Meet the Collectors Reshaping the Art World Piece by Piece

The first thing you see when you walk into Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. and Janine Sherman Barrois’s house in L.A.’s Lafayette Square is a pair of paintings by Kehinde Wiley and Henry Taylor, icons of contemporary Black portraiture. From there, the couple’s art collection spans every nook of their multiple-structure compound. Works are hung salon-style in narrow hallways and even on the ceiling, as is the case with the enormous Shantell Martin drawing mounted above the living room. “Every time we think we don’t have any more wall space, our installer comes by and finds it,” says Lyndon, gesturing toward a painting they’ve hung directly over a window. “A lot of people have blank walls because there’s this idea that your eyes should rest,” adds Janine. “We would disagree.”

Janine, a TV writer and showrunner, and Lyndon, a visual artist and animation director, have been passionate about art since they met. On their very first date, they had a dispute about whether Lyndon had actually seen the Harlem Renaissance show at LACMA, in 1998. (Janine thought he was simply trying to impress her; ultimately, he did.) In the decades that followed, Janine says, they’ve collected art they recognize as “reflections of us—how we, as African Americans, are seen in the world”: an array of blue-chip superstars like Shinique Smith, Theaster Gates, and Fred Eversley, plus one-of-a-kind acquisitions from early on, when their budget was smaller and neither Black artists nor collectors were really visible in the art world. Deep cuts include a small, spectacular collage of Muhammad Ali layered inside 12 panes of glass, a 1975 work by Harry O. Henry. Another is a black and white photograph by Ming Smith they bought 25 years ago, which has since begun to yellow. The artist recently offered to reprint it, “but we said, ‘We love it, Ming,’ ” says Lyndon. “It looks like it was meant to be that way.”

Early on, Janine dreamt of filling a home with posters from important Black films like Imitation of Life. But as their careers progressed, the couple became more ambitious in terms of the work they could buy and the impact they could make as patrons of the arts. L.A.’s existing generation of Black collectors, including C.C.H. Pounder, Eileen Harris Norton, and Joy Simmons, had set an example. Janine met Simmons at their mutual hairstylist more than 20 years ago, and “I remember thinking, Who is this beautiful, dynamic woman?” she says. “Going to Joy’s home and seeing her live with art was just something to aspire to.”

In Ladera Heights, a historic enclave of L.A.’s Black upper middle class, school groups regularly visit Simmons’s house to do scavenger hunts of her collection. It features works by some of the most important artists of our time, including a 2005 portrait by Mickalene Thomas of the artist’s mother, rendered in acrylic paint and rhinestones, and a 1992 jacket Mark Bradford made of fused hair end papers, now framed in Simmons’s dining room. She made both purchases well before either artist had reached their current superstardom. “Acquiring work from artists at that stage of their career has a bigger impact on them,” she says she realized early on. “That’s when I pivoted to the groundwork of finding younger artists. The special ones.”

Simmons bought her first work, a print by Elizabeth Catlett, when she was a first-year medical student at UCLA, in 1974. A visual learner, she attributes her keen eye to decades of studying MRI scans. She rarely solicits second opinions—not from her husband or even her daughter, curator Naima J. Keith. Simmons simply knows what she likes, she says. “It just clicks.” Her parents were not collectors, but her uncle’s wife, the late Janet Carter, was a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “She was the one who really taught me about the opportunities and the responsibilities of a patron,” she says. “It’s the commitment of time and resources to supporting artists’ careers.” Simmons joined lily white museum boards to advocate for artists of color and help finance their exhibitions. Acquiring work simply to sell for a profit has never been a consideration. During her formative years, “there was nobody to sell to,” she says, because Black artists were so historically undervalued. “You bought work because you loved the work. Your return on investment was living with it.”

In the elite circles of the art world, patronage and advocacy are also about who you bring in. When Simmons was appointed a Stanford University trustee in 2003, she asked Janine if she might want to take her position on the board of the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Plainly, Simmons says, “I wanted Black people in this spot.” As board members, Janine and Lyndon helped fundraise for the museum’s 2009 Barkley L. Hendricks show and offered up their home to host countless events. Simmons later invited them to join the board of the William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts, a prize fund for Black artists established by curator Victoria Dailey and L.A. gallerist Steve Turner. There they met other passionate collectors, such as Dee Kerrison and Gianna Drake-Kerrison. They’ve all become close over the years. “The art world has given us another circle of friends where we’ve all been bitten by this bug of art collecting,” says Janine. “It’s an obsession.”

