May 9 | 9:00 am – 11:00 am
Join us for the third installment of ArtTable’s Art Law Series, produced in partnership with Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. In this conversation, we will explore the various roles and responsibilities that are involved when building and managing an art collection. Coinciding with the Spring art fair season in New York, a city whose contemporary art scene is constantly evolving, this panel will focus on the professionals who help collectors navigate the collection- building and management process. What resources are available to guide collectors when purchasing artworks? How should a collector care for the art once it is in their collection? What are the responsibilities when owning fine art that new collectors might not be aware of? We will hear from several arts professionals involved at the different stages of collection-building, from the initial purchase to long-time care and conservation.
This conversation will build on topics explored in the first two conversations in this series: Responsible Transacting in the Art Market (held at Patterson Belknap’s New York office in April 2024) and From Purchase to Patronage: Stewarding Your Growing Collection (hosted at Untitled Art Miami Beach in December 2024, with additional support from Private Client Select and SRI Fine Art Services). If you missed us in Miami Beach, you can enjoy our December conversation courtesy of the Untitled Art Fairs Podcast!
Panelists:
- Moderator: Anne-Laure Allehaut, Counsel, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP
- Sharon Chrust, President, Sharon Chrust & Associates
- Maura Kehoe Collins, Principal, Artiphile
- Tanya Wells, Owner, TMSW Art Advisory
Program Admission:
- ArtTable Members – $15
- Member Guests – $20
- General Admission – $25
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Please note that ArtTable registration fees go toward administrative costs for the organization.
This program is hosted in partnership with and supported by Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP
ArtTable’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
About the Speakers
Anne-Laure Alléhaut is Counsel in Patterson Belknap’s Art and Museum Law practice. Anne-Laure started her career at Skadden Arps in M&A before serving as a Senior Vice President of Sotheby’s legal transactional team, negotiating many of the auction house’s most complex and high value transactions while also overseeing Sotheby’s advisory, appraisal and valuation departments.
Anne-Laure brings 18 years of law firm and in-house experience to the art industry and draws on her broad and deep experience to advise her clients with speed and efficiency. Her client base includes private collectors, galleries, estates, start-ups, art dealers, museums, advisors and financial institutions. Anne-Laure is a graduate of Université Paris X, Nanterre and Université Paris II, Panthéon-Assas. She received her J.D. and LL.M. from Cornell University.
Maura Kehoe Collins is founder and director of Artiphile, an independent art advisory firm specializing in art collections management services. Established in 1991 to promote the conscientious stewardship of cultural property, Artiphile is primarily concerned with the preservation of artistic and historic works held in collections outside museums. Artiphile implements museum standard procedures for inventory and registration, cataloguing, photo-documentation and records management, condition surveys and baseline condition reports; advises on installation, conservation and framing, lighting, environmental controls, appraisal and insurance needs, loans, storage, packing, and transit; provenance and authentication procedures, as well as succession concerns. All needs germane to the proper maintenance of any art collection large or small, from acquisition to disposition.
Collins is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a BA in Art History and a minor in Asian Studies acquired during fourteen months of study in Taiwan and at Beijing Normal University in the PRC. During college Collins worked as a curatorial assistant in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and as acting registrar initiated the project to computerize the Museum’s catalogue. In post graduate studies Collins was the first recipient of the C.V. Starr Fellowship for training in Far Eastern Art Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, a position she held for three years. A Kress Foundation grant then funded an internship in the Eastern Pictorial Art Conservation Department of the British Museum, London, which led to a permanent post. Collins continued her interest in computerized documentation by representing her department on a task force to network conservation records in all UK museums.
Sharon Chrust has been involved in the Contemporary Art market for over 25 years. In 2003, she started Sharon Chrust & Associates, which provides appraisal and art consulting services to private and corporate clients. She has attained the highest accreditation of the Appraisers Association of America, that of a Certified member and is the Immediate Past President of the Board of the organization. In addition, Sharon has been an adjunct instructor at New York University in the Appraisal Studies program, is an instructor for the Appraisers Association of America’s CASP program, and was President of the Board of Franklin Street Works, a non-profit arts space in Stamford, Connecticut.
