At the start of 2021 Pace, the mega gallery that’s been one of America’s leading art concerns since it opened more than half a century ago and now has eight outposts on three continents, seemed to be in a pretty bad spot. After opening its new global headquarters on 25th Street in late 2019, it shut down in March 2020, not to reopen until July. Dozens of employees were furloughed, and fewer than 20 were later laid off. In March, longtime director Douglas Baxter left the gallery after an investigation into his conduct concluded (the results were not released to the public). He had been accused of phone-throwing and epithet-hurling. (“I would like to apologize to those who I hurt through my actions both directly and because of the atmosphere I created in my office and that spread beyond it,” Baxter wrote around the time the allegations were raised.) Fellow Pace president Susan Dunne left as well, having also been accused of contributing to the toxic work environment. (She declined to be interviewed for the Artnet story that first reported the allegations.) She was hired by David Zwirner as senior director in May.
That narrative began to turn around in late April, when Pace, which did respond to a request for comment for this story, poached Jeff Koons, the most expensive artist alive. But lately, Superblue, the Pace-adjacent project dedicated to interactive exhibition spaces, has provided significant lift as well. In its few short months of existence, the Miami museum has placed a wild (and what looks to be savvy) bet on the public’s growing demand for experiential art. Founded by Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher and former Pace London director Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, Superblue is an independent entity from the gallery empire, Pace maintains. Nevertheless, it might be the most successful holding currently in the portfolio.
Skeptics dismissed the project almost immediately when it was announced in August 2020—when many of the world’s indoor museums were still closed and there was zero public timeline for vaccine rollout—but it’s been a hit, as many have flocked to the large hangar in the Miami neighborhood of Allapattah. Spectacle-seeking attendees willing to pay about $36 a pop provided an infusion of good news for the gallery.
The Miami New Times named it the best new museum. “Don’t know anything about art? Don’t worry!” the paper said giddily. In August, Superblue announced that it would expand to New York and London in the fall. How exactly does a hangar-size museum get conceived of and built in the middle of the pandemic and become transatlantic a year after it was announced? With Superblue, it happens with backing from Emerson Collective and its founder, Laurene Powell Jobs. The widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs and one of the richest women in the world, LPJ, as some in the know have taken to calling her, has funded a variety of arts and culture organizations along with a slew of other investments and philanthropic endeavors through her semi-secretive philanthropic juggernaut. (Emerson declined to comment for this story.)
Powell Jobs has been fairly public-facing in Washington—she took stakes in the NBA’s Wizards and the NHL’s Capitals and bought a majority stake in The Atlantic. But she hadn’t waded much into the strange waters of contemporary art, and her announced involvement had many dealers scratching their heads. Sources said the connection between Glimcher and Powell Jobs came about through a project Emerson participated in by JR, the French street artist known for his large-scale murals. That collaboration, Inside Out/Dreamers, included an installation that consisted of a gigantic photograph of a pair of human eyes laid out across the U.S.-Mexico border.
The gaze belonged to a woman named Mayra, a Dreamer immigrant from Mexico who crossed the border into California when she was seven. Mayra was in College Track, the startup Powell Jobs cofounded in 1997, which allowed Mayra to stay on track in school and guided her on how to apply for legal status. JR began showing with Pace Gallery in 2019, and had his first show with the gallery at its Palo Alto, California, outpost, which is close to Powell Jobs’s home in the suburbs. The area was also home to PaceX, the art-meets-tech endeavor that Pace founded in 2019. A year after the JR show closed, the Palo Alto–based PaceX had been rebranded as Superblue, with Powell Jobs along to boost it with funding (Powell Jobs also personally nixed the former name).
Superblue’s ascendance has happened to partly coincide with Powell Jobs’s relationship with Daniel Humm, the chef at Eleven Madison Park, the extremely fancy and just a tad whimsical Manhattan restaurant that recently went plant-based and retained its three Michelin stars. When not in the kitchen, Humm is a devoted collector and patron who commissioned and acquired a gigantic work by the artist Rita Ackermann that hangs above his pricey eatery.
Since going public, the pair have been one of the more enigmatic couples on the art-world periphery. When news of their relationship first hit Page Six in July 2019, some actually tweeted siren emojis. And fair enough, they made an intriguing pair, the Swiss chef who appeared to love Instagram and the Jersey girl who became a giant of American philanthropy. By the next year, Humm was quoted in the pages of this magazine saying that Powell Jobs “allowed me to see myself more clearly, and I get to be more myself by knowing her. She inspires me every day.”
He added that, the two of them being together, “It’s kind of magical.”
While we’re not much for prying into the mysteries of the human heart, we do think it’s high time to take a deeper look at how the pair’s separate approaches to their respective forays into the art world might be shaping each other and future projects.
Humm has a long history of collecting, and often posts pictures of himself with artists such as George Condo, Sarah Crowner, and Rashid Johnson. A Times profile in 2017 revealed that his Upper East Side apartment had works by Daniel Turner and chairs by Franz West. He’s friends with Hauser & Wirth founder Iwan Wirth and president Marc Payot. He runs marathons with Vito Schnabel, who opened his palatial new Chelsea space earlier this year.
Many art-world observers have been waiting (perhaps wishfully) for Humm and Powell Jobs to come together and use the stuffed Emerson coffers to collaborate and start making bigger and bigger buys, and bigger contributions to artistic entities. (Both Humm and Powell Jobs declined to comment for this story.) And not without reason. Emerson is a little different from most philanthropies. It was set up as an LLC, meaning that it doesn’t have to disclose the number of zeros on the balance sheet or how fat the grants get. It’s essentially a family office, said a source who has worked with Emerson in an advisory capacity.
