Born in Beijing and raised in the Bay Area, Yu is the ultimate multihyphenate. She has worn several hats over the course of her career, working as a freelance photographer, investing in real estate, and work on the business development and market research side of the tech industry. Today, Yu is best known for founding Four One Nine, a creative agency that focuses on supporting artists and developing the Bay Area’s art ecosystem with clients that range from e-commerce watch platform Hodinkee to drag queen Juanita More to San Francisco gallerist Micki Meng. Yu is also the founder of MYLES Magazine, which focuses on art, travel, and culture.

As a collector, Yu focuses on a wide range of artistic practices from some of today’s leading contemporary artists, including sculptures by Robert Gober, video works by Mika Rottenberg, and sound works from Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, among others. She has also focused on acquiring “works by artists from marginalized voices and communities like Martin Wong, Oscar Yi Hou, Julien Nguyen, and Felipe Baeza,” she said. Other recent acquisitions include Pierre Huyghe, Frank Moore, Yuji Agematsu, and Rachel Whiteread.

“My collection is a reflection of my values and aesthetics, so there are a few collecting threads that have come about organically over the years that create the foundation, rather than a singular work,” she said. “One of particular interest (and close to my heart) is female painters working within abstraction like Amy Sillman, Jacqueline Humphries, R.H. Quaytman, Tauba Auerbach, Mary Corse, and Etel Adnan.”

Located on the eighth floor of Deji Plaza’s Phase II building, the Deji Art Museum showcases many of the works that Wu and the Deji Group have purchased over the past several years with a mission of “building a comprehensive art institution and cultural platform that bridges art across cultures and time,” according to its website. Additionally, the nonprofit has plans to open another branch of the museum that is to be designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who designed the Japan National Stadium in Tokyo for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Located on “the eastern foot of Nanjing’s Zijin Mountain, where rivers and mountains meet and universities cluster,” the new branch is set to open in 2025.

The Deji Art Museum has a collection that spans thousands of years and is divided into three parts: ancient Chinese art, the art of Jinling, and Chinese and international modern and contemporary art. Over the past three decades, the museum has focused on acquiring antiquities—jades, ceramics, furniture, Buddha statues, and more—from as early as the Neolithic period (roughly 4300 BCE to 2000 BCE) up until the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty.

Jinling is another name for Nanjing, so naturally being based in Nanjing, the Deji Art Museum has also made it a priority to collect art from the region, with an emphasis on landscape paintings and everyday scenes of Nanjing.

In the Deji Art Museum’s late 19th- and early 20th-century holdings are trophy pieces acquired at auction by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian, Paul Cezanne, René Magritte, Georgia O’Keeffe, Zao Wou-ki, and Sanyu. On the contemporary end of the spectrum, the museum owns works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Kaws, Yoshitomo Nara, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, and Beeple.

Early purchases include works by Charles Bibbs, whose work was featured on The Cosby Show, and Synthia Saint James, who did the cover art for Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel Waiting to Exhale; both were acquired from Samuel’s Gallery in Oakland, California.

But Kelley didn’t consider himself a serious collector until around 2015, when he began building his collection in earnest. “I grew up in East Oakland and had an uncle and aunt who were former Black Panthers, so the struggle for liberation by people in Africa and the African diaspora resonated with me,” he told Artsy in 2022, noting that his mother, who passed away when he 14, was also an artist.

It’s now a role Kelley, who is a trustee of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, takes seriously, because he sees collectors as instrumental in helping to support the entire art ecosystem. “[Collectors] need to rally alongside their peers to educate new collectors and work in close collaboration with museums and galleries to support the brilliance of Black emerging talent,” he said in the Artsy interview.

Since 2010, Kelley, who works as the CFO for the software company Juvare, has been based in Atlanta, which itself has seen increased attention as a new arts hub. That excitement has only been heightened since the launch of Atlanta Art Week, UTA Artist Space setting up a permanent space, and the forthcoming launch of the Atlanta Art Fair in 2024.

Though she didn’t start out with “an overarching thesis behind my acquisitions,” she recently realized a throughline had emerged in what she had purchased over the years. “One tendency that has developed within the collection has been a strong focus on sculpture,” she told ARTnews. “Sculpture is an interesting area of the market because you can buy works of extraordinary quality with much less of the hype and competition that surround painting.”

