Where The Art Is

Written by Emily Lyons Photography by Thomas Arledge

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The advice for would-be collectors is endless: Buy the best art you can afford. Buy what challenges you. Buy what makes you feel at peace. Buy from artists you know and admire. Buy work your mind revisits days after you’ve seen it. Buy with a sentimental eye.

Whatever your strategy, art can be a wise investment, producing happy returns. If well-selected and cared for, its value will likely increase. It directly supports someone’s small, non-commercialized business. In an accessible, tightly knit art scene like Washington’s, intimate gallery events encourage dialogue with artists, which informs your understanding of the work. Perhaps best of all, buying art is a way to enhance your daily life, adding human gestures to your walls, shelves, and corridors.

Create a Dialogue

Restaurateur James Alefantis’ collection groups gritty pieces with graceful ones, neoclassical with high-concept contemporary, neutrals with hot color. It’s no quiet mix, and to call it eclectic would be to miss the point. It’s more inclusive, a word at the core of his art-design sense, and one that describes his work as director of the board at Transformer, an innovative arts nonprofit in DC.

“It’s not about rarefied objects you put on your wall,” Alefantis says, “it’s a way of engaging in the world.” He describes collecting as a way of exploring and expressing interests, of strengthening the community dialogue about those interests. When people visit Alefantis’ home, they immediately want to talk about the work – it often pushes them to cut through etiquette and begin talking about their ideas and value systems.

The 1920s beaux-arts home he shares with his partner, author David Brock, has an innate grandeur, but the art gives it the hands-on feel of a work in progress. A Robert Rauschenberg photograph leans patiently against the wall with other un-hung pieces that can be moved around to suit the mood. He lends out pieces to friends and businesses – even his gym – just to expand the circle of dialogue and appreciation a beautiful piece of art can inspire. “It’s not about possession. For me, the work exists more prevalently if it exists for someone else [too],” he says.

Alefantis laments that Washington abounds with missed opportunities to mix groups of people – artists and politicians, for example – and that’s where inclusivity becomes crucial. Transformer’s aim is to facilitate that kind of mixing – to merge the high and low ends of culture, getting everyone to play together. “When I go to galas,” he says, “I always see the same group of people. At art openings, I always see the same few people. Everyone should go to everything,” he urges.

He offers advice for those who find themselves an awkward fit in the art world – “Everyone’s intimidated. I’m intimidated!” he says, and he used to own a gallery. “You can buy online, or go, look around, then call [or e-mail] the artists. But don’t worry about what people think.”

Dig Deep

For Mila Kagan, a ceramic artist and psychotherapist, art is about both dialogue and excavation – mining through memories and unearthing primitive patterns and emotions. The recurring notes in the tranquil Bethesda, MD, home she shares with her husband, Dan Rosenbaum, an attorney with Caplin & Drysdale, are soothing, almost basic forms made from glass, clay, porcelain, and other natural materials. Her work commonly references the building blocks of life – “these cell forms keep showing up,” she says. “It’s about poetic abstraction, distilling down to the essence.” Which also happens to be her design philosophy.

In the Kagan-Rosenbaum home restricted palette of white, gray, black, and ice blue “puts the emphasis on form,” inviting examination of the relationships between the individual pieces. The light-filled home allows each piece room to breathe, and gives her a space to stage her work and contemplate it over time in a larger setting than her studio. Mila’s collection blends her work with that of her influences, such as the enormous commission Excavation Meditation by Margaret Boozer, with finds from the Kagans’ many travels, such as a lilting tableau of tribal pieces from Cambodia, Laos, and Peru. “These are all felt pieces,” she says. “Even the conceptual pieces have an emotive core.”

Her advice for new collectors? Visit studios, open the lines of communication with artists, get involved. “We have a vibrantly emerging art scene,” she says. “Particularly in Mount Rainier, MD, there’s enormous interplay” among artists, and a strong focus on community. When choosing art, she guides: “Buy something that invites you to go deeper. That’s purchasable work.”

