Benedicta M. Badia de Nordenstahl, Singapore - MEET THE COLLECTOR Series Part thirty-one
Benedicta M. Badia de Nordenstahl is an Argentinian Art Collector currently living in Singapore and she makes up part thirty-one of my ‘Meet the Collector’ series. I was introduced to Benedicta from Debra Kerr at Intuit and it seems she has lived a life of traveling, feelings of non-acceptance, but some incredible art along the way. Read on to find out more …
Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl at the Hilma af Klint exhibition
1. When did your interest in the field of outsider/folk art begin?
The first time I learnt about it was when I discovered Intuit in Chicago. Without even realising it, I have always been an advocate for artists in the periphery. (probably because I belong to the periphery) So while I was studying Museum Studies with Deb from Intuit in Northwestern University in Chicago, when one of my peers presented Intuit in an assignment paper, I fell in love with their mission immediately and I started researching them and later became a volunteer. Looking back, I know the seed had been planted by my mentor Thomas Cohn, who was a German Brazilian Gallerist, but who also was an avid collector of Brazilian folk art. He said to me once ‘I love artists that don’t know that they are producing art, who are not conscious of it.’ And that statement has kept me interested in this kind of art ever since.
2. When did you become a collector of this art? How many pieces do you think are in your collection now? And do you exhibit any of it on the walls of your home or elsewhere?
I didn’t realise I started collecting folk art. I have probably been buying folk art all my life. The first contemporary artwork I bought was by an artist who would never ever be labeled as an outsider artist in Latin America, but who would meet the ‘outsider’ criteria: Sonia Gomes. All her work was made from fabrics, thread and objects from her life and the environment around her, even her clothing does, often with autobiographical themes. Now, I realise I have always been looking for this sort of artworks. I would say I have around 20 pieces of folk/outsider art, but I mainly collect Latin American art. Most of the works are at home. I think outsider/folk art expresses collective thought the same way contemporary art does, but it stems from another realm. I am very much interested in the sociological and anthropological questions of this cultural production and lines of thought. Even though outsider artists are not fully conscious that they are producing art, they still show collective values and concepts. For example, Henry Darger: even within his fantasy and disconnection from reality, he was still aware enough to realise he did not have the skill to masterfully draw. In the back of his mind he was able to bridge this by tracing images from picture books. In his use of colour, there are no random decisions, he was cognizant of how colours are “charged” by society and conventions.
I see an extreme fluidity in how outsider/folk artists express themselves and it is very unique. So hanging in my house you will find contemporary art next to a Mexican self-taught artist’s ceramic, and I crave those combinations. Many people that visit the collection are usually drawn to the folk/outsider art works, probably because they come from the contemporary art world – and the eclectic components and the emotional and intelectual liberties I take to make up my collection intrigues them.
A short description of my collection: It can be described as young, eclectic, vibrant and very active. I understand that cultural production’s social impact plays a key role in transforming collective thought. I seek young artists that challenge the political and socio-economic status quo, disrupt stereotypes, gender roles and aesthetics givens. With my collection I aim to converse in the dialogues and debates of our times for a better future.
Inside the Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl residence
3. Can you tell us a bit about your background? I read online that your practice as a collector has extended to advocacy, education and support across the whole arts ecosystem – please could you explain this further.
I studied Human and Social Sciences in the Argentina, applied to Fine Arts - basically a lot of history and theory of art and I have kept studying all my life. I sit down to analyse art more than two hours per day. A true nerd. I started working in the art business in my mid-twenties. I have worked in every role you can imagine: from museums, galleries, magazines. I’ve given guided and coordinated tours for art fairs, received shipments and crates, designed talk programs, helped to stretch canvases and so on. While I was volunteering at Intuit, I usually rolled up my sleeves and simply asked: what do you need me to help with today?
Around 2007 me, my husband and children left Argentina to move to Puerto Rico, then to Mexico, after Chicago and now Singapore. My husband says I am like a gipsy cart of art, books and objects all tied to me and that I walk around surrounded by these jiggling objects. I have always been very visceral in the way I buy art and protective of that amorous bond. In the last five-six years I have realised that I wanted to develop a narrative to project artists’ voices. So, I went from buying separate objects randomly to systematically thinking and organising the collection to develop connections and building bridges between them.
Amongst other patronages, I am on the Guggenheim Museum’s Latin America Circle Acquisitions Committee, Patron of Terremoto Latin America magazine and I am a second-generation Founder and Board member of Intuit. Apart from supporting financially, I also try to help by bringing my education and background to the equation. Often times helping establish new connections and/or ways to articulate concepts that can make people look at things in a different way. While we lived in Chicago, together with some friends, we set up a group of international women and started a series of ‘Art Encounters’ at pre-selected exhibitions. I would choose one show in Chicago and a concept that I ran through when I was working within this group. We challenged ourselves to work with the concept of competence. Competence is the set of skills and knowledge needed to decode something. Incompetence is probably the main detractor from contemporary art. The majority of people feel incompetent in front of art, because they don’t understand it. When you feel incompetent you feel uncomfortable. Nobody voluntarily wants to feel uncomfortable. I try to make people see that it is okay to feel uncomfortable. Actually, we all do, they are not alone and you should embrace that discomfort. It is one of art’s key roles: To question. We looked at art together, proposing questions like: ‘Who do you think the artist is talking to? Who is the intended spectator? What was his intention? What can we read from it without knowing the history?’
