Photo Credit: credits to Miami Herald – CARL JUSTE
On a Friday afternoon with a fuzzy phone line, I rung art collector Gary Nader – from my home in London to his in Miami. In comparison to most journalists, I refuse to research who I will interview prior to talking to them, I only conduct my due diligence afterwards. The reason I am doing this is to hope for each conversation to be a genuine encounter.
Gary Nader turned out to be the perfect person to conduct an interview with this way, as he has a strong, bold and confident personality. As soon as he picked up the phone, he took the lead of the conversation and discussed his passion: Latin American artists. Meanwhile, I took a back seat and got ready for the ride.
The Lebanon-born, Dominican-raised publisher and philanthropist, has risen to become one of the most famous collectors of Latin American artists and he is very passionate about collecting art. The very first work he ever bought was the one of Plutarco Andujar when he was twelve years old. Today, Gary owns the largest collection of Latin American Masters with an extensive range of 180 artists with over 120 artworks from Botero.
Why Latin American artists?
At first, it is slightly disconcerting, as Gary was born in Republica Dominican and is 100% Lebanese. Yet, the business man and art collector fell in love with artists who were shockingly unknown in the late 80s – Frieda Kahlo, Roberto Matta, Fernando Botero, etc. Gary saw an opportunity and became one of the earliest collectors to support their works, as he has bought many artworks from Botero at 5% of their value at the time.
When he discovered that most of these Latin American artists lived in France, he moved to Paris to meet all of them in 1988 – as you do! The collector went for a week and loved the French city so much that he stayed for over three months in the Petit Hotel du Louvre. Fast forward to 2017 and he has now travelled to Paris more than 100 times.
‘Everyone talked about Picasso, Chagal, Matisse there – I bought and sold my Latin American artists as I wanted to be their new voice,’ explained Nader.
Paris was then the center of the art world with over 100 galleries, when Madrid had barely twelve of them during the same time.
There is no doubt that Gary Nader is a success story but his own drive feels deeper than success and finance. Art is a necessity for Gary. Art helped build Miami, which was a ‘Damp in the 1980s,’ according to his dad, Roberto Nicolas Nader. Gary wants his favorite city to grow and earn cultural respect, but also show that art has no boundary and can relate to all. He is, after all, a middle eastern man living in Miami and supporting artists from Mexico. So many things in this sentence feel conflicting in today’s politics, yet Gary doesn’t seem to care as art is the only language he wants to exchange with, and he’s perfectly comfortable doing just that.
An advocate for artists since a young age, Marine managed her first gallery at age 21, opened her first art gallery in Los Angeles at age 23 and finally created her current business, MTArt, to promote the artists she believed in across the globe.