Sharon has participated in a number of national and international panels, and discussions on art and art appraising, in cities as diverse as Shanghai, New York City, Greenwich, and Sarasota. She has been quoted in articles in Artnews, and Artsy, and has written articles on insurance appraisals, and contributed essays to publications on posthumous editions, and appraisal writing. Prior to starting Sharon Chrust & Associates, Sharon was a gallery director at the Waterside Art Gallery in Stamford, CT, a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art and worked in the public relations department of the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She has a Masters in Art History from Hunter College, a BA from Boston University, has completed the Certificate of Appraisal Studies at NYU and has passed the Uniform Standards of Appraisal Practice Exam.
Tanya Wells began her career in museum education at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth under Terri Thornton and Michael Auping. She has worked as a specialist and sales director with Christie’s New York and Bonhams in 19th and 20th Century art for almost twenty years. Tanya also spent a brief time with Winston Art Group in the advisory division assisting large collections and family offices.
Tanya currently owns and oversees TMSW Art Advisory, an independent practice focused on creating fine art collections and consulting with families and fiduciaries to manage the unique needs of collectors during a transition, or at the end of a collecting period. Tanya is a former participant in the ArtTable career fair, a member of The Modern and Contemporary Collectors Committee of The Morgan Library and Museum, an IFAR supporter, and recently became a member of The Cosmopolitan Club.
Dr. Tania Aparicio (she/her) is a full-time lecturer in the Arts Administration Program at Teachers College-Columbia University. Using ethnographic and archival methods, her research has focused on the study of cultural production, cultural organizations, and cultural workers–with particular attention to the dynamics of inequality in art worlds. In particular, she has conducted a comparative investigation of the effects of unionization in arts organizations and how it shapes racialized and gendered relations in the workplace. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Fulbright Program, Institute for Critical Social Inquiry, and Janey Program in Latin American Studies. At The New School she completed her doctoral degree thanks to a Dean’s fellowship and a dissertation award.
Partner LaKeisha M.A. Caton is a member of Pryor Cashman’s Labor + Employment and Litigation Groups, and combines her comprehensive litigation background with a focus on employment-related matters to bring results to clients across the globe. Having represented both management and executives in discrimination and harassment cases, LaKeisha brings her extensive knowledge of the law as well as her familiarity with the strategies often adopted by the opposition to every engagement. She leverages her comprehensive experience with federal, state, and local discrimination law and her background in litigation and dispute resolution to achieve favorable outcomes on behalf of her clients.
Gillian is a sociologist of inequality, art, and work. In 2018, she received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation focused on understanding how gender and ethno-racial inequality shape the work experiences of cultural entrepreneurs, especially chefs, under the direction of two of the leading scholars in feminist theory and work. Alongside her dissertation research, Gillian worked closely with several campus offices to conduct program evaluation research related to sexual harassment and sexual violence prevention education on campus. After completing her PhD, she was a Dean’s Fellow at NYU, where she continued her research focused on inequality and artistic labor and completed several consulting projects for the university focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion recruitment and retention efforts at the university.
Marysol Nieves is Vice President and Senior Specialist, Latin American Art at Christie’s, New York where she has worked on several important consignments, including, the sale of the world auction record for the category, Diego Rivera’s The Rivals as well as the 2022 sale of The Embroiderer, a rediscovered masterpiece by Rivera acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She has also been instrumental in bringing such previously under recognized women artists to the auction market as Zilia Sánchez and Olga Albizu. Prior to joining Christie’s in 2011, Marysol was an independent curator and art advisor working with institutional, corporate, and private clients. Additionally, she has held various positions in the museum and for-profit art sectors, including Vice President and Specialist, Latin American Art, Sotheby’s, New York; Senior Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Director of Visual Arts, Americas Society, New York; and Senior Curator, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York.
Gabriela Palmieri is the Founder and Principal of Palmieri Fine Art, Inc., a bespoke full-service Art firm based in New York City. Prior to establishing PFA, Inc., in 2016, Ms. Palmieri led a distinguished 17-year career at Sotheby’s, where she rose to Chairman of Contemporary Art, Americas, and was recognized as one of the most respected in the auction industry as a leading specialist in Post-War Art.