Being an expatriate, an exile, is one of the biggest griefs for a human being and the ultimate incompetence experience. When you move to another country all the set of skills you have built up across your life become useless… it’s a humbling situation. So, by definition, I have always felt like an outsider myself. This is one of the main reasons Intuit is so important to me.
inside the Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl residence
4. Debra Kerr from Intuit in Chicago mentioned that you were passionate in Latinx artists – can you explain this interest to us and when/how it started?
I have to make a big clarification here. The concept of Latinx resonates more with the Latin American political agenda in the US. It is about issues and problems that do not preoccupy Latin Americans that are actually living in Latin America. I would say I am a collector of Latin American art not of Latinx art. Yet, I am also conscious I am indeed a Latina living in the US realm and I am very aware of the responsibility of representing that voice, so I push my fellow patrons and others to reflect about how do we want Latin American Art to be represented in the US. The space we do not occupy, others will and I am against someone else telling me who I am supposed to be.
5. What style of work, if any, is of particular interest to you within this field? (for example is it embroidery, drawing, sculpture, and so on)
I don’t discriminate by media or gender or geography (or anything) - I am open and really have no preference. It has to be art that is poignant and many times confronts me to my own privilege. I like art that engages in social issues, or artists who have found a new way of talking about certain matters. Since we are born, we are trained and indoctrinated by concepts of beauty, what we should “consider beautiful” or not. For example the use of colours, e.g. the mandates that brown is bad (yucky) but pink is good for “girls"… I like artists who push the concepts of beauty or mock society’s givens. Many times I have bought works that are not ‘finished’ or are broken and my husband has said ‘Can you stop buying broken things?' But I find the questions ‘When is an artwork finished? And who says so?’ fascinating. ‘Can we cope with the discomfort of an unfinished work?’ As I travel a lot, I have found that other cultures deal with the answers to these questions differently. For example, the Japanese culture and their view of a broken object; Their gold welding technique is used to patch broken ceramics back together. It is a society that, by convention, has surpassed the functional-form cannon and still sees beauty and worth in a broken object.
I also push a lot for ‘why?’… for example if an artist is using 3D printing as a material, I want to know why and what are the artist’s demands from the material? What is the artist really trying to force the material to do? Do they want it to behave in a certain way? I love it when the material fights back and the artist cannot completely control it to his own will. Material choices, have to have meaning and significance, not just like everyone else doing 3D printing because it is the cool thing to do.
Inside the Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl residence
6. Would you say you had a favourite artist or piece of work within your collection? And why?
I don’t have a favourite artist or work. As I was saying I nest. It’s me, at home, sitting down in any regular afternoon reading… it’s when I light a scented candle and see the conversation between the works hanging on the walls, it is the compilation of all of them that makes it special. Sometimes I have to rehang the whole house if I buy a new work that “fights” with the others, just so that it all feels right again. All of them are like friends and have a connection and a dialogue - they establish visual rhythms. I enjoy looking up from my book as my eyes jump from one to the other. I do not see them as an individual work, but as parts that conform my nest. Art is a source of extreme joy and pleasure for me, and I take my role of giving back as much joy as possible and sharing my pleasure with others seriously.
7. Where would you say you buy most of your work from: a studio, art fairs, exhibitions, auctions, or direct from artists?
I buy art from galleries and in art fairs and not from artists directly. Last year I visited more than 14 art fairs across 14 cities. Since I mainly buy primary market, I think the gallery is a key component of this eco-system. It is stupid to go behind the gallery and straight to the artist. The gallery is the champion of the artist and it would be disempowering them. I have a soft spot for the young gallerists, specially because no one helps them since there are almost no Institutional/State funds available for them. How do they learn how to be a gallery? It is usually just trial and error for them, which is a very expensive process and a waste of money they didn't have in the first place. I have a very close relationship with galleries I buy from… and try to advocate and empower them. My Collector’s Residency in Delfina Foundation in London will focus on – (Collecting as a practice) giving young emerging galleries tools to be competitive and viable long-term.
8. Is there an exhibition in this field of art that you have felt has been particularly important? And why?
Not important per se, but some that really expanded my scopes. I have been doing groundwork of what an art fair can give a collector like me and what I can give back, as well as how to broaden my lines of thought. I see a trend in a lot of collectors that are tired of the saturated markets in the northern hemisphere. We want to be challenged. When I refuse to go to see a new Andy Warhol show, it fells like it is almost a sin. But ‘How many exhibitions of his work I am expected to see in my life?’ I would rather visit a new gallery out of the beaten path.
My highlights in the past year were: Art Basel Hong Kong, the Sharjah Biennial at the United Arab Emirates and the Dakha Art Summit in Bangladesh. In these three I was pushed, challenged and confronted with realities that I could not manage easily in terms of art, culture and socio-economic situation. When I came back home I had morphed into someone else. My views had changed completely after them.
