Meet the Collector: Kim Manocherian Is Building Narratives Through Art

Kim Manocherian collects with an artist-forward sensibility. Named for the narrator-heroine of One Thousand and One Nights, her Scheherazade Collection is as eclectic and thematically expansive as its namesake. In addition to the largest private holding of works by the late Portuguese feminist artist Paula Rego, Manocherian lives with pieces by Alice Neel, Jeffrey Gibson, Kara Walker, Natalie Frank, Hernan Bas, Wael Shawky, Louise Bourgeois, Dorothea Tanning, María Berrío, Laurent Grasso and more.

“I’m interested in narratives and storytelling, and my collection is my way of making a collage that tells my story,” she says during a late September walkthrough. Touring the rooms feels like stepping into the tale itself: time and geography compress to weave a fairytale of drama, violence and wit—with women artists and women’s stories at the center. As Scheherazade spun one thousand and one stories to outwit a king, Manocherian’s approach deftly counters the market-driven expectations of contemporary collecting.

Scheherazade is an apt metaphor for her in other ways as well. Although the stories reached English and French readers in the 18th century, they draw on a far older, cross-cultural network of folktales, including from the Indian Panchatantra and the Islamic Golden Age. Manocherian’s collection too synthesizes a diverse nexus of cultures and reference points, including her Iranian heritage.

“As the oldest of five, and because Iranian culture is such a strong male culture, being seen has always been an issue for me,” she tells Observer. “I feel very indebted to the artists I collect. They’ve really helped me express myself.” Persian artists recur throughout. Two prime examples include a projection piece by Farideh Lashai that features rabbits as metaphors for Iranian history and a poignant video installation by Newsha Tavakolian that addresses the restrictions on women singers in the country today.

For 46 years, Manocherian served as CEO of the New York Health and Racquet Club, which was founded by her father, Fraydun Manocherian, in 1973. “Growing up with the family business, I always felt like I was being put in positions I wasn’t qualified for—even with collecting,” she reflects. “But at some point I realized I like what I like, and I trust myself.”

“I don’t want to buy anything where I’m just looking at the dollar number on the wall. Over time you keep looking and asking questions, and it becomes about storytelling and the sense of peace it gives me,” she adds.

This sense of curiosity in the works and in the artists behind them has inspired Manocherian to extend her support well beyond the customary model of patronage. In addition to her donations to the Drawing Center, Art21, the Park Avenue Armory, MoMA and Tate Britain, she also regularly hosts salon-style dinners that bring curators and artists together. One such recent gathering centered on Natalie Frank’s drawings after Grimm’s fairy tales.

In recent years, Manocherian has even run a kind of ad hoc residency in a belvedere on her terrace. She inaugurated the initiative with Jessica Maffia, whom she met while inquiring about a work by Anita Steckel on view at the Art Students League in Midtown Manhattan. After Maffia, a former student of Steckel’s, helped the collector navigate the late artist’s estate, she was invited to use Manocherian’s extra space as an extended studio. The current resident, Dragan Strukelj—Manocherian’s former ballroom dance teacher—trained as an artist in Bosnia and has since returned to painting.

Manocherian is clear that her level of involvement with the residents fluctuates according to an artist’s preference, but she loves the opportunity for direct contact. She points to a private tour of Peggy Guggenheim’s home in Venice as crystallizing her approach.

“I was so moved by her passion and how she cared for artists and invested in them,” Manocherian recalls. “Because I, like everyone else, once dismissed collectors as just buying for value.”

She considers her relationship with Paula Rego—whose figurative work wrestles with grief, trauma, gender and power—among her most formative. Manocherian maintains a room dedicated to the artist’s work, including The Maids (1987), which had to be brought into the apartment by crane. Based on a 1947 Jean Genet play about an actual Parisian mother and daughter brutally murdered by their maids, Rego’s magisterial canvas elevates a genre scene to the register of history painting, with Goya in its DNA. “Every day, Paula lived to paint,” Manocherian says. “But she thought a lot of the art talk was bullshit, so she would change the story all the time. I loved that about her…she was a character who had fun.”

Another throughline in her collection is humor, which she sees as a natural companion to the tales of trauma surfaced by some of her other acquisitions. There are knowing winks from Maarten Baas, Urs Fischer and Nate Lowman, among others. A bust by Marcel Dzama, first presented to her as “the king’s head,” takes on a subtle irony in the context of her holdings and their literary inspiration. Although Scheherazade’s moral instruction reforms the king in the classic tale, a portrait of Manocherian by Rego imagines an alternate ending in which the heroine kills him instead.

Amid the tour of the marquee names on her walls, she pulls out albums that underscore her love of close looking. We leaf through copperplate bird etchings by Stephanie Wilde, an Idaho-based artist whose intricate ink and acrylic paintings simultaneously resemble lacquerware and medieval manuscripts. Manocherian recently donated a painting by Wilde to the Met, the first by the artist to enter the collection. “As soon as I saw her work at the Outsider Art Fair, I thought, ‘This belongs at the Met,’” she says. “There’s a validation in that for me too, knowing I got it right.”

In the same sitting, she shares a binder of her children’s drawings, followed by an album of fabric collages by Louise Bourgeois. “It depends on how you collect and why, but I don’t believe you have to spend a great deal of money to collect,” she shares. “I have pieces from flea markets next to important works, and art by my granddaughter and kids.” A wall off the entrance hall pairs works by Chantal Joffe with prints by her grandfather, a lawyer and self-taught artist.

A sense of discovery continues to drive Manocherian’s collecting. A regular at the annual Visual AIDS Benefit, she remembers the inaugural year, when other attendees assumed she would chase the biggest names. She didn’t—and still doesn’t. “Now I don’t scare them at all because I love finding artists I’ve never seen before. That’s the most exciting,” she recounts. Above all, her intuition governs her acquisition strategy. “If I need to think about a piece, it’s not for me. It’s always such a visceral, heart-racing feeling of needing to look at the work.”

Lately, in light of the unrelenting pace of the art fair circuit, she’s been thinking about access and tempo. All That Glitters, the recent memoir by the former gallerist and disillusioned Inigo Philbrick compatriot Orlando Whitfield, factors in as well. “Orlando Whitfield talks about how the biggest privilege for a collector is access. Orlando really impacted me because he says fairs have actually given us less access, not more,” she notes. “I think we need to return to galleries, to spend more time with art instead of feeling the urgency to see it first.”

Pausing, she adds, “Everything should be more about content and quality, less about quantity.”

Manocherian’s acquisitions are a testament to what happens when content syncs with quality. Every piece in the collection threads into a broader story—one of many tales Scheherazade might have spun. The audience, in this case, is the unrelenting cultural industry that can leave behind artists, collectors and the wider commitment to storytelling. Rather than breeze through one thousand and one nights of fairs, Manocherian’s collection asks us to slow down and linger.

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