Since 2021, E. Carmen Ramos is chief curatorial and conservation officer at The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. There she leads the curatorial and conservation teams as they serve the nation and beyond through collections development, ground-breaking scholarship and exhibitions, and art conservation. Ramos most recently served as acting chief curator and curator of Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she built one of the largest collections of Latinx art at a museum of U.S. art. She organized award-winning exhibitions at SAAM including ¡Printing the Revolution!, Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, and Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography. Before prior to the Smithsonian, she was a curator at the Newark Museum and worked on early DEAI initiatives at The Brooklyn Museum. She holds a MA and PhD in art history from the University of Chicago.
Rada Akbar, born and raised in Afghanistan, is an activist and artist who uses her art to speak out against misogyny and oppression. Her work consists of a mixture of wearable monuments, performance, photography and installation pieces. It has been displayed in numerous national and international exhibitions. In 2015, she received an honorable mention in the UNICEF Photo of the Year Award. In 2020, her art exhibit called Abarzanan—Superwomen—which celebrates pioneering Afghan women, was featured in the New York Times, and in 2021 she received the Prince Claus Seed Award, MujerHoy awards and BBC 100 Women.
Barbara Pollack is the co-founder of Art at a Time Like This Inc., a platform for free expression for artists at times of crises. An independent curator and writer, Pollack will be lead curator for the exhibition, Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity, opening at the Asia Society Museum in June. In 2021, she organized Lu Yang: DOKU—Digital Alaya at Jane Lombard Gallery. Since 1994, Pollack has written extensively for a broad range of arts publications and catalogues and monographs and is also a professor at the School of Visual Arts. 
Julie Trébault is the director of the 
Anne Verhallen is the co-founder of Art At A Time Like This, launched in 2020 in response to the global health crisis. The non-profit arts organization supports artists working in response to crisis and current events by presenting their work online and in the public space.
Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer specializing in Native American and Indigenous arts and culture. Her work in these areas focuses on amplifying the under-recognized presence of native peoples in the arts, sciences, and the public arena. Erin earned an M.S. in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT and an M.P.A. in Tribal Governance from Evergreen State College. She also studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In recent years, her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at Boston’s Urbano Project, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, The Museum of Northwest Art, and the International Space Station. Public commissions have come from the Tufts University Art Galleries, the Minnesota Historical Society, the City of St. Paul, and the City of Seattle. Also in the public realm, Erin was named artist-in-residence with the City of Boston (2020-2021) and co-founded, “Centering Justice: Indigenous Artists’ Perspectives on Public Art,” with the New England Foundation for the Arts’ Public Art Team.
Shannon O’Loughlin is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and the Chief Executive and Attorney for the oldest non-profit serving Indian Country – the Association on American Indian Affairs. Throughout its 99-year history, the Association has provided national advocacy on watershed issues that support sovereignty and culture, while working at a grassroots level with Tribes. The Association’s vision is to create a world where diverse Native American cultures and values are lived, protected and respected.
Shannon has been practicing law for more than 20 years and is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. In 2013, she was appointed by Secretary of the Department of the Interior to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Review Committee. In 2015 she was appointed by President Barack Obama as the first Native American to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee within the State Department. Shannon received a B.A. in American Indian Studies from California State University, Long Beach. She then received joint M.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Arizona in Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy.
Malynn Wilbur-Foster is a Squaxin Island tribal member, raised among her people near the Skokomish and Squaxin Island reservations where she has lived most of her life. She works in a variety of media , including weaving, painting, jewelry, and carving both stone and wood. Malynn is always looking for new ways to tell the stories of her people fusing tradition and technology.
Since 1998, her work has been shown in galleries and featured in
books. It has also entered collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Burke Museum, and Washington State History Museum. Additionally she has collaborated on a number of commissioned works in the Seattle area, with family members and friends. 2020 brought a significant new commission: Malynn is now collaborating with Tamela LaClair and Kimberly Deriana, as a team, known as the MTK Matriarchs.
They have been selected as the artists for the Salish Steps, part of the Seattle project re-imagining the city’s waterfront. Representing both local tribes and Urban Natives, they are working with the design team, developing a permanent artwork to elevate the importance of indigenous culture and history to this very public site. Malynn has received grants for her achievements in both art and for being an indigenous knowledge keeper.
Thank you to ArtTable members Cathie Behrend, former Deputy Director of New York’s Percent for Art Program and founder of VenturesinVision, and Lori Shepard, Independent art advisor, for organizing this program series.
