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Meet Six Artists Supporting South Florida’s Norton Museum of Art
Members of an auction benefiting the museum, Amani Lewis, Nikolai Haas, Hubert Phipps, Nacho Carbonell, Asif Tanvir Hoque and Sarah Meyohas answer the Sotheby’s Questionnaire.
T he Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach is Florida’s oldest art museum and undoubtedly one of region’s most invaluable cultural institutions. This year Sotheby’s is once again pleased to host its annual benefit auction. From 27 January through 6 February, 48 exceptional artworks – by artists such as Eric Fischl, Ed Ruscha, Claire Tabouret and more – are coming to the block in order to raise funds for the Norton’s curatorial, learning and community-engagement programs.
In honor of the benefit, we shared the Sotheby’s questionnaire with six participating artists and gathered their perspective on working in the studio, the future of art, how collectors can support artists and more.
Amani Lewis
If you could own just one work of art – any work! – what would it be and why?
My own practice starts with a photograph. I would love to live with a print from Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table series, or a vintage print by Gordon Parks from Invisible Man – work that shows the beauty in the everyday.
What fuels you in the studio?
My faith in God and being surrounded by good friends, who become my family. My studio is a social space, and painting lifts us all.
What is an artist’s greatest responsibility?
To share what they see, think and feel. To liberate oneself in a universal language like art can be a healing, beautiful journey for everyone.
What is the most memorable experience you’ve had at a museum?
I worked as a guide at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, under their Emerging Professional Program in 2017. Every day, I would drive from Baltimore to the suburbs, and I got to spend hours with works by Roni Horn and Faith Ringgold.
I also had the opportunity to see the museum throughout each season, to see how that space transformed in different light. My conversations with visitors in the galleries were unforgettable – and they let me explain how I thought something was made. Studying and breaking down a finished work of art is a funny puzzle. Plus the connection and ongoing support built with their team is a gift.
What art will people be talking about next year?
Hopefully mine! Ha. I’m excited to just focus in the studio and work with new materials.
How can collectors best support artists?
Encourage us, share our work and be patient.
Nikolai Haas of the Haas Brothers
If you could own just one work of art, what would it be and why?
For me, Philip Guston’s The Line because it inspires so many questions and so much ambition inside me. For Simon, it would be a David Hockney painting.
What fuels you in the studio?
Music, partnership, teamwork, materials and reaching people.
What is an artist’s greatest responsibility?
To be generous and to strive to inspire others.
What is the most memorable experience you’ve had at a museum?
I chaperoned my son Fox’s kindergarten class on a field trip to LACMA. I had a group of four kids whom I was responsible for showing the museum to, and I really had the first opportunity to introduce them to art in a formal setting. Their viewpoint blew my mind. My son had a moment with a Guston painting: He stood in front of it for one minute, just soaking it up unprompted. I talked to him about it afterward on our way home and it made me really proud.
I think that might have been one of the most important four hours of responsibility in my life. So much future, so much pure intention and pure artwork and pure experience.
How can collectors best support artists?
Buy work and don’t haggle. Generosity is the greatest luxury.
Hubert Phipps
If you could own just one work of art, what would it be and why?
Clyfford Still’s PH-247 (1951). The invitation that Clyfford Still has offered in this painting is an endless journey through this blue world. The depth that I perceive is infinite.
What fuels you in the studio?
The power of the potential.
What is an artist’s greatest responsibility?
To be true to oneself.
What is the most memorable experience you’ve had at a museum?
My visit to the Clyfford Still Museum and viewing his paintings in person for the first time.
What art will people be talking about next year?
The installation of my sculpture entitled Dream Wall at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
How can collectors best support artists?
By purchasing their work!
Nacho Carbonell
If you could own just one work of art, what would it be and why?
Being honest, I’ve never thought about this question… The art I own mostly always comes from artists I have a personal relationship with.
The first iconic work that comes to mind is the apple by Picasso. I believe the object of the apple relays the intimate relationship between artist and subject, and its simplicity speaks to the process of searching for a new idea. It symbolizes the finding of something new – a new movement, a new style – the construction of an icon, a personal charm that will unlock a future body of work. It opens a portal to personal artistic revelation.
