. Our art dealers or art advisors may serve as matchmakers, introducing us to the curators at, say, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with whom we may wish to discuss the rationale for adding certain works to our collections.

ARTIST STEEL Stillman’s studio is in the art center of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg area.

Norah Sharpe Stone and her husband, Norman, influential contemporary art collectors from San Francisco, attribute at least part of their standing to membership in a collectors circle. The couple were already veteran art collectors in the summer of 1987 when, during one of their frequent trips to France, they met a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) who happened to be staying at the same small hotel as they were in St. Tropez.

“We realized by talking to him that while we had been buying a lot of art, there was a lot more we could learn about the world of art, things that would enhance our ability to build a real collection,” Stone recalls. They were already members of SFMOMA but decided to increase their involvement with the museum’s varied collecting groups, a move that would give them access to curators and help them understand the constantly changing world of contemporary art. Within a few years, the couple shifted their emphasis on collecting to edgier, more contemporary works.

TOP VIEW Our nation’s leading art museums are enhancing their chances of acquiring important contemporary collections while grooming a new generation of donors. By selectively offering memberships to collectors circles, they create relationships that may grow into bequeathals and financial support. For inexperienced art enthusiasts, these groups provide access to the crucial expertise of curators and the time and effort of dealers needed to develop important and satisfying collections.

“The people we met through MOMA helped us understand how that art reflects the culture of today; how these artists were putting their reactions to the things happening in the world—from AIDS to environmental issues to world peace issues—into the work they were making,” Stone explains. They assembled a collection of several hundred pieces by artists whose work now fetches millions at auction—Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Richard Serra, Richard Prince and some of Cindy Sherman’s early art. These days, the Stones pay more than $100,000 in dues each year to belong to the elite collector groups at three major museums: the SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Tate Museum in London.

Tyro Titans
“Every institution is out there trying to identify the next generation of benefactors, the next Walter Annenberg,” notes New York-based art advisor Sanford Heller, referring to the media mogul who donated his extensive collection of Impressionist artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The challenge of identifying these future Annenbergs and cultivating relationships with them grows ever more difficult as the number of affluent collectors expands, and the world of contemporary art becomes complex. “Looking at a vast amount of the art that is being produced today can make you feel insignificant, silly, stupid, inadequate,” Heller says. “A good curator, on the other hand, can translate or interpret what it is that you’re looking at.”

The museums are not usually looking at these groups solely as a source of revenue. Indeed, their preference is often to keep the entry price low—as little as a few hundred dollars for the most junior level of membership—in order to attract individuals who may evolve into major donors over time, as they build their wealth and develop their artistic taste.

The tacit quid pro quo is clear. In exchange for dues, substantial cash gifts and donations of art, museums give us crucial access to curators’ offices when we need advice, and to the genius of top dealers who keep multiyear waiting lists for works by hot young artists. These connections are particularly urgent in the volatile and frenetic contemporary art scene, where knowing the right people is vital to finding and successfully obtaining works by the best young artists.

For example, those seeking to buy a work by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami cannot simply walk into the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district and purchase one, though his work is often on view there. Membership in a collectors circle provides access to a curator who can help us decide what kind of Murakami to buy, and who can later provide a reference to dealers such as Boesky.

In exchange for dues, substantial cash gifts and donations of art, museums give us crucial access to curators’ offices when we need advice, and to the genius of top dealers who keep multiyear waiting lists for works by hot young artists.

“There’s no question that if you are introduced to me by a curator as a member of one of their groups or acquisition committees, you’re far ahead of someone who comes in off the street without a reference, regardless of the size of the checkbook,” Boesky says. “That alliance tells me you are serious about art, serious about this work.”

Another benefit of membership is that it increases the chance that our assembly will end up in a museum collection one day. That, of course, is the Holy Grail for dealers, and why so many like to do business with those in a collectors’ circle. Acceptance into the permanent collection of a respected institution such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York confirms that the emerging artist is contributing to art history and is less likely to be among the hordes of struggling artists who vanish each year. It confers a seal of approval on the artist’s worth, and means the dealer can charge more for his or her works in the future.

