Wealthy collectors who want to be involved with museums typically donate works, write checks and sit on a board of trustees — these are the essential steps that keep art institutions afloat.
But Ariel Aisiks — the Argentina-born art patron who now lives on New York’s Upper East Side — is on a personal mission.
“My goal is to make sure Latin American artists have a seat at the table,” said Aisiks, 59, of his plan to add to the diversity of museum holdings.
As he gave his first major English-language interview about his activities earlier this year, Aisiks was standing in the exhibition space he founded — the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) in TriBeCa — which is free and open to the public. Aisiks is also announcing that he will open a new branch of ISLAA in his hometown of Buenos Aires in the fall.
Established in 2011 as a hub for his activities, the institute moved to its current location in 2023. One current exhibition features the Mexican artist Magali Lara, who works in a variety of media.
ISLAA has amassed a collection of 15,000 artworks by 800 artists, 677 of which have been lent to museums. Aisiks has donated almost 500 works; he also co-founded a network called the Museum Exchange, which connects donors and nonprofit organizations. The institute has also worked with 20 universities to support research and scholarship in Latin American art.
“I think about the Latin American or Hispanic population approaching 25 percent of the total in this country,” Aisiks said. “But when I look at representation in museums, it’s negligible.”
ISLAA did an informal analysis of the collections of several major U.S. museums, and found that Latin American representation was around 1 percent.
“What he’s doing is seismic,” said Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation, of Aisiks’s work. Dia has a long-term partnership with ISLAA that has included financial support for a show last year of the Colombian artist Delcy Morelos at Dia’s Manhattan branch, and next year’s show of the Argentine artist David Lamelas in the same space.
Estrellita Brodsky, another patron who has made efforts to increase Latin American visibility in the arts, noted Aisiks’s “broad and expansive philanthropy, and his enthusiasm.”
“There’s a sense now that we’ve been ignored,” said Brodsky, who is of Venezuelan and Uruguayan descent and is chair of the board of trustees at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. “Enough is enough, it’s time to be heard.”
She added, “There’s still a lot to be done.”
Having the means to take action is, of course, a necessary starting point. Aisiks started out ahead in life — “I am from a wealthy family,” as he put it. He worked in finance, including a stint at Morgan Stanley, and his purchasing power took another leap when he was an early investor in the Swiss shoe and sportswear company On, which is now publicly traded.
“That is the investment that is funding all of this,” said Aisiks, a former triathlete, pointing to the On shoes that he was wearing.
He generally prefers to make donations to see an immediate outcome — like a show or a seminar — rather than endowing positions for the long term, although he did recently endow a professorship of Latin American art at Bard College.
“I can write a check right away and get it done,” he said.
As for being on museum boards, so far that role is not for him. “There are lots of wealthy people to sit on boards,” he said. (ISLAA does not have its own board, though Aisiks does have advisers and a staff of about 15 people.)
Dia’s Morgan called it “an activist’s approach.” “He’s interested in results,” she said.
In 2020, just before the pandemic, Aisiks was in Madrid when he got talking to his Uber driver, who turned out to be a filmmaker named Manuel Herreros de Lemos. He was the co-creator, along with Mateo Manaure Arilla, of “Trans,” a lost 1982 documentary about trans women in Venezuela.
Last fall, at Aisiks’s suggestion and powered by his donation, the film became the cornerstone of a graduate seminar at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College taught by an ISLAA-funded professor, and it was featured in an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College’s museum.
Aisiks then gave one edition of the film to the Hessel and one to the Getty — an example of how he builds on a single inspiration from his own life and then spreads it around.
Collecting is a family tradition for Aisiks. His maternal grandparents emigrated from Russia to Argentina in 1929. “They were prominent business and cultural people who were persecuted by pogroms,” Aisiks said. His mother’s father used to talk about his cousin, the pioneering filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Growing up in Buenos Aires, Aisiks was surrounded by his father’s collection of modern and contemporary art, which he later inherited. “I was born with art and culture,” Aisiks said. “It was part of Jewish identity. My parents were very philanthropic.”
He recalled that his father turned down the chance to buy a work by Marc Chagall in the early 1960s, and instead used roughly the same amount of money to buy work by some lesser known Latin American artists. “I basically do the same thing,” Aisiks said, adding, “I’m just taking it to the next level.”
Perhaps the most unusual thing about Aisiks’s collecting is his interest in archival material, ephemera and documents — items that have little market value and hence do not interest the average wealthy collector.
The institute’s trove includes around 20,000 graphic artworks and posters; 40,000 reference books; the archives of 168 artists, critics, scholars, galleries and curators; and 863 artist files.
“It’s unusual for a collector to get their hands dirty with ephemera,” Morgan said.
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a top patron of Latin American art, said in an email that Aisiks’s focus on archives and supporting young scholarship “has been on a scale that we haven’t seen before.”
Cisneros, who co-founded the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros of New York and Caracas with her late husband, Gustavo, added, “It’s vital to have good archives for new scholars to consult, and also places for them to publish. Ariel has provided both of these.”
Aisiks said the depth of knowledge provided by archives was important to his mission. “How do I get a museum to hang an artwork?” he said. “I need to get them to understand more about it.”
He also just enjoys nerding out among the papers. “I like spending time in the archive,” he said, noting that he is not as present on the black-tie art dinner circuit as he could be. “This isn’t a personal, social thing for me — I have a responsibility to give back.”
His affinity for getting into the weeds has helped him form close relationships with artists. “He’s very curious to learn more about the process of how you make art,” said the Argentine artist Liliana Porter, who lives in the Hudson Valley. “A lot of people don’t really care about that.”
Aisiks has purchased 30 works by Porter, some of which are now in the ISLAA collection, and some of which have been donated to institutions like Dia. Porter noted that the latter presence made a difference to an artist’s career.
“It’s better to have it in a museum,” Porter said. “It’s more accessible there to everyone, rather than in one person’s living room for one family.”
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