Cesar Cervantes
Mexico City
A restaurateur who doesn’t use consultants for buying art, Cervantes lives in suburban El Pedregal with his collection and his family. Indeed, he considers his art pieces — including works by Abraham Cruzvillegas, On Kawara, Jimmie Durham, and Gabriel Orozco — family members. Only his ownership unites the collection, but he does feel that his profession “is now more influenced by my involvement in culture through collecting art than the other way around.” Most recently he acquired "Dieu," a 1974 work by Robert Filliou he’s wanted for seven years. Yet the thrill never wanes. “I honestly still feel excited about acquisitions made 5 or 10 years ago,” he says.

Bill Clarke
Toronto
Executive editor of Toronto-based Magenta magazine, a journal of international art, his collection has been expanding for 12 years and focuses on works on paper, artist’s books, and multiples from the likes of Christian Marclay and Jonathan Monk, though it also includes an impressive array of pieces by emerging artists.

Moisés Cosio
Mexico City
A producer at Detalle Films, Cosio is already an active supporter of public culture at the young age of 28. Last February he began Alumnos 47, a foundation that seeks to create learning communities for contemporary art, and launched his first major project, a mobile library that travels throughout Mexico City. The project grew out of earlier collaborations with various art institutions (including soma in South Korea and moma in New York) to design community-specific libraries. Even though he has been collecting for only four years, Cosio has made enough of a name for himself to have been included in the “New Collecting: From the Personal to the Political” panel at this May’s edition of arteBA. His collection includes work by the self-taught Mexican artist Dr Lakra, and in 2010 he helped finance a Marxist puppet show by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes.

Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan
Seattle
Gopalkrishnan has always been passionate about art. She once collected ukiyo-e, Japanese wood-block prints, particularly first editions by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, “best known,” she says, “for his violent interpretations of traditional horror stories.” However she lost the collection four years ago and “was left looking at bare walls and a tight budget. Right around that time,” she says, “I began transitioning from a successful corporate career to a more experimental, asymmetric philosophy that I call ‘simply transformative’: the process of aligning outside with inside, image with inspiration, who you happen to have become with who you were meant to be.” This approach guides her nascent lifestyle consultancy venture. “At its core, this philosophy explores contrast and exploration. It rests not in erasure or absolute reconciliation but in that space between sound and silence, journey and destination,” she continues. “This is my commitment, in life and work as in art. I am drawn to pieces that are composed, clean to the touch of the eye, but then invite deconstruction and realignment that is authentic to my experience and aspiration.” Recent acquisitions include work by Canadian artist Tom Burrows, Bratsa Bonifacho, and Izima Kaoru’s "Nagasaku Hiromi wears Louis Vuitton," 2001.  — Orit Gat

Alon and Betsy Kasha
Paris
The Kashas established an interior design firm specializing in renovating and reselling Parisian apartments in 2004; they started collecting art 10 years earlier. “We bought a painting on our honeymoon and decided to buy a work of art each year on our anniversary,” they say. “We buy what we like, not with an eye to investment.” They recently added a 1951 painting by François Willi Wendt to a collection that includes multiple works by John Zinsser, as well as pieces by Richmond Burton, Cindy Sherman, and Louise Bourgeois. Overall though, “it is the younger, lesser-known artists” — such as the sculptor Nils Darsonval and the painter Julien des Monstiers — ”that truly inspire us. This includes furniture designers whose works we have incorporated into our own designs.” The couple’s collecting activities work in tandem with their profession: They often put newly collected works and pieces of furniture into their designs and sometimes sell them to clients.  — OG