Top 200 Collectors

J. Patrick Collins is the cofounder, president, and CEO of Cortez Resources, a Dallas-based company in the oil and gas industry.

Though no one else in his family buys art as seriously as him, Collins represents the next generation of collectors within Dallas, which has long been known as a hub of major U.S. art patrons. “The collecting scene in Dallas has continued to strengthen as new players emerge on the scene focusing on emerging and contemporary art,” Dallas Art Fair director Kelly Cornell told ARTnews in 2020.

In high school, Collins wrote a term paper on the 20th-century movement Dada, which spurred his lifelong love of the arts. Though his degree from Columbia University in New York is in modern European history, he made sure to take a class with the revered critic and scholar Rosalind Krauss. That soon led to his first art purchase: a painting by Ryan McGinness.

Collins, who is in his early 40s, has since focused his collecting on buying the ultra-contemporary, estimating that around three-quarters of the collection is by artists his age or younger. Among those artists, who work in various modes from painting and sculpture to photography and video and more, are Tom Burr, N Dash, Danielle Dean, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Jill Magid, Christodoulos Panayiotou, and Patricia Treib. (He’s even become close friends with many, telling the Aspen Art Museum in 2022: “I prefer the company of artists.”)

Collins also serves on a number of museum and arts nonprofit boards, including the Dia Art Foundation, El Museo del Barrio in New York, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. He is on an advisory committee for the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and previously served on the boards of the Dallas Museum of Art and the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.

“I prefer to think of art as a cultural good,” Collins told the Aspen Art Museum. “I try to support artists in what they do. … I’m passionate about helping artists achieve their goals.”