“Being Black, being a woman, being an immigrant, being divorced, being a writer, being a mother—all parts of me are in my collection,” Suzanne McFayden told Cultured Mag in an interview.
The Jamaica-born, Texas-based author has been very open about her collection—not always a given among the art world’s top buyers—which includes the likes of artists Glenn Lygon, Pervis Young, Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu, and Deborah Roberts prominently displayed in her Brutalist style home. . A cornerstone of her collection is Mutu’s 2003 collage I Have Peg Leg Nightmares, which she considers her first serious art purchase. “It started me on the journey that I’m on today,” she told ARTnews in 2021.
It’s not the artists’ notoriety, however, that attracted McFayden. Instead, she collects art based on an almost gut emotional reaction. “I’m only interested in works that move the soul,” McFayden told Artsy of her approach to collecting. “I call it a quickening, usually a blood-rushing sensation I feel in my stomach. It’s an urge that makes me want to get closer, one that lures me in to learn or ask questions. That’s the feeling I enjoy the most, and it really doesn’t happen often.”
In addition to her keen sense for collecting, McFayden is a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem and of the Blanton Museum of Art, where she was named board chair in 2021. She also provided support to artist-founded nonprofits, like Titus Kaphar’s NXTHVN and Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang Community Center. Inspired by the art collecting and charitable efforts of Agnes Gund, McFayden’s other philanthropic endeavors sponsor national and international humanitarian aid to feed the hungry.
She has also helped to pave the way for people of color in a sector that can be difficult to permeate, with a collection of top Black contemporary artists of our time and leadership positions among notable institutions. “We’re witnessing Black artists reclaiming abstraction, allowing themselves to make work that is more radical, more political, and more fluid,” she said of the current moment.