This West Coast supernetwork that began in L.A. extends to Seattle, with Josef Vascovitz and Lisa Goodman, who met Dee and Gianna on a bus in Mexico City. To be precise, “it was a little passenger van,” recalls Josef, on a VIP tour during the 2015 Zona Maco art fair. He and Lisa took a seat behind Dee and Gianna and began asking the usual questions: Do you come to the fair often? What do you collect? “My sense of sarcasm and Dee’s seemed to blend in well,” says Josef. “It was ‘couple love’ at first sight.”

Today, they are close friends and have happily introduced one another to their respective networks. Lisa, who’s on the board of the Hammer Museum, regularly visits Dee and Gianna’s home when she travels to L.A. They collect many of the same artists but have distinct approaches to how they look. Josef is particularly known for his enthusiasm in seeking out and promoting young artists among his friends. “If I see something that I feel is unique in style, I’ll dig deep. Maybe I’ll see Joy or Lyndon, and I’ll say, ‘Have you heard of this guy?’ ” Once, as Dee recalls, “Josef actually called me and told me to drive to Roberts Projects and buy this artist.” The artist in question was a then relatively unknown Ghanaian painter named Amoako Boafo, who would go on to make major headlines.

Josef traces his passion for collecting back to the early 1990s, when he traveled to South Africa to help launch Microsoft there. He spent his weekends going to local galleries like the Goodman Gallery, Stevenson, and What If the World. The couple’s focus, Lisa says, is on “artists of the African diaspora and Latinx artists, with an emphasis on social justice and/or gender.” Between herself and Josef, she adds, “he looks more from the point of view of technique and surface, and I may get really excited about the story and the narrative.” They were early collectors of Nick Cave’s soundsuits, one of which they donated to the Seattle Art Museum. More recent acquisitions include paintings by Leslie Martinez, Luke Agada, and Sydney Cain, who just earned her master’s in fine arts from Yale.

Now that Josef has retired from the tech and publishing industries, “he spends his afternoons managing the collection and doing research,” says Lisa, who still works full-time as a commercial real estate executive. “I’m also painting people’s animals,” adds Josef, who recently earned a BFA in painting. Lately, he’s been doing portraits of dogs of the art world, including those of artists and museum directors. “I have a very active studio practice,” says Josef, “so if you have pets, you should call me.”

In Dee and Gianna’s high-rise apartment in Orange County, the only surface without art is the one made of floor-to-ceiling glass, with epic views of the mountains in the distance. On every wall, you’ll find pieces from their collection, which is focused on the African diaspora, particularly in the contemporary category of living artists. Their current rehang includes painters like Devin B. Johnson and Simphiwe Ndzube, plus much earlier acquisitions in black and white photography, including a prized vintage portrait of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali by Howard Bingham. When I visited, they each had a painting leaning against a window that they weren’t quite ready to put into storage. Dee’s was a 2005 Gary Simmons drawing of two partially smeared boom boxes, an homage to New York City hip-hop. Gianna’s was a somber portrait of a young man by Kwesi Botchway. “His eyes are so hopeful and wanting,” she says. “When you hang it up, you almost feel as though he’s looking down at you.”

The couple, a pair of wealth management advisers, started collecting about 25 years ago, not long after moving to Orange County. The lifelong New Yorkers had met as stockbrokers at Merrill Lynch before relocating to Newport Beach, where they fell in love with the beauty of the coast and its weather. Still, something was clearly missing. According to Dee, “These folks had never seen any Black folks. Never.”

Dee often went back to New York to culturally realign—“just for a haircut and to get myself together.” On one 2001 trip to Harlem, he saw “Freestyle,” a landmark Studio Museum show that sparked a pivotal question in his mind: Where could he and Gianna buy work like this? Ever since, they’ve been unpacking the nuances of the art world with friends like Joy, Josef and Lisa, and Lyndon and Janine.

“The folks in the art world fulfilled our lives,” says Gianna, who recently joined the board of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. The more artists, curators, and collectors came over for dinner and a walk on the beach, the more Orange County felt like home. Their exchanges about art with their friends are ongoing. “We agree more than we disagree,” Dee says, then adds with a smirk: “With one exception—when Josef claims that he met an artist first, like I didn’t introduce him.”

Hair and Makeup For Sherman Barrois, Barrois SR., Simmons, Drake-Kerrison, and Kerrison by Amy Chin for Chanel at Forward Artists; Fashion Assistant for Sherman Barrois, Barrois SR., Simmons, Drake-Kerrison, and Kerrison: Jesus Herrera; Hair and Makeup Assistant For Sherman Barrois, Barrois sr., And Simmons: LaQuisha Seams; Hair and Makeup Assistant For Kerrison and Drake-Kerrison: Daja Hartman.