Before I understood the language of collecting, I understood what it meant to live with art.
 

There was artwork on the walls of every home we lived in.  Framed works, paintings on canvas, sculpture, works on paper.  Colorful, rare, and filled with images of us.  I did not encounter Black art first as an investment category or an auction result.  I encountered it as part of the space in which I was becoming a Black woman.
 

I am the daughter of art dealers whose work was rooted in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s.  What they brought into our homes shaped my understanding of beauty, history and belonging long before I could name those ideas.  Art was not something we traveled somewhere else to see.  It was already there, sharing space with us.
 

Today, as the inheritor of a collection of works by Elliott Pinkney, I return to those early encounters with a different understanding.  What once felt like the ordinary surroundings of childhood now carries the weight of stewardship.  These works hold more than family memories.  They belong to a larger history that has not yet been fully seen, studied or brought into public conversation.  Some have existed for more than half a century without entering the market’s field of vision.  Their absence from that field does not mean they were absent from history.
 

The First Collection:  Home

Growing up in a family of art dealers meant that my first relationship to art was both intimate and connected to imagination.  My parents understood art as things that could move between our people, but I knew them first as beautiful objects that stayed with us. Familiar.
 

A child does not necessarily distinguish between ownership or curation.  Familiarity becomes its own form of importance.  You remember colors, texture, a figure, the feeling of looking up at something that looks back at you everyday.  Brown eyes, brown skin - immovable reflections - only later does one ask…why someone believed it needed to be kept. That recognition changes the meaning of inheritance.
 

To inherit a collection is not simply to receive objects.  It is to receive decisions made before you could participate in them.  Someone thought of the future. Someone recognized an art practice. Someone made room. Someone took time to care.

My parents’ work was part of that process.  The collection I hold now is inseparable from their attention and from the cultural world in which they were working.  Their choices helped make Black art visible within our own lives, regardless of how much attention that art received elsewhere.  When I look at the Pinkney collection, I see the works themselves.  I also see the act of keeping them.
 

Learning History Through the Body

At the same time that I was growing up surrounded by visual art, I was training to become a professional dancer.  My education unfolded in Black dance spaces, in ballet companies, in rehearsals at Alvin Ailey, and eventually through travel and work in Paris. Looking back, I realize how political that was for me to move effortlessly through dance spaces with my little brown body.  Saying things that could not be said with words - only by sound, movement and a practice passed down through the generations of Black dancers who came before me.

Movement became another way of encountering our history.  I learned through repetition, observation, discipline, and the difficult work of making something part of the body.  I learned that our history can be and should be kept within the body.  A secret that can only be shared with my permission, but the stories only entered by invitation by choreographers whom came before me like, Dunham, Ailey, Jamison and Ulysses Dove.  
 

The visual art in our homes and the dance spaces I entered were not separate worlds to me.  Both asked me to pay attention.  Both asked me to give reverence. Both offered ways of understanding how Black life could be archived, expressed, remembered and transformed.  Sacred.
 

I remember walking through the Ailey library in complete awe and silence. I sat among the books he had collected during his lifetime.  There was something profound about encountering the materials that had surrounded another artist’s thinking.  The books suggested a life of looking beyond one’s own medium, of gathering references and returning to them.

I was surrounded by art history.  Black art history.  But, I was also learning that history did not live only in a finished work or a published account.  It lived in what an artist read, what a dancer preserved in their body, what a family kept, and what one generation made available to the next.  That understanding continues to shape how I collect.
 

I do not see a work on paper as detached from the life around it.  I want to know what can be recovered of that life:  the circumstances of its making, the relationships that sustained it, and the people who recognized it before recognition became public.

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Becoming an Artist, Becoming a Collector

Studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago gave me another way to examine what I had grown up with.  I began to consider more deliberately how art history is organized, how an artwork is interpreted, and how an artist’s practice enters a larger narrative.  In 2001, seeing my own artwork in my first gallery show changed my relationship to those questions.

