Investigating what it takes to build sustainable careers, collections, and ecosystems in the art world. Profiles, interviews, criticism, and market analysis — each piece an investigation into how success actually gets built. Written by Moriah Alise.
Twenty years painting Black leisure — pools, rafts, cookouts, beach days — as if the work didn't need a defense. A Zoom conversation with the artist and his longtime curator Dexter Wimberly on refusal, what success looks like at the top of the market, and why he stopped explaining.
A response to the Def Jam piece. The art world has a representation gap: the artist is the only person in the room without dedicated representation. One institution doing four jobs the music industry figured out needed to be separate. What it would take to build the missing layer.
Whether it’s a self-hosted exhibition, a gallery show, a pop-up, or a studio open — the planning work is the same. Twelve stages, the order they go in, the budget honesty most exhibition guides skip, and the worksheet that handles the deep execution. A practical guide for emerging and mid-career artists planning a real show.
Artists afraid their work isn’t ready. Collectors afraid they’ll buy the wrong thing. I’ve sat with enough of both to tell you it’s the same panic — different chair, same fear. A note on the mirrored paralysis that keeps both sides outside the room, and what it takes to move anyway.
New York is still king. The map widened. Both are true — and artists pitching only the old one are leaving real money on the table. Mexico City. Lisbon. Dallas. Detroit. Twenty percent of high-net-worth collecting now happens direct-from-studio. A field note on the four cities where money moved, the bigger shift underneath them, and what to do about it if you’re an artist, a collector, or a gallery.
A $181M Jackson Pollock. An Alice Neel up 87% overnight. A foundation buying four emerging artists straight into museum collections. Three headlines, one week, one story — and it isn’t the one everyone is leading with. Different markets, different rules, and the question that actually matters: where is the gathering?
A panel at GloryLand 2025 with Ayesha Selden, Lester Marks, and Richard Beavers on what serious collecting actually requires. Cultural wealth before financial wealth. Five-to-ten percent asset allocation. Lineage painting. The pipeline. The ladder back down. The conversation most of the market never says out loud.
They did not just enter museums. They reshaped how museums think, how communities are mapped, how images move, and how Black life is allowed to exist on its own terms. A meditation on what extraordinary actually means — and the eight contemporary practitioners who have earned the word.
People love your work. They DM you. They share it. And then it goes quiet. The space between “I love this” and “I’ll take it” is not a mystery — it is a five-stage funnel with five known friction points.
Most artists are still waiting for someone to give them a show. They will wait a long time. Self-hosting is the position you take when you stop — and the practical work that makes it possible.
In 2023 I made a video on ten of the most influential living Black painters. It became one of the most-viewed things I've ever published. A reflective field note on what the list did, why I have stepped back from the format — and the one condition under which I will make another: as an entry point, not a destination.
The Met's $3.5B endowment. MoMA's $110M annual gap. Brooklyn's Cranach. Baltimore's Warhol. The 5 percent of any collection that's ever on view. With named institutions and real numbers — how museums actually make money, and what most artists never get told.
Three years in, in a market the founder of 154 herself called deflated, her artists keep selling out — and the pattern is no longer accidental.
The moment a collector takes possession of an artwork, the infrastructure that supported the sale collapses — leaving them to navigate care, documentation, and protection entirely alone.
What it means to move careers without ever signing the check — and the relationships that make institutions follow you, not the other way.
On the quiet contract between platforms and the brands that fund them — and the difference your audience can smell from across the room.
The infrastructure that built hip hop into a global cultural force has direct parallels for the next generation of artist-led galleries. Distribution, tastemakers, and why the art world keeps trying to do it alone.
A working theory of Houston as the most underestimated art city in the country — and the collectors quietly making it the proof.
The most intentional fair I've covered. Black-owned galleries holding the floor. And what happened when I asked dealers, publicly, what actually sold.
They sent a team to my home, packed four large-scale works, and walked me through the entire chain of custody. This is what a working art-storage partnership actually looks like.
The artists doing the best work right now are saying no to as many things as they say yes to. A note on what that costs and what it makes possible.