It reminds me of the charms that I keep in my office to remind me of ideas that have passed or that need to be developed one day. The apple alludes to the potential of unpretentious subjects, still-raw ideas, and represents transition, metamorphosis and the will to always keep searching.
What fuels you in the studio?
The drive to discover what’s next – the search for answers through the thoughts in our heads. How ideas evolve through the process of creating and the freedom to choose, step by step, where to go, allowing ideas to transforms and mature whilst you experience them.
The possibility to work on multiple ideas alongside a motivated crew who wants to keep exploring and challenge ourselves. When you discover or experience something visceral while creating a project, it’s a mix of fear, excitement and satisfaction.
What is an artist’s greatest responsibility?
Honesty, purity and emotional realism.
To awake the art of emotions.
To transmit a certain energy or emotion.
To awake a reflection.
Make people feel.
What is the most memorable experience you’ve had at a museum?
Museums offer me a rollercoaster of emotions. When I engage with the work exhibited I enter a state of sensorial pleasure – at the same time that activates my desire to keep working. It makes me want to improve and go back to the studio and keep developing my ideas, creating a dialogue with what I had just experienced.
What art will people be talking about next year?
The art of experience, the art of feeling – that’s the art of the future!
We all are looking for the soul of things. We are in search of truth, and the art that will help us bring us closer to this will be the one that will survive and live forever. Unique experiences, they live in us forever.
How can collectors best support artists?
Engaging with the journey of the artist, encouraging their ideas by facing the artist with new challenges. Posing the right questions and allowing us to answer it through our work.
Helping the artist to feel like an explorer, free to travel to their imaginarium and bring back their findings to be shared. Allow the artist to keep learn and improve – to flourish.
Asif Tanvir Hoque
If you could own just one work of art, what would it be and why?
Saint George and the Dragon, a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, because it’s powerful and it demands the viewer’s attention.
What fuels you in the studio?
Peace of mind and lots of water.
What is an artist’s greatest responsibility?
To be present, absorb and create.
What is the most memorable experience you’ve had at a museum?
The time I saw Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits” at the Norton Museum of Art.
How can collectors best support artists?
Keep trusting the process.
Sarah Meyohas
If you could own just one work of art, what would it be and why?
One of Leonardo’s studies of water. I developed a deeper appreciation for his ability to combine disciplines in service of his rapacious curiosity when I read Walter Isaacson’s biography. It’s exciting to look at these studies and see Leonardo’s interest in visually understanding the physics of water, then to consider the complex fluid simulations today that have become the hallmark of high end computer graphics.
What fuels you in the studio?
A mix of curiosity and desire, the curiosity being to understand the shape of reality, and the desire being an emotional endeavor to feel it, to feel connected to the world. There are twin pursuits of understanding the wonder and magic of physical phenomena on one hand and social dynamics and human subjectivity on the other. My aim is to look at them both as equivalent flows but without analytically reducing them to a pulp.
What is an artist’s greatest responsibility?
An artist’s greatest responsibility is to inspire. That’s it. Now, there are a thousand and one ways that an artist can inspire – one can shock an audience, reassess their cultural norms, illuminate something otherwise overlooked and so on. Fundamentally, to inspire is to connect with another human in a way that brings them out of dreary reality for a moment, even if that sometimes means showing them how dreary reality can be.
What is the most memorable experience you’ve had at a museum?
The Teshima Art Museum. It’s a single piece. It was pouring rain when I was there, and it was so loud. Rivulets of water were coming out of little holes in the ground. We were standing there in silence. In a white bubble. It was a full experience. Nature outside, nature inside. Being essentially part of the artwork. It was doing it all.
What art will people be talking about next year?
I’d like to be surprised! I sometimes get exasperated by what people are talking about. There are real stakes to culture and it can often feel like intellectually bankrupt or visually dull work gets outsize attention. I think it’s the most fun when you don’t see it coming.
How can collectors best support artists?
By continuing to collect artwork, and inspiring others to do so as well. I feel a great sense of satisfaction when someone commits to owning a work of art. They are parting with the resource that our society values most – money – in order to then burden themselves with the responsibility of a delicate physical object. Ignoring any other, less savory motivations like pure speculation, it shows a collector’s genuine interest, and it feels good that someone else wants to care for the work.