I was no longer only the daughter of dealers or the child looking at works on a wall.  I was also an artist watching her work enter a space where other people would encounter it, respond to it, and perhaps take it into their lives.  A new world of collectors.  A new world of dealers.
 

From that position, I could begin to understand collecting as a relationship with a living practice, not simply the acquisition of a finished object.  An artwork may leave the artist’s hands, but it continues to carry the consequences of how it is presented, described, cared for and circulated.
 

Now I approach the Pinkney collection with those overlapping experiences:  daughter, dancer, artist, collector.  None gives me a complete answer. Together, they make it impossible for me to think about the collection only in terms of what it might sell for.
 

Beyond the Auction Block

Historically, the term ‘auction block’ has negative connotations in our culture.  The price, the families separated, the body - for sale.  I, even today, wrestle with the term throughout my work in the art market.  But, today - for a young Black collector willing to spend $5,000, $50,000, or $1 million on art, the question is not simply what can be purchased.  It is what kind of relationship we now have with auctions - where the tables have turned, a new ownership begins. 
 

Those figures describe levels of purchasing power we have never seen before.  But, an auction result answers a narrow question:  what someone was willing to pay for a particular work in a particular transaction.  It cannot, by itself, explain the full significance of Black life, especially one where it is surrounded by art.  My concern is what happens when the transaction becomes the dominant story.
 

What do we fail to see when we look first for a record price?  Whose work remains outside our attention because it has not yet been placed in a recognizable market category?  What knowledge disappears when a collection is dispersed before its relationships have been documented?  Beyond the auction block, there is a body of work waiting to be encountered on other terms.
 

The Pinkney collection asks me to consider those terms.  Its age alone does not complete its story.  Neither does its rarity.  The work must be looked at closely.  It must be documented and interpreted.  Questions must be asked without forcing every answer into a sales narrative.
 

Unseen does not mean without value.  Nor does it mean without a past.  These works have had a life.  The task is to make that life more legible without reducing it to a promotional claim.
 

An Invitation to Young Black Collectors

I want young Black collectors to know that participation in art history can begin before a work becomes widely desired.  That does not mean buying without care or treating obscurity as proof of importance.  It means developing the confidence to look, study, ask questions, and form a relationship with work that has not already been explained by the market.
 

It means asking who made the work and what is known about its history.  It means understanding what documentation exists, what remains uncertain, and what care the object requires.  It means recognizing that a purchase can create obligations as well as opportunities.  A collector can help bring an artist’s work into conversation by making it available for study, supporting an exhibition, preserving records, or inviting thoughtful writing. These actions need not wait for a major institutional acquisition or a headline sale.
 

For me, the goal is not to oppose private ownership and public access.  It is to ask how private stewardship can make a public contribution.  I inherited works that helped shape my life before I knew how to describe their significance.  I now have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to consider how people might encounter them.  That includes a young collector making a first purchase.  It includes a dancer who recognizes something in an image before finding words for it.  It includes someone who has never heard Elliott Pinkney’s name but sees, in his work, a history worth knowing.
 

Make Room 

My parents made room for art in every home we lived in.  I understand that gesture differently now.  The walls were not simply decorated.  They held choices about what deserved to be seen, lived with and carried forward.  My task is not to repeat their choices without question.  It is to meet those choices with the attention they deserve and to make new ones with care.  The collection has accompanied one family across time.  It is ready for a wider conversation.
 

Beyond the auction block, as Black bodies - we are all too familiar of what that duality means.  Now, there are works for sale beyond our bodies - still waiting to be studied, stories still waiting to be heard, and relationships still waiting to be formed.  Today - there is a new idea, a future where the next generation of Black collectors may look beyond what has already been, perhaps even validated through art and imagination.  Consider what we can do now - with color, form, Black bodies, and freedom in our hands - it resounds of ownership. The new art - of ownership.