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So, I called Gagosian and said, “Hi, I’d like to buy an Ed Ruscha.” I was on hold for so long! But I did end up speaking with someone and anyway, to cut a long story short, they didn’t have one avail- able, obviously, but I mentioned this whole thing to Stewart. He found one at auction six months later, and bought it for me—that was one of our rst pieces.
For example, we funded Free Friday Nights at the Whitney, and the results have been incredible: the visitor base has become much younger and much more diverse. XC You mentioned an early acquisition of a work by Alicja Kwade, but what was the very rst thing that you and Stewart bought together? JR It wasn’t exactly together, but he bought me an Ed Ruscha—a litho- graph of Jet Baby , the mountain paint- ing. This is actually quite a funny story, because before I was a collector, I didn’t really know how it worked. I didn’t know that you don’t just go to galleries and buy things. So, I’d seen Jet Baby in a photograph online and it really resonated with me—it felt relevant for Away, and I’m always traveling.
works on there that really couldn’t exist anywhere else. The goal eventually is to make it open to the public. XC I know you quite often support younger and emerging artists when it comes to funding major museum shows. JR Being able to support artists, especially in the earlier stages of their career, is a really meaningful thing for me. I’m on the board of the Whitney, and have great relationships with MoMA, the Met and LACMA. If there are conversations already taking place and we can provide the nancial support to make something happen, then that becomes really rewarding for everyone involved: the artists, institutions, galleries and other collectors. And then, on the other end of that, it’s important to us that there’s access to these shows.
XC Talking about the “Cowboy” painting—can you tell me about your foundation in New Mexico? JR We have a ranch in Galisteo in New Mexico, which is about 25 minutes from Santa Fe. Galisteo has a popula- tion of a few hundred people but lots of artists live and work there—Lynda Benglis, Bruce Nauman, Harmony Hammond, Judy Chicago. The ranch has many thousands of acres and the idea is to invite artists to make works there. One of the early pieces Stewart and I bought together was an Alicja Kwade sculpture, and now she is one of the rst artists we approached to do something on the ranch. The idea is that it’s somewhere with fewer boundaries in terms of time and space. We are interested in putting
Above Works by Anselm Kiefer and François- Xavier Lalanne
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Jen Rubio is the co-founder and CEO of Away. She lives in Aspen and New York. Xerxes Cook is a writer and editor who regularly con- tributes to 032c , Interview , Purple and Vogue . He lives in Bali, Indonesia, and London, UK.
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