Although I've always loved art, I hadn't taken collecting seriously until recently. I've realized the importance of documenting some of the pieces I've acquired over the years, and I plan to continue adding to my collection and watching it grow. In this document, I'm including photos of my pieces (or similar ones) along with brief blurbs about the artists and how I came across their work. I'll be displaying them in the order in which I acquired them.

I acquired a photograph by Beltran Petrica at the Iberoamerican Art Fair in Caracas back in 2010. It was the first piece I bought with the money I made from working at a booth at the fair, and it's the only belonging that I've brought with me everywhere I've lived. The photograph is a vibrant depiction of Plaza Venezuela, a center for some of the most iconic buildings in the city of Caracas. Although the artist seems to have crawled under a rock since then, this photograph remains a cherished part of my collection

Diana is a Venezuelan-born photographer and videographer with a background in architecture based in New York City. She’s worked on projects in the food, fashion, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, videography, and camera department work for film, television, commercials, and digital media. We went to school together and collaborated on several projects during my first couple of years in New York.

She gave me a lovely photo of myself and Joanna Hausmann hiding from the winter in a Berkshires shed. I have it in a huge wooden frame in my office. I couldn’t take a good photo of it so here’s another cool picture by Diana of me drinking in the woods.

Fabiana Viso was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1981. She received her BA at the Maryland Institute College of Arts and currently lives and works in New York City. We’re related through my wife and I’ve always admired her work. We were very excited to be able to have one of her pieces in our first apartment in Los Angeles.

Working with analog photography, Fabiana Viso’s work deals with the experience of space; how we structure lived space and relate to it. The artist disassembles and classifies lived space with the intention to point out things that routinely go unnoticed. The work focuses on the way we understand space, by juxtaposing a quantifiable, homogeneous mathematical notion of it, with the heterogeneous structure of it as we experience space.

Her photographs force the viewer to search for clues within the frame in order to reconstruct what was left out and to question the mechanism used to reproduce the image. It aims to remind the viewer that the power of a photograph lies in what has been left out of the frame.

Seohui Chi is a freelance illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. While working as a fashion technical designer at brands such as Marc Jacobs and Rachel Zoe, she found her passion for fashion illustration as she loved to draw clothing rather than make them. Since then, Seohui has been illustrating things she loves which include (but are not limited to) fashion, lifestyle, and food.

I found her work through With Warm Welcome, a passion project supporting the need for more Asian representation in the food, beverage, and culinary community. She had drawn two beautiful hyperrealistic food prints that I was lucky enough to acquire to support Asian restaurants during the pandemic. Mine are a Chinese beef noodle soup on a tiled kitchen counter and a plate of bloody beef with bok choy in a burgundy setting. I couldn’t find them online so here’s some of her more recent food work.

A dear Venezuelan friend, currently based in Oakland, California. Figueroa works in drawing, photography, video, and sculpture. He has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Cooper Union (BFA), and recently received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been exhibited at Southern Exposure, Embark Gallery, and Root Division, located in San Francisco, California; at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá, and at Longwood Arts Project in New York.

He’s best known for his map-like drawings that document (in playful detail) his surroundings, Figueroa is a keen observer of life. He is interested in the role colonization and imperialism have played in collapsing geography onto itself and seeks to revise these spaces and histories by creating a queer atlas. A self-described "impressionist" his recent travels to Paris, Tennessee, and around San Francisco have provided much inspiration for his growing archive of queer spaces: clothing-optional beaches, clubs, Rupaul Drag Race viewing parties, yoga retreats, among others.

As soon as we moved to the Bay Area, we ransacked his studio and acquired several of his pieces, ranging from my beloved large-scale painting of Hermes depicted below to some of his original photo-performance photographs mocking consumerism, and smaller sculptures of his dog Cholo.

I’m infatuated with Fernando himself and the delicacy of his portraits. His photographs are incredibly beautiful and I hope to own some at a later date. For now, I happened to have run into some initial prototypes of mobile sculptures that he had been creating. I have two cherished pieces that are hanging in different places in my home: Cala & Slaabs.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1989, he studied Architecture at the Central University of Caracas, the place where he discovered his passion for photography. In 2013 he moved to New York where he did studies in photography, graduating from the International Centre of Photography's General Studies program in 2015. Having reached a high level of technical skills in the practice of photography, he conceives fine art imagery through architectural concepts. He’s currently based in New York where he works as a freelance architectural and portraiture photographer, digital post-production, and fine art printer

I met Alison at a Wondrous Fungi event at The Exploratorium After Dark. I was taken aback by the macro level of detail that goes into her photos. She diligently hunts through the Marin forest for the tiniest slime mold and has nailed a magical formula of merging hundreds of photos to provide a level of detail and magnified effects. The slime mold I chose looks like funny candied gummies. I printed it large and try to have it near my dining room. You can listen to her describe her process in this podcast. Be sure to follow her @marin_mushrooms

Some other highlights in the porcelain or sculptural side of my collection include a Blue Meanie cookie jar inspired by The Beatles Yellow Submarine film and a Fornasetti Plate depicting the face of opera singer Lina Cavalieri with binoculars.

I love Kehinde Wiley and purchased one of his limited edition Morpheus Basketball. He sells affordable collectibles on his site, which help support the artist in residence program Black Rock Sénégal, founded by Wiley in 2019. Lastly, I’m exploring acquiring a James Rosenquist print now that I’m expanding my collection to focus more on Pop Art and Photorealism.

For smaller objects of art and design that I’ve collected throughout the years you’re going to have to wait to check out my 2023 Life in Objects project get completed.