Among the artists who make up those rich sculptural holdings are historical figures like Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana, Alina Szapocznikow, and Donald Judd to some of today’s most closely watched artists working the medium like Andra Ursuța, Rosemarie Trockel, Kathleen Ryan, Jean-Luc Moulène, and Carol Bove.

At the moment, she said she wants to continue to grow the collection, both by adding new artists and collecting artists already represented in her holdings in greater depth. “I’m now at a stage where I want to be proactive as much as reactive, and would like to further develop this interest in objects,” she said.

But that won’t stop her from branching out from the confines of sculpture. “I always remain open to acquiring things that I simply love (such as finding the right Albert Oehlen),” she said. And a cornerstone of her collection, after all is René Magritte’s 1927 painting Le Musée d’une nuit; she owns several works by the Surrealist, whom she said is “an artist who remains as contemporary today as he was a hundred years ago.”

A recent acquisition was a suite of self-portraits by Ana Mendieta from 1973. “It is a tough work to look at, and for many people probably even tougher to live with,” she said. “But I found its defiance extraordinarily beautiful, and surprised myself with an instinctive need to own it. It made me realize how essential art has become to my life and provokes a great deal of conversation at the dinner table.”

Lagrange was also a supporter of Francis Alÿs’s Belgian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale; she also loaned two works to the Biennale’s main exhibition, which she called “a lovely moment for me.” She continued, “I’m most proud of the moments in which I took risks and bought something I could never have imagined owning ten years earlier. It’s a bit like a marker of my own development. That’s the challenge of building a collection that feels interesting and true to oneself.”  

Catherine Lagrange was listed on the Top 200 in 2010 and 2011 alongside her former husband, Pierre Lagrange.

But Schnizter has also amassed a collection that includes paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and more, and now numbers more than 20,000 objects with some 1,500 artists represented. And he—and his trusted team of curators and registrars—show no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Rounding out the collection are works by artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Kara Walker, Julie Mehretu, Lorna Simpson, Marie Watt, Hung Liu, Wangechi Mutu, and Robert Colescott, of whom Schnitzer owns 30 paintings.

Two acquisitions made in 2023 represent the collection’s dedication to prints and its expanded purview to other mediums by way of Keith Haring’s first print Bean Salad (1977)—the collection already has about 50 prints by Haring—and a 6.5-foot-high bronze version of Hank Willis Thomas’s The Embrace that was commissioned for the Boston Common and was unveiled in 2023.

Other recent acquisitions in diverse mediums include sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, Vanessa German, Leonardo Drew, Kehinde Wiley, Jeffrey Gibson, and Josiah McElheny; an installation by Christopher Myers; textile-based works by Alison Saar; a Bruce Nauman neon work; and mixed-media paintings by Jim Dine and Mickalene Thomas.

But the crown jewel of his collection might just be his acquisition of Judy Chicago’s print archive in 2021; since that purchase, he’s continued to add works by Chicago in other mediums and now owns the largest collection of work by the pioneering feminist artist.

Operating under the aegis of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, the collection is housed in a 50,000-square-foot storage facility in Portland, Oregon, Schnitzer’s hometown; works from it are often be seen in an exhibition space in downtown Portland, as well as at three university museums across Oregon that bear the foundation’s name. Over the past two decades, the foundation has organized over 160 exhibitions that have traveled to some 120 museums. On the philanthropic side, Schnitzer is also a major funder of the new Converge 45 biennial in Portland and the annual IFPDA Jordan Schnitzer Award for Excellence in Printmaking, which comes with a $25,000 grant to produce a new work.

In a way, collecting runs in Schnitzer’s family. His first acquisition came in 1965 via the Fountain Gallery of Art, which was operated by his mother, Arlene. On the back of the painting, a small study from 1965 titled Sanctuary by late Portland artist Louis Bunce, Schnitzer said, reads “The First Piece of the Schnitzer Collection!”

