Bloomberg Pursuits has been highlighting artists on the rise as part of an ongoing look at art as an investment.
At Miami’s NADA art fair, which closed on Dec. 10, the booths are small and the aisles narrow, which means galleries do their utmost to set themselves apart.
So it was unusual to see paintings by the same artist—John McAllister, a Louisiana-born, Massachusetts-based artist—hung in two separate booths. One, on display at the Shane Campbell Gallery, was on sale for $30,000 and sold in the first two hours of the fair’s opening.
The second, which was 14 feet wide, was at the booth of James Fuentes Gallery, and by the end of the fair sold for $70,000 to a trustee of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Most of McAllister’s art doesn’t end up at fairs—but recently you could find it at solo exhibitions in six galleries on two continents: Almine Rech in Brussels, Wentrup in Berlin, Carl Freedman in London, Shane Campbell in Chicago, Richard Telles in Los Angeles, and James Fuentes, who was McAllister’s first dealer, in New York. “I fell in love with the work,” says Fuentes. “Its scale, its luminosity at the time, really grabbed me.”
Beyond dealer representation, McAllister has a devoted group of collectors. In 2009, at a solo show in his Lower East Side gallery, “a couple of key figures came to his opening and got turned on to the work,” says Fuentes. “There were like five people in the room, but among them were [Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. co- founder] Marty Eisenberg, [contemporary artist] Mary Heilmann, [poet and writer] Max Blagg, and [critic and curator] Matthew Higgs.”
Other collectors of McAllister’s work include the German aristocrat Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and the Puerto Rican art collector César Reyes.
As opposed to most artists in a similarly anointed position, though, McAllister has garnered all of this goodwill without significant institutional support. Aside from the Rubell Collection in Miami and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, McAllister has been left out of museums’ permanent collections and—with the exception of a few group shows—has largely existed outside of the world of curators and foundations.
McAllister is therefore an extraordinary anomaly in today’s art market, flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that says emerging artists need the so-called establishment imprimatur to survive.
“He hasn’t necessarily gotten the museum support yet, but I think that will come in time,” says Robert Diament, a director at Carl Freedman Gallery. “But it’s an unusual case, definitely. He’s got representation in Brussels, London, it’s unbelievable really, he’s all over the world.” If and when that institutional support comes, his loyal collectors could see an extreme boost in the value of their holdings.