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.
New here? Find your fit in five questions ›
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.
The Art Basel and UBS report dropped in March, got read for a week, and went wherever PDFs go to be forgotten. Wrong week to read it. Three months later, Pace has cut fifty artists, Basel week is here, and the data reads like prophecy with receipts. The case for the June re-read, and the three questions to ask it now.
On May 21, a visitor intentionally damaged Clarence Heyward’s Man in the Garden at the Houston Museum of African American Culture: a puncture, and a long cut. The museum filed the report, called the conservators, and then put the damaged painting back on the wall for everyone to see. What happened, what the work means, and why this story cannot get buried.
Pace cut fifty artists and fifty staff in a week, and its CEO called the gallery model unfixable. On the live I argued it was the truth coming out. Then the room wrote back, and some of you were righter than I was. The autopsy, with my corrections in it: the cash-cow line I got wrong, the corporate anorexia the comments named, the reader building her own gallery, and whether art can scale at all.
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.
New Edits, what the field is telling me, and the work worth watching. Once a week, written by Moriah. 600+ readers.
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.