“While I am honored to now have a collection that consists of thousands of paintings, prints, sculptures, videos, ceramics, and glass, this work Sanctuary has never left my side and I look at it every day,” Schnitzer told ARTnews. “Yes, it reminds me of my mother but also of Louis Bunce, who like many artists in many communities, was in the center of the art world in Portland. … I always talk about the importance of supporting local artists. All of us in the Pacific Northwest were lucky to have Louis Bunce in our midst.”

In September 2023, OBM commissioned a monumental art installation by Sarah Cain for its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. “We had to develop commitment and, frankly, the courage to go ahead and paint our entire building with something that’s permanent,” Scantland told ARTnews at the time. “Over time, we think it’s going to be an iconic part of the landscape in Columbus.” (The company also recently opened an art-filled office in Manhattan.)

Scantland’s first art purchase was from a student show while he was in college, and he later supported local galleries. But when he decided to get serious about collecting, he began acquiring works by major artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Bisa Butler, Firelei Báez, and Derrick Adams.

“It was a progression, but has accelerated as I was able to dedicate more time, knowledge and resources,” he told ARTnews in 2023. “I’m not sure I think of being a collector as binary, but rather as a journey. Of course, while it’s a true joy to live with art, I feel equally privileged to be able to build relationships with artists, gallerists, and museum professionals. While I’m always excited about the next acquisition, I find real meaning in being connected with others united by a shared belief in art.”

Today, his collection also includes dozens of closely watched artists, including Felipe Baeza, Lucy Bull, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Somaya Critchlow, Jadé Fadojutimi, Derek Fordjour, Louis Fratino, Jerrell Gibbs, Lauren Halsey, Jammie Holmes, Deana Lawson, GaHee Park, Hilary Pecis, Emily Mae Smith, and Vaughn Spann. In 2021, Scantland and his family made a promised gift of 27 works of art and $2 million for an endowment for community education to the Columbus Museum of Art. That donation is the first wave of promised gifts that will now form the museum’s Scantland Collection holdings.

 “It holds the potential to catalyze what this institution can really do in the space of contemporary art,” CMA contemporary art curator Tyler Cann told Columbus Monthlyat the time. “The ambitions are really to develop a representative picture in our collection of what is happening in art now—in this generation. And that’s huge for any museum.”

Other recent acquisitions to the collection include works by Mary Weatherford, Doron Langber, Rashid Johnson, and Alice Neel. The latter purchase was also spurred by their visit to Neel’s 2021 retrospective, “People Come First,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “We found a phenomenal piece, coming the from the estate that captured the qualities that we really love about Alice’s painting style,” said Steele, who serves as a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

On the business side, Steele has nearly four decades of experience in the tech world, getting his start at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s. He has since served as CEO of several companies and most recently was named president and CEO of Splunk, a cybersecurity firm, in 2022. In September 2023, Cisco announced that it would acquire Splunk for $28 billion, representing the largest acquisition in Cisco’s history and “a massive push into software and artificial intelligence-powered data,” according to Bloomberg; Reuters called the deal “the biggest technology transaction of the year.”

NMACC’s opening was attended by major figures in art (artists Jeff Koons, Mickalene Thomas, Alex Israel, and LACMA director Michael Govan), entertainment (Zendaya, Tom Holland, Priyanka Chopra, Penelope Cruz, and Nick Jonas), and fashion (Gigi Hadid, Christian Louboutin, Prabal Gurung, and Law Roach). The space was inaugurated by two exhibitions: “India in Fashion,” curated by fashion editor Hamish Bowles, and “Sangam/Confluence,” which featured the work of contemporary Indian and international artists and was curated by dealer Jeffrey Deitch and poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote. In July 2023, NMACC opened an exhibition titled “RUN AS SLOW AS YOU CAN” dedicated to TOILETPAPER, the magazine founded by artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari.

In 2019, Nita Ambani was named an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which she has supported since 2016. Among the major exhibitions she has helped fund there have been solo shows for Nasreen Mohamedi (in 2016) and Mrinalini Mukherjee (2019), as well as “Modernism on the Ganges: Raghubir Singh Photographs” (2017) and “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE” (2023).

