Collecteurs was launched with the mission of bringing unseen artworks out of the dark and into public view. With this mission at heart, the museum has sought out to expand its community with new members joining each day.
2020 was a year of firsts for the world and for us—a year where the world came to an abrupt halt, where we had to redefine how to live, how to work, how to present the full range of human emotions from joy to grief and even anger in constructive ways. 2020 was also a year that taught us how to redefine our relationship with art, which has the capacity to speak to us in moments of crisis. At Collecteurs, we challenged ourselves to be more creative and to be more empathetic, to give voice to the unheard and the unseen.
This was a challenging year for just about everyone, but being a digital museum and platform put Collecteurs a step ahead in many respects. We didn’t have to scramble to digitize our processes or create “virtual viewing rooms” that were little more than static pages. In 2020, we worked harder than ever to bring you new discoveries via unique initiatives. Thanks to the support of our ever-growing community of members from around the world, we were able to reach wider audiences and expand our sphere of influence.
Without further ado, let’s take a short walk down recent memory lane, shall we?
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2020 was the year when our most trusted truths turned out to be fake—like these everyday objects that are actually cakes…
1-31 was our first digital exhibition connected around a loose narrative that brings together 31 works by young, emerging, and well-established artists from around the world. Curated by Adam Carr, the 31 works were related in some way to a specific number and presented on a day with the related number within the three-month span of the exhibition, from February 1 to April 31. Intended as a new way to present artworks in a digital exhibition, 1-31 connected with the artworks more deeply, providing editorial content that included interviews with the artists, curatorial texts, and essays that interpreted the artworks in a different context.
1-31 included works by Neïl Beloufa, Alejandro Cesarco, Roy Claire Potter, Simon Denny, Gabriel De Santis, Claire Fontaine, Louise Giovanelli, Mario García Torres, Isa Genzken, Felipe García López, Tehching Hsieh, Pierre Huyghe, David Jablonowski, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Fred Lonidier, Guadalupe Maravilla, Adriana Martinez, Metahaven, Paul McCarthy, Jonathan Monk, Puppies Puppies, Amanda Ross-Ho, Ariel Schlesinger, Reyes Santiago Rojas, Luke Stettner, Mungo Thomson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Oscar Tuazon, Villamil y Villamil, and Bedwyr Williams.
The show proved to be Collecteurs’ most popular exhibition of 2020 by far, drawing in an impressive 148,951 visitors to date.
Metahaven: “Art does not, in a material sense, contribute to a solution, and at the same time does not operate independently from these problems, or outside their consequences. What is very interesting about poetry, for example, is the minimalism of its ecological footprint in relation to its ends, the enactment of art with and within the listener. You can collapse artworks into poems and poems then are like a .zip format for art as a whole.”
Read Metahaven: Designing Transparency
Behrouz Boochani, born in Ilam, Iran (1983) is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, poet and film producer. He is currently detained on Manus Island, an island in Papua New Guinea that is used as a de facto prison for asylum-seekers heading to Australia. Boochani is in his seventh year of imprisonment without charge. His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian to English.
Hoda Afshar’s video work “Remain, 2018” addresses the invisible histories and the human rights of asylum seekers in Australia. Filmed on Manus Island, an immigration detention facility in Papua New Guinea, the work delivers a powerful depiction of the prolonged mistreatment of detainees, including Behrouz Boochani.
Hoda Afshar /Remain, 2018 (Video Still)
Read A Conversation Between Hoda Afshar and Behrouz Boochani
In 2020, we announced SUBSTANCE 100—a new, annual list that outlined a diverse array of artists, activists, collectives, movements, and organizations making a substantial change in the world. By engaging a community of activists from the art world and beyond, SUBSTANCE 100 raised the question: “What is the purpose of art in the 21st century?”
SUBSTANCE 100 nominations were opened to the public from March 15 to 23, with official results finalized on April 10, 2020. A diverse panel of judges including Nástio Mosquito, Adam Broomberg, Jessica Oralkan, Evrim Oralkan, Adam Carr, and Àngels Miralda Tena from within the Collecteurs family selected the finalists.
SUBSTANCE 100 became the second most visited exhibition on Collecteurs in 2020, welcoming more than 78,000 visitors.
As tensions grew and the BLM protests ignited a wave of long-overdue discourse on Race in America, we took to our social media accounts to show solidarity and support for the movement (albeit in our small way).
As a Public-Benefit Corporation (PBC), we also thought it was important that we deliver useful and actionable content to our members at this time…
Read How to Defund the Police If You Live in New York
Anthony Peyton Young’s ongoing project, “They Have Names,” memorializes Black lives that were taken by police brutality. In our article detailing his works, Young recounts the thoughts behind his project, and how collector Scott Lorinsky came to acquire a piece of his from a recent solo show.
Anthony Peyton Young / They Have Names III:
Trayvon Benjamin Martin, 17, February 5, 2016
Christian Taylor, 19, August 7, 2015
Tony Robinson, 19, March 6, 2015
Victor White III, 22, March 3, 2014
Jonathan Ferrell, 24, September 14, 2013
Keith Lamont Scott, 43, September 20, 2016
Bleach and oil on canvas, 2018
—Anthony Peyton Young
We also launched the SUBSTANCE Podcast in 2020 so we could get to know the honorees of our SUBSTANCE 100 list on a deeper level as well as hear their immediate reaction to the BLM protests happening over the summer.