“It’s not private equity,” the source said. “There’s shit you make money on and shit you just do because it seems cool.”
Superblue was the latter. Right now, the source said, Superblue is in “try-out” mode, meaning that Emerson’s lower-tier lieutenants are running point on the art-world holdings, while the big guns oversee its other holdings.
“It’s not on the highest level yet,” the source said.
A source from inside Emerson said that the LLC makes what it calls “pocket investments” all the time, and likened the Superblue move to something like giving a buddy 500 bucks.
Speaking from the Superblue side of things, another source confirmed as much, saying that while there was once a plan in place to prioritize programming that Powell Jobs was focused on, she’s no longer a presence at all in day-to-day operations, and that the investment was entirely a hands-off one.
Powell Jobs might be in New York later this month when Superblue takes over The Shed at Hudson Yards, so the collective Drift can stage something involving kinetic sculptures, wind machines, and giant multi-channel videos—whatever it is, it’ll probably be all over Instagram. Or perhaps she and Humm are in the market for some anti-Superblue, good old-fashioned physical artworks: A few months ago Humm closed on a $14.5 million condo in Greenwich Village, and it’s got a lot of empty wall space.
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…Some of the arguably more A-list Armory Week dinners are being held at the normally members-only jazz bar at the recently opened Casa Cipriani, which will also play host to the Independent Fair during the day.
…The very, very polarizing Damien Hirst work that graces the cover of Drake’s new album, Certified Lover Boy, is reportedly an edition of two: One is owned by Drake, and one is owned by the artist himself.
…The Odeon’s signature subterranean bathrooms flooded Wednesday night during the deluge New York suffered as the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed through town. Didn’t stop what seemed to be half the art world from staying late into the night, though.
…After a week of fairs and gallery openings—truly an orgy of spending on contemporary art, an infusion of capital brought to you by a collecting class that has apparently gotten fabulously wealthy during the plague—Independent’s party will be hosted by everyone’s favorite scrappy little print-only downtown paper, The Drunken Canal, at Gitano the Saturday of Armory Week.
…Matt Copson, the London-based English artist who’s dating indie star Caroline Polachek—and who earlier this year caused lines down the block when he had a show of new work at High Art in Paris—will have a show with transatlantic powerhouse Clearing at the gallery’s outpost in Brussels.
…Adam Sheffer, who, as we reported in the last True Colors, had left Pace, has joined Lisson Gallery as a senior director, heading up sales in New York and working alongside executive director Alex Logsdail.
…The Hester Street Fair, the venerable neighborhood gathering spot for eateries and galleries on the Lower East Side, has found a new home at the South Street Seaport after being booted out of Seward Park by the co-op board—it’s open tomorrow and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
…Gagosian COO Andrew Fabricant going after Eric Clapton—the rocker and collector of Richters who could conceivably be a Gagosian client—for his continued public skepticism about the COVID vaccines. Fabricant wrote in an Instagram comment, “Clapton’s anti-vax stance is truly shameful. Why extol this guy when he should be shunned.”
…LGDR, the new consortium formed by Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, will not be participating in any American art fairs, perhaps giving other big galleries permission to stop doing some of the fairs that were, pre-COVID, arguably considered mandatory.
…Caffè Lodi, Estela chef Ignacio Mattos’s new Rockefeller Center eatery right next to Christie’s, is now open for breakfast and lunch—run, don’t walk.
An edited and condensed, hyper-quick Q&A with one of the greats. And hey, look who’s here on my FaceTime, it’s Julian Schnabel!
True Colors: “Self-Portraits of Others” opens Wednesday at the Brant Foundation in Manhattan. Where did the germ of the show come from?
Julian Schnabel: Willem was playing Van Gogh and Willem and Van Gogh don’t look like each other. You suspend your disbelief when someone is playing the part. So I made a painting of Willem as Van Gogh, and that was a prop for the movie. When I came back to New York after the shoot, I had these paintings of Willem, so I thought, Van Gogh used to make paintings of his paintings. I thought that the idea of painting a self-portrait of someone who was dead, and painting it from life—there’s something about the artificiality of that and the reality of that.
Were you painting Cy [Schnabel, his son] and Willem and Oscar Isaac from life?
I don’t paint people from photographs.
Do you know what’s become of the props that you made for Basquiat and At Eternity’s Gate?
The ones for Basquiat, I have. The paintings for Eternity’s Gate? I gave Willem a painting of him, I gave Oscar one painting, the painting of the shoes I gave to Jean-Claude Carrière. They’re more tokens of appreciation. They’re not really paintings of mine.
Do you remember the first time you met Peter Brant?
He bought a velvet painting of mine from 1984 called Ethnic Types. Larry Gagosian called me and asked me if I wanted to sell this particular painting and I said no. And he said, “Would you sell it for this number?” And I said no. And then he said, “Will you sell it for this?” And I said no. And then he said, “Will you sell it for this?” And I said no. And then he said, “Will you sell it for this?” And I said no. And then he said, “Will you sell it for this?” And I said, OK.
What do you think of the Brant Foundation space in the East Village?
It’s excellent, the paintings are super happy there. The ones that are ocre are in a room with these Naples yellow bricks. It’s very—what’s the word?—receptive to those particular paintings.
You’re in Montauk now?
I came out here in the pandemic. I had a show at Pace, it was on March 5. We got the news—“don’t congregate, don’t let anybody breathe on you”—but it was a little too late. My friend Hal Willner was at my opening, and he died a couple of weeks after the opening. He died on his birthday. Great producer, great friend of mine, great friend of Lou Reed’s.
And that’s a wrap for your Labor Day weekend True Colors. Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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