In some cases, Stone says, the covenant with a museum can mean the difference between successfully acquiring an artwork and losing it to another aficionado. In the 1990s, she and her husband wanted to buy a work by German sculptor Joseph Beuys from a London dealer. “It was a condition that it would have to go to a museum, and we specified that SFMOMA would receive it,” she says. “We have since made a fractional gift of that piece.”

Igor da Costa, 33, a private equity investor who has accelerated his purchases of cutting-edge contemporary works in recent years, has been able to leverage his membership of various Guggenheim committees in a number of unexpected ways. On one occasion, he contemplated buying a work of art made of fabric, but was puzzled about how he would go about conserving it. Information gleaned during a flurry of email exchanges with the Guggenheim curator and a conservation expert she procured prompted da Costa to pass on the opportunity. Another time, in a conversation with another curator, he mentioned his interest in a certain young artist, and the curator instantly replied, “Oh, I know him! Let’s go to his studio.”

Vanguard Vantage
Curator-led visits to artists’ studios in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, the locus of a vibrant, emerging art world in New York, are a standard part of the $500-a-year package in Guggenheim’s Young Collectors Circle. “It’s in the YCC that we can begin to sense who is becoming more interested in very serious collecting, who is developing a real rapport with the curators and who is beginning to make a real commitment to the organization,” says Cecilia Wolfson, manager of individual giving at the Guggenheim. As a first sign of commitment, a YCC member—most of whom are between 21 and 35 years old and whose ranks include children of major art-world donors as well as up-and-coming financiers—may choose to double their financial pledge and join the YCC’s acquisition committee, which votes on which works their dues will buy for the museum’s collection.

At the next level—the International Directors Council ($15,000 a year in dues) or the Photography Committee ($5,000 a year), both by invitation only—membership provides access to the loftiest international echelons of the art world. In mid-June, a group of two dozen members of the Guggenheim’s Directors Council jetted off to Art Basel, one of the top art fairs worldwide, with a curator by their side. They then traveled on to Athens to attend the opening of an exhibition of works from the private collection of wealthy Greek collector Dakis Joannou.

Museum curators like to talk of these groups as comprising an extended family. When we first discuss membership with one of these institutions, the wariness on each side often makes the exchange feel like college rush week (except that we can, if we are so inclined, join as many museum groups as will have us). “Eventually you decide which ones interest or engage you the most and concentrate on them,” da Costa says. “It’s a natural evolution.”

The Right Fit
Nevertheless, deciding which group will best help us pursue our particular collecting passion can be difficult, unless we know where our passions lie. Heller says rapport with the curators is one of the imperatives, as are the obvious shared aesthetic sensibilities. If you do not identify with Cezanne, Picasso and Jasper Johns, you will not be happy at New York’s MOMA, he says. If you love Edward Hopper, “go to the Whitney, where their mission is American art.”

In addition to Guggenheim, da Costa supports Innerspace, a group that works with emerging artists who have not yet found galleries in New York to represent their work. Membership is inexpensive, but limited to those who have a real interest in the arena. “You can join a big museum group for the social network and the prestige of the affiliation,” he says. “But Innerspace is a group that only art-world insiders know about; it’s full of people who are passionate about art.”

Heller suggests that if our goal is to have a profound effect on an institution, “You can do it more easily and more cheaply outside of New York. A regional museum, for instance, may end up doing a retrospective on your favorite artist. If you give your collection to a smaller institution you will see the impact, whereas if you give a painting to a giant institution, it may well end up in storage for a lot of the time.” Heller is a long-time supporter of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and says the network of art-world relationships he has built up through that affiliation has been invaluable.

When it came time for the Stones to decide which New York institution to back, they opted for the Whitney Museum rather than MOMA. “We felt we could make more of a difference there, rather than be just another face in the crowd,” Norah explains.

At their best, the new relationships beget the kind of mutual gratification that the Houston Museum of Fine Arts has with businessman and polo enthusiast John Goodman. As a young man, Goodman developed a fascination with Asian art on trips to Thailand and Nepal. He organized a recent benefit polo match with the maharaja of Jaipur as a guest. The proceeds, says Margaret Skidmore, associate director of development of the museum, will help finance the purchase of sixth-century Indian sandstone sculptures. “It’s the ideal outcome,” she effuses.

Photography by Robert Adam Mayer.