Our first two guests were Eyal Weizman, Director of the research agency Forensic Architecture, and Edgar Heap of Birds, a Native American artist and academic. Despite being a fairly new podcast, SUBSTANCE managed to attract 42,415 listeners for its first two episodes alone.
—Edgar Heap of Birds, Substance Ep. 2
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Of course, not all was bad in 2020—our collectors shared more works by female artists than ever before! As we look forward to seeing many more female artists on our platform, here are just a few whose works are beloved by Collecteurs members…
(highest number of works on Collecteurs)
Nazgol Ansarinia / From the ‘Private Assortment’ series – Metal Chair, 2013. From Anastasios A. Gkekas, The Office Collection. Photographer: Antonis Minas
See all artworks by Nazgol Ansarinia on Collecteurs
Candida Höfer / Opera Garnier Paris XXXI, 2005. From Arthur de Ganay’s Photography Collection.
See all artworks by Candida Hofer on Collecteurs
Haris Epaminonda / Pond, 2012. From Fustinoni and D’amato Collection.
We also launched HELLO, a series of talks between curators and artists intended to provide a window into the inner workings of the art world. In our first installment, we hosted artist James Beckett and curator Adam Carr in a discussion around Beckett’s artistic practice.
In 2020, Collecteurs partnered with Oscilloscope Labs. to present The Proposal (2018) dir. Jill Magid exclusively on Collecteurs, with a special note from Jill Magid.
The Proposal tells the story of an ingenious project by American artist Jill Magid, highlighting the work and legacy of Luis Barragán. Upon first visiting the UNESCO-listed Casa Luis Barragán in 2012 and learning that the late architect’s archive belonged to The Barragán Foundation, Jill Magid requested access to the archive—only to be rejected. Not one to give up, Magid joined forces with the Barragán family: Over the next two years, as Magid maintained cordial communication with the Foundation, the Barragán family get to work having the late architect’s ashes exhumed from the Rotonda de los Jaliscienses Ilustres in Guadalajara for what would end up being the highlight of Magid’s bold project: a diamond ring made from the ashes, personally presented by the artist to Federica Zanco on Vitra’s campus in 2016.
This exclusive screening of The Proposal on Collecteurs drew more than 22,000 visitors.
— Jill Magid, director of The Proposal (2018)
As lockdowns and travel restrictions forced us all to stay home, we found new ways to connect and tell stories within our community. So, we launched Collecteurs at Home, where we got collectors to open their homes and share their thoughts and feelings about their favorite artworks from their collections.
Regularly updated with contributions from the collectors in our community, our Collecteurs at Home page has attracted more than 12,500 visitors (and counting!)
— Andrea Fustinoni, Collector
image left: Leigh Ledare Walt, 2013. From Andrea Fustinoni’s home.
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For those of us fortunate enough to stay home, this was also the perfect year to master new hobbies.
When the news broke out that not one but four major museums were to postpone Philip Guston’s retrospective, we took seriously our responsibility as a PBC and were able to act quickly to present a digital exhibition featuring works by Philip Guston from our museum, which tackle issues like systemic racism and white supremacy.
The Danger is in Looking Away drew more than 21,000 visitors.
Drawing from pivotal and never-before-seen works and material from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive, this digital exhibition unfolded via Collecteurs’ website and Instagram over the course of two weeks. Starting on Félix González-Torres’s birthday, we shared interviews, insightful essays, and archival images from the artist’s early life.
We are proud to have collaborated with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Family Archive to host this exhibition on Collecteurs, as we believe the family archive plays a vitally important role in the preservation of an artist’s legacy.
Given how perfectly Félix’s focus on making his art accessible to the public ties into our mission of doing the same for private collections, we welcomed the public to contribute to the exhibition by participating in a social campaign where they could capture an image of the sky, post it to Instagram with a geotag, and share it with the world using the tags #felixexhibition, @collecteurs, and @felixgonzaleztorresfamilyarchive.
Despite being launched near the end of 2020, Félix has already welcomed nearly 20,000 visitors.
—Natalia Grabowska, Tender Hours on Collecteurs
Of course, we were happy to see our efforts didn’t go unnoticed… Our mission and initiatives also drew recognition from the media. Collecteurs was a 2020 Honoree in the Social Good category of Fast Company’s Innovation by Design Awards.
We also caught the attention of Vanity Fair’s On Art, The Disruption Issue (November 2020), which announced the list “The movers, shakers of the art world,” placing Collecteurs at the top of the list and praising us as: “A shining example of the inclusivity and accessibility that social media can bring to the art world.”
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We also wanted to take a moment to recognize the collectors who went above and beyond in using our platform this year. As always, we thank each and every one of our collectors for creating and sustaining such a vibrant and diverse community.
Arthur Tress / Kent on Slid, New York, 1979
View P D V N Collection on Collecteurs
Adam Gordon / UNTITLED, 2020
View Fustinoni and D’amato Collection on Collecteurs
O_scar Tuazon /_ “MODEL” for Outdoor Sculpture.
View Toscano Collection on Collecteurs
Torbjørn Rødland / Corn Cob Pipe, 2009
View Lysgaard Collection on Collecteurs
Franz West / Sitzwuste, 2000