Collector Conversations Writer Alicia Eler tours the home of Chicago collectors Matti Bunzl and Billy Vaughn, who reveal their different approaches to acquiring art as well as the ah-ha! collecting moment that started it all. aspects of our contemporary world called Strange Days. Below the work, it said “Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery.” And we had no idea what that meant. So we just went to Rhona Hoffman’s and bought the piece. That’s how it started.
• Billy: In this piece, she uses a lot of Japanese symbols that she repeats in her works: the lotus flower, cherry blossom, the clouds. So you have these ancient Japanese art undertones overlaid with a sense of the uncanny. • Matti: You see one and you instantly recognize it as an Ohsawa.
Matti (left) and Billy (far right) with friends Kat Parker, Director of Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and Katie Rashid, Director of Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.
“If you want to distill our collection, this is it: highly academic, text-based, queer, racial politics, historicity,” says Matti Bunzl. Matti, his partner Billy Vaughn, and I gaze at three of Glenn Ligon’s Narratives, (1993), in which the queer, African-American artist re-imagines his own life as a 19th century slave narrative. Bunzl, a fast-talking, Austrian-born professor who works in the Department of Anthropology at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and Vaughn, a soft-spoken, Savannah, Georgia, native who teaches social studies at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, began collecting in 2004. Their rich collection is made up of mostly photography and painting and, according to Matti, is “definitely well below 50% Chicago artists, but there is more Chicago in here than any individual city.” The couple splits their time between Chicago, where approximately one-third of their collection lives, and Champaign, where they teach and own a home that houses the other two-thirds of their collection. The two of them were gracious enough to take time out of their busy schedules and give me an in-depth tour of their intelligently curated Boystown condo. Tell me about the beginnings. How did you two meet? When did you start collecting? • Matti: We met in 1993 while we were in graduate school at the University of Chicago, and started collecting together in 2004. We moved to Champaign because I got a position there at the university, and Billy came too and began teaching at University High School. In 2001, we bought a house in Champaign. It took us some time to remodel and buy furniture; after we did that, the next question was what would be on the walls? We decided that we’d outgrown the posters phase, and we had always been into visual art—but not in a serious way.
• Billy: We started thinking about collecting art when we were at the MCA. • Matti: Yes. We went to the MCA once in awhile and, back in 2004, saw this piece by Stephanie Brooks, a Chicago-based artist. It was in a big group show examining unsettling
Asuka Ohsawa, After School Practice, 2006
Rashid Johnson, Signed Clarence Thomas, Uncle Tom's All Stars, 2006, and Glenn Ligon, Narratives, 1993
Speaking of Chicago, is this a Laura Letinsky photograph? • Matti: I really love this piece. We decided we wanted a piece from Mourning and Melancholia, a series where Laura plays with the still life and post-dinner party kind of situation. We looked at the entire series, and we had to decide on what piece to buy. There are seven in the series, and this was Billy’s and my second choice. We had different first choices, so we agreed to agree on the mutual second choice, which doesn’t happen often. I’m particularly drawn to this sort of cartoonish, yet unsettling work. Are the kids with bunny ears, the gorilla girl, and the burlesque dancer, preparing for a freakish, eroticized after-school variety show? • Matti: This is a gouache-on-paper painting called After School Practice, 2006, by a young New York-based Japanese-American artist, Asuka Ohsawa. It’s just weird—we like weird, eerie art. Or maybe it’s uncanny. We bought this at the Aqua Art Fair in Miami, which is unusual because we don’t buy a lot of art at fairs. Billy found it—he is much more open to impulse buying. Well, that’s not the right word. When he sees a piece that he loves, he wants to buy it. That doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s a strong, immediate impulse. Whereas for me, it’s always about research and knowing a whole lot, and becomes about the context and the politics. So art fair purchasing is more the Billy approach. But I did not need to be persuaded to get this.
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You say that you’re also quite interested in purely conceptual work, like this Scott Short piece, Untitled (Orange), 2007. • Matti: Yes, he’s a Chicago-based painter who had a show at the Renaissance Society. He takes a black piece of paper and runs it through a Xerox machine hundreds and hundreds of times until patterns start to appear, and then he paints those patterns. It’s extreme photo realist painting and Abstract Expressionist at the same Scott Short, Untitled (Orange), 2007 time. I was particularly pleased to learn that he had been invited to the 2010 Whitney Biennial. I think the result is totally beautiful, and I can’t wait to see it in New York.
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