An Inside Look at Why a Private Museum Is on Every Major Collector’s Wish List

The newest crop of collector-founded exhibition spaces is as diverse as the people who established them and the art they house. Some come from relative newcomers to art buying who are experimenting on a smaller scale, and others from veterans who have already set up full-fledged museums. Unifying the recently opened private art spaces around the world is not the drive to create vanity projects to show off trophies but rather a desire to complement and augment the existing art ecosystem in each location.

Real estate developer René Campos, working with curator Sacha Zerbib, displays contemporary art in an intentionally sparse, converted warehouse setting. “Masquerade,” the inaugural show at Ostillo, which opened in September in Austin, Texas, features works by Kader Attia, María Berrío, Marlene Dumas, Glenn Ligon, and Adam Pendleton. The show highlights 14 pieces of the total 90 in the collection, which continues to grow. “I don’t want to see a lot of works on a wall. It just becomes clutter,” says Campos. Since his collaborator agreed that less is more, they cut down the size of the initial exhibition to accommodate the power of a single piece: Thomas Schütte’s striking bronze Fratelli (2012), composed of four busts. “That’s the one that everything is made around in the show, and it has a gravitas that attracts like a magnet,” Zerbib adds of the work.

For Campos, who has been acquiring for a decade, part of the motivation for founding Ostillo was to bring publicly accessible art to a part of town that does not have much: the historically Black neighborhood of Rosewood in East Austin. “We’ve got great museums in Austin,” Campos says of the city’s cultural scene, noting that institutions that accept public money, such as the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin, have guidelines and limitations. Hence, the value add of a privately funded venture like Ostillo. “We have a sense of freedom.”

Home to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Fondazione Prada, and multiple spaces from billionaire François Pinault, Venice may already be a capital of the private museum, but in April, fashion designer Dries Van Noten and his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, introduced something entirely different with the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, housed in a 15th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal. The debut show, “The Only True Protest Is Beauty,” engagingly spans jewelry, fashion, glass, and more to celebrate craftsmanship across disciplines.

Also joining the party in La Serenissima is Italian collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, who has long established herself as a major force in the art world. Her namesake foundation operates in her hometown of Turin and Guarene, a hamlet in the countryside near Alba. In May, she opened the Venice outpost with a sampling of her 1,500-piece collection. “I really believe it’s important to have another space in Italy,” says Sandretto ReRebaudengo. “People are paying more attention to contemporary art.” The indefatigable collector is even planning on a Madrid branch as her next act.

The unique Venice venue for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is the island of San Giacomo, a tiny dot in the city’s lagoon with a rich history. With more than 10,000 square feet of exhibition space across two buildings, plus a sculpture garden, the new foundation is powered by solar energy and draws water from an old well. “We work in an ecological and sustainable way,” she says, emphasizing the city’s fragile environmental status.

When Sandretto Re Rebaudengo began buying art, in the early 1990s, she focused on certain categories, such as women artists, makers from Italy and Britain, and sound and video installations. She has since widened her aperture and has a particular love for commissioning new works. “I never acquire for decoration or possession,” she says. “My collection pays attention to life in this moment and what artists say about it.” Her opening presentation in Venice consisted of three shows, including an exhibition of British artist Matt Copson’s work curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and a display of her own collection’s highlights.

Jorge M. Pérez—whose name is already on the Pérez Art Museum Miami and who also oversees El Espacio 23, a more intimate venue in that same city—is another collector who is adding a destination to his portfolio. He hopes to inaugurate a by-appointment sculpture park on his property just outside Aspen for the 2027 summer season. Visitors will be able to see more than 100 outdoor pieces by such standouts as William Kentridge, Robert Indiana, Henry Moore, Jim Dine, and others.

Pérez’s move comes from a deep need to share his art. “I can’t look at 9,000 pieces every day,” he says. “It’s got to be for something more than that.” He notes that he has never sold an artwork, creating a critical mass that demands to be seen. Another way he hopes to add to the conversation: contributing to arts education for younger audiences is. “The public sector can’t do everything,” he states, echoing Campos.

A private museum is always personal, but when it’s founded by an artist who uses it to show his own work, that ethos is magnified—as it was for Jean-Marc Bustamante, who opened the Fonds Bustamante this past summer in Arles, France. The deconsecrated stone church, which architect Charles Zana renovated in a chic, minimal, and friendly way, joins other institutions in Arles, including mega-collector Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Arles.

Bustamante, who has gained acclaim for his multifaceted conceptual work, thinks market pressure has been an atomizing and isolating force. “With the globalization of the art world, we are like floating islands,” he says. He sees the new project as a version of the Greek agora, or town square, which promotes dialogue and community.

Open through the end of October, the foundation’s inaugural exhibition, “En Miroirs,” showcases works by Bustamante (though only about a quarter are by his own hand) as well as Cristina Iglesias, Alice Anderson, Rodney Graham, Franz West, and Mariella Simoni. “I have a big network of artists all over the world,” he says. “It’s a dream for me to do this, and the show is like a poem.”

For Becky Gochman, the forthcoming November opening of her storefront space called Branchline in Katonah, New York, represents the next step in a logical progression. The longtime collector agrees with Pérez, saying of the nearly 800-piece Gochman Family Collection, “We want the art visible.” Already, some of it is viewable by appointment to visitors at her homes in New York and West Palm Beach, Florida. (She has a residence close to Katonah as well.)

In 2021, with former dealer Zach Feuer, she founded the Forge Project in New York’s Columbia County, a center for Indigenous art and artists—now spun off as a separate nonprofit.

To oversee the Gochman Family Collection, including Branchline, Gochman hired curator Laura Phipps away from the Whitney Museum of American Art—quite a coup—to be its director. The storefront off Katonah’s main street will eventually be expanded from the back, stretching into a converted barn and an annex building, with a design by Elizabeth Roberts Architects.

Gochman is keeping the focus on contemporary Native art. “We’re about getting funding into artists’ hands,” Gochman says. In opening Branchline, she adds, she is “giving something to the local community and staying loyal to our artists by giving them an exhibition space.” The opening show, “Line Break,” will feature works by 18 talents across different mediums, including Jeffrey Gibson, Faye HeavyShield, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. The name Gochman chose reflects her nuanced approach to making a private museum—each of these institutions can do its small part to get art out into the world and doesn’t have to bear all the responsibility itself. As she puts it, “we’re just a branch.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Foundational Wisdom.” Subscribe to the magazine.