Art as a Cultural Expression

Brigitte Reyes and Mills Davis, co-owners of Reyes + Davis Independent Exhibitions, couldn’t abide an artless home. “We can’t conceive of not having art in our life,” Reyes says, “it’s part of our interior, what makes our home comfortable and visually pleasing.” Originally from New Mexico, Reyes is drawn to open spaces, and the art in their airy home is pleasantly uncrowded. An accomplished painter herself, Reyes is lured by work that both resonates emotionally and shows mastery of technique. “I’m intrigued by process,” she says. “[We have a lot of respect] for the process the artist has gone through.”

Reyes and Davis view art as the ultimate expression of individuals, but also of cultures. They travel as often as possible. “It’s part of the experience of going to a country. When we were in Marrakesh [Morocco], I’d never seen so much craft in my life. In Oaxaca, Mexico, generations of families do a craft,” honing their processes over time, she says. “There are parts of the world where craft is a way of living. I’m intrigued by how other countries work to keep that tradition.”

In that vein, they see a lot of potential in Washington to develop and embolden the local arts community. (“Whenever a gallery closes, I feel just terrible,” Reyes says.) She speaks of the community as a kind of village, full of accessible people and growing resources. “We’re all for these [nonprofit] organizations, more [interplay] between museums and galleries,” she says, a strong next step for nourishing and bringing attention to local talent.

Don’t Be Shy

Architect Peter Hapstak, partner at Core Architecture + Design, says that if you put off collecting art until you can afford it, you’ll never begin. He contrasts art buying with more forgettable purchases – a nice dress, a pair of shoes, a big dinner out. The art will outlast them all.

This self-described “maximal minimalist” takes an active role in the art community. Having designed a litany of award-winning local restaurants, he customarily employs artists in the creation of commercial settings around town. He has known and helped support the work of Trevor Young, a rising talent from Takoma Park, MD, for nearly a decade – and the two have developed an easy friendship. (When Hapstak recently moved into his Dupont Circle row house, for example, Young helped him place and light the art, some of which was his own.)

“Trevor is so unexpected,” Hapstak says, “I’m thrilled to see the body of work he’s putting together.” From inked envelopes to his newer vast and intimate oil paintings, Young’s work has been integral to Hapstak’s interiors, just as Hapstak’s support has been integral in the creation of that work. “He’s still painting, he’s still prolific,” Hapstak says. It’s a symbiotic system and the rewards keep coming.

Hapstak buys from the gut, largely, and recently parted with half his collection in a divorce, causing him to think more deeply about what he’s collected over the years and what he responds to. The pieces he retained are saturated with color and motion, “pieces [in which] your eye moves and never comes to rest.”

“[Choosing pieces] is a gamble,” he says, “that part you have to have.” His advice? Attend gallery events, get into the community, don’t be shy. Engage with the artists, he says, “and don’t just head for the wine.”

From the Inside Out

The paintings filling artist Izette Folger’s Glen Echo, MD, Cape Cod feel both celebratory and thoughtful. They are all about the richness of life – her work honors landscapes, cultures, food, and especially people. “I’m all about beauty,” she says. “I believe in surrounding yourself with beautiful things.”

A native of Mexico who grew up in DC, Folger has spent much of her life abroad, having lived and studied painting in Paris and Lacoste, France. She studied with Lucio Loubet and worked at Man Ray Studio in Europe and studied closely with Willem de Kooning in East Hampton, NY. She also helped open the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York.

Folger supports the arts in all forms, but has deeply classical sensibilities. “It’s based on technicality,” she says, “I’m drawn to work that is really well-trained.” And it all has a positive, vibrant energy. “I’m so confused as to why people buy disturbing art,” she says. “I want to enjoy the stuff that I look at.” Her life has always been enmeshed with art – both her grandmother and mother were painters, and she’d never dream of doing without it. She credits it for giving her life both an internal and external rhythm. As she says, “It’s an essential.”