“A great collection is a great story,” said the art advisor Joe Sheftel. “Otherwise, it ends up being just disparate objects on someone’s wall, like trophy hunting. There’s a certain cohesion to a good collection—it reflects the people. There’s an authenticity to it.”
It was early afternoon on Wednesday’s Art Basel Miami Beach VIP opening. Sheftel had already completed his initial rounds. He was in town for one day only and had a map and a mission. For Sheftel, it’s all about “narrative,” a word he brings up frequently. Commandingly tall with an art-world ruggedness, Sheftel was dressed in an elevated hiking look, suitable for booth-hopping and ambling the aisles. He pulled a pen out of his sporty side bag and started plotting his next move.
Our first stop was Rodolphe Janssen, where the Brussels gallery had constructed an intimate side room to house 10 of Sanam Khatibi’s exquisite miniature meditations on mortality (eight have sold by day two of the fair). Verdant landscapes are populated by skeletons, lone or in pairs, with titles like Another Year Has Passed But Instead of Remembering I Am Forgetting. The artist, fresh off a flight from Paris, was on hand and chatted with Sheftel. “This is a visceral series,” she explained. “They’re like protection charms.”
“These are not really memento mori, are they?” Sheftel asked.
“Well, yes and no,” Khatibi responded. “It’s something that’s influenced my work. I have a series that’s more like a still life series—large paintings very much influenced by the Renaissance. My work is more about animality and power structures. It’s about nature and chaos. They’re about life. Loving to death. Heaven and hell. Contradictions. Humor. There’s a bit of everything.”
Sheftel said his goodbyes and started searching for his next stop. Many fairgoers he greeted and conversed with in Spanish. Though based in New York, Sheftel hails from Boston but studied abroad. His path in the art world has been circuitous.
After law school, he worked at an investment bank. “It was kind of horrible,” he said. “I always had artist friends that were showing, and I became curious about the exhibition process. I wanted to participate in their careers somehow.” Sheftel made the career pivot to galleries. “I was both under and overqualified,” he noted. “I had the law degree, but no one was quite sure what to do with that.” He started as an assistant and worked in various blue-chips in the Chelsea ecosystem, learning how galleries and the art world worked from the ground up. He ran his eponymous Lower East Side gallery from 2012–2015. He was the first gallerist for Sam McKinnis as well as Alex Da Corte.
“I loved working with artists,” Sheftel said, “but it didn’t seem like a sustainable business model—especially as my artists got more popular. They’d inevitably be scooped up by larger galleries. It’s fun being an incubator for a while, like in one’s 20s or 30s. But as a life decision, it’s challenging.” Sheftel decamped to Los Angeles for a stint as director of donor relations at the Hammer Museum before embarking as a full-time advisor.
At Mendes Wood DM’s booth, Sheftel was taken with Leah Ke Yi Zang’s No. 2 (binary machines), an abstracted, gauzy rendering of a geared machine painted in acrylic on trapezoid-shaped stretched silk. The Chicago-based Chinese artist will have a solo show with the gallery in January. Sheftel stood back and said, “It’s kind of this conception of a universal time machine, something underlying the universe.”
Sheftel was particularly taken with Rubem Valentim’s Emblema 6 (1973). “For a long time, he was relegated to being a folk artist,” said Martin Aguilera, a gallery partner manning the booth. “He was one of the few Afro-Brazilian Neo-Concretists. He was always melding the language of Yoruba cosmology with Latin American concretism. The last few years, there have been incredible retrospectives in Brazil, and there’s a show now at the ICA Miami. I wanted to write my thesis on him in college, and my professor was like, there’s not enough.”
Sheftel has been a longtime fan. “I like the graphic and historical elements that transcend language,” he said. “Brazilian art is remarkable in its ability to function out of time—often being both incredibly ahead of the curve while also exploring ideas from the past that may have been abandoned by other artists.”
A few aisles over, we were stopped by a large-scale work by Khatibi, who also did the miniatures at our first stop. She had wrapped a solo show at P·P·O·W in May, and the New York gallery displayed her oil painting Where Our Love Once Lay, A Dark and Tortured Jungle Grew (2023) on its corridor wall. It’s a sumptuous depiction of a skeletal figure and a nude woman in repose. Their au naturel idyll is littered with various carcasses as moths waft by. Sheftel appreciated both series.
“There’s something about the memento mori that is so intimate,” he said. “To place them by a desk or someplace where you want to think—that’s what they’re meant to be. This idea of reflecting on your life or the ephemerality of life. That’s the power of the small ones. The large ones definitely feel like they have a lot more narrative. The violence is really confusing. Is this seduction? The figure doesn’t seem disturbed, necessarily.”
We headed deeper into the fair. Sheftel’s art advisory business is built through client recommendations and word of mouth. “It’s very intimate. It’s very personalized because it has to do with their taste and where they’re putting their money—big decisions. It’s also about putting together something that’s narrative and interesting. It’s like being a financial advisor and an art expert, needing to be sensitive to both those elements.” Sheftel’s law degree wasn’t a waste. “It comes in handy,” he said. “I’m involved transactionally with people—negotiating transactions and also doing the research around provenance and checking where things come from.”
But it is also about paralleling and intersecting tastes and visions. “No one wants to be dictated to,” he explained. “It’s a working-together situation. I know that sounds amorphous, but I like all my clients, and they all have aesthetic viewpoints that I respect. It’s fun getting into someone else’s brain and finding things that can expand my horizons. I have a client who does a lot of Latin American work. It’s not an area I knew much about, so I got to research and find experts. I have a client who’s moved toward Old Masters. I didn’t have a background in that, but over time, I learned a lot and did a deep dive, which is exciting as opposed to just looking at the newest things.”
Sheftel declined to name specific clients, but when the TV producer Ryan Murphy’s mid-century Los Angeles house was featured in Architectural Digest, he received a shout-out for his art contributions. Collecting and creation go hand-in-hand for that client. “He’s often informed by what he’s doing for television,” Sheftel said. “While he was doing The Andy Warhol Diaries, we saw a lot of Warhols.”
The Pop artist would have been impressed by the Guatemalan artist Rodolfo Abularach’s obsessive ocular theme. There are a lot of his eyeballs at the booth of Los Angeles gallery Marc Selwyn. “His practice was really just depicting eyes,” Sheftel said. “There’s this mythological element to them.”
“We’ve had a lot of people asking about these,” Selwyn said, on the cusp of selling out the works. “One person bought three. I need to put the brakes on.”
Hirschl & Adler Modern has a transfixing Fairfield Porter landscape, View From the South Meadow (1969), where daubs of flesh and raw umber form what seems to be a cliffside. Sheftel thought it would resonate with a client and complement another Porter painting in their collection, such that the two could even be displayed in dialogue. “In terms of quality, this is something you could see in a museum,” Sheftel said. “This also feels very contemporary in many ways. It’s not an old lady painting—there’s a lot of abstraction here too.”
At Matthew Marks’s booth, a wall piece by Alex Da Corte depicted a neon crescent moon with stars. “Alex was the reason I started a gallery,” Sheftel said. “I saw this incredible artist at Yale and was inspired by his practice. There was a whole generation looking at figuration and technology differently. My generation was starting to make work, and it took a minute for the world to catch up. Alex was really at the forefront of understanding that.”
He admired the illuminated sculpture. “Alex is doing a lot with astrology,” he said. “His work always had this element of communicating—what’s the communication behind the communication? It’s like a layered narrative.”