She is also the chairperson of the Reliance Foundation, which was founded in 2010 and focuses on “aiding India’s sustainable development” in various sectors, including health, education, urban renewal, and arts and culture. Additionally, she founded the Dhirubhai Ambani International School and was elected as a member of the International Olympic Committee in 2016, becoming the first Indian women to join the IOC’s membership.

Reliance Foundation is a nonprofit affiliated with Reliance Industries Limited, a Fortune 500 company that is one of India’s largest private corporations. Founded by her father-in-law Dhirubhai Ambani in 1955, the multinational conglomerate began as a textiles company and now has interests in energy, retail, and digital services, among others; her husband, Mukesh Ambani, currently serves as the company’s chairman and managing director. (As of October 2023, Forbes estimated Ambani’s net worth to be around $91.4 billion.) The company also wholly owns the professional cricket team Mumbai Indians, which has won the Indian Premier League five times.

A venture capitalist by trade, Zurrer is the founder and director of Dialectic and Vine Ventures, firms invested in alternative assets and the psychedelic community, respectively. While he has previously worked on wind turbines and energy distribution, Zurrer began to focus on crypto in 2016, when he became a venture partner at Polychain Capital, a major player in the crypto space during the Bitcoin boom of 2017. He has since become a major evangelist for cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and NFTs, having served for two years as the director of the Web3 Foundation, an organization that funds research and development of decentralized web software protocols.

Zurrer burst into the public eye (of the art world) in November 2021 when he was revealed as the buyer of Beeple’s Human One, a seven-foot-tall sculpture composed of LED screens that display an astronaut strolling through a dystopian landscape. The work, sold at Christie’s for $29 million, is currently on view until January 2024 at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, after previous stints at the Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.

In a 2023 interview with ARTnews, Zurrer said that he feels “a deep sense of mission to help these leading digital artists tell their story and take their rightful place in the art canon.” He further added, “We orient a lot of our efforts to help tell that story and to communicate to museums that these are important generational artists who merit exhibition, critical thought, and academic rigor.”

Earlier this fall, Zurrer, through his 1OF1 collective, and the RFC Collection, led by Pablo and Desiree Rodriguez-Fraile, gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the Museum of Modern Art, where it first went on view in November 2022 and was extended several times into October 2023.

Visitors to it are greeted by a gigantic Louise Bourgeois spider set above a low pool of water, and as they move through a sleek building and its surrounding environs, they’ll also encounter a steel installation by Tracey Emin, Sean Scully’s first-ever sculpture, a Bob Dylan piece resembling a full-size rail car, and Andy Goldsworthy’s Oak Room (2009), a structure formed from trees taken from Burgundy. Those who can afford to spend 800 euros or more a night on a hotel room can also stay at the nearby Villa La Coste.

Paddy McKillen, the developer behind Château La Coste, said he opened the sculpture park with a mind for business. “I don’t want the family to have to wake up some day and feel saddled with this expensive artistic venture, so everything feeds into the success,” he told the Irish Times in 2016, five years after Château La Coste opened. “The winery first and foremost, and the hotel now, will allow the architecture and art to continue.”

Generally, the Belfast-born tycoon keeps his art collection private and instead tends to his business dealings public. Born in Belfast to a father who owned a garage, he entered the family business and has since far exceeded it, becoming one of the foremost hoteliers in Ireland and the surrounding region.

His activities have frequently landed him in the Irish tabloids. In 2015, McKillen made headlines when the Qatari royal family (some of whose members have also appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list) bought the Maybourne Hotel Group, which manages many luxe lodging venues, including the Connaught in London. The deal was thought to have been worth £1.4 billion, and it has continued to follow McKillen, who, in 2022, sued the hotel group, claiming he was still owed 20 million euros. Maybourne, in turn, claimed that McKillen had attempted to hire a “non-gay” person to manage one of the hotels in the group when he still co-owned it, an allegation that McKillen denied.

Within Ireland, McKillen is well-connected. He co-owns the Clarence Hotel in Dublin with U2’s Bono and the Edge. With another one of the group’s members, he also patronized the U2 Tower, a never-realized Dublin skyscraper that was canceled in 2008 as the Irish economy took a turn for the worse. And in 2019, McKillen became involved in a project to build a U2 Visitor Centre, only to be bought out of his ownership by U2 members three years later.