For example, in Hong Kong there is an amazing place called Para-site – it blew my mind. And sometimes a certain art fair is uneven in quality but the institutional exhibitions in the city make up for it. During Zona Maco 2019, Mexico’s institutional shows were fantastic. I found intelligent risk at the core of them – and they were not just pushing the limit for the sake of it.
inside the Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl residence
9. Are there any people within this field that you feel have been particularly important to pave the way for where the field is at now?
No. I strongly believe in community, generosity and inclusion formulas. Anyone who we have ‘glorified’ in the art world is probably separating himself from the organic mesh where everything that matters happens, in many cases alienating themselves. I strongly believe in collective thought. I remember studying a collaborative Brazilian literature genre that used to be hung on clotheslines with pegs “Literatura de cordel”. These stories where hung on clothesline in public spaces and then people would read them and bring them back to the clotheslines. Sometimes a character was murdered, and the community did not like it, so later on, by ‘popular demand’ the character magically came back to life. I enjoy this kind of cultural production as an adaptive mechanism. It is a simbiosis stemmed from the need of a socially precarious reality, where culture is being produced and shared collectively. So, no, I could not single out one person that is more important than another. I do respect merit, but we are all the same, humans beings.
10. When did you become a board member of Intuit and what drew you to this museum?
I became a board member at Intuit around five-six years ago, because I saw how some outsider artists are somewhat vulnerable in certain aspects. I think there is a huge ethical and moral question in who profits from the work of outsider artists. They are a vulnerable group of artists that could be easily poached by the unscrupulous.
Non-commercial places like Intuit, champion these artists and set ethical guidelines to protect them. On the other hand, Bill Traylor’s work has recently been shown at David Zwirner in New York and I am worried. I hope these guys understand what they are doing and where they are going. Last year (2019) I loved Javier Tellez’s curated outsider art booth at Frieze New York. Javier is an extremely intelligent Venezuelan artist and well loved, his curating was fantastic. Then I saw the incredible show of Outliers at LACMA. I am happy to see the increase of outsider art featured within mainstream contemporary art venues, but I worry on ‘how’ are we crossing that threshold between the outsider world to the cut-throat contemporary art market. Specially in cases where artists are still alive.
Another reason why I joined Intuit was because I am Latina and when we moved to Chicago, both myself and my kids found it extremely difficult to adapt. I would say we suffered a lot for the first two years. When my eldest daughter started the process to go to college, I went back to my roots and decided to enrol in Museum Studies certification in Northwestern University in Chicago. That is where I met Deb. She was my teacher, and read my opinionated papers. Initially when she called me to be a volunteer at Intuit, I asked her ‘Are you sure?’ Because she knew, I like to stir the pot, question everything and challenge the state quo. After volunteering for around a year and a half, Cleo and Deb asked me to become a board member. After being unable to feel at home in United Sates, when I started volunteering in Intuit, I finally felt 100 % accepted and it was its people and their work that changed my gloomy vision of the United States.
I struggled a lot in my first years in United States. I had preconceptions, and an image of the society I was living in that were not positive. In the past almost five years I pushed myself to see the good, to seek things to admire, and came to understand that there are other faces within this nation that not necessarily are seen by the conception of United States the rest of the globe has. I bonded with THAT United States, I might not have agreed in some things but I really see the intentions are in the right place. I found an openness to listening and learning together from a place of common ground. Discarding the collective notions and in seeking the individual I found the amazing. Thanks to THAT United Sates, as a foreigner, I started to feel accepted and valued in a society I prejudged was endogamic in its essence. I am deeply hurt by the election's result. Not because who is the president but because more than half of this nation strongly believes I am not worth to be here. Many of my kind were rejected. (written after the results of the last presidential elections)
We need more acceptance. The discrimination between tolerance and acceptance is very important. You tolerate until you don’t tolerate anymore. When acceptance comes it doesn’t leave. The key word is not to tolerate, but to accept and celebrate others, that to me, embodies Intuit.
Benedicta M Badia Nordenstahl
11. A conflicted term at present, but can you tell us about your opinion of the term outsider art, how you feel about it and if there are any other words that you think we should be using instead?
This is one of things I sit on the other corner from others. In my opinion, outsider art, is a problematic category in certain aspects. It is a very Euro and US centric idea. It is not a concept that is used by Latin American art critics or intellectuals, where narratives are built based on an artist’s work and their education background is a simple footnote. I question ‘Whose mainstream are we talking about?’ Outside of the “mainstream” is a statement that implies that “you” are the centre and there is an ‘Other’ who is the outsider. Who decides who is what? And Why? I could propose that Asia is the mainstream and any artist that has not been influenced by asian art is an outsider. For example, at the last Sao Paulo Biennale a lot of outsider artist’s were presented by Swedish artist Mamma Anderson. Unless you were really into outsider art, no one knew Henry Darger as an outsider artist or his history. His worked was evaluated with fresh eyes in a contemporary art context. Then, I question the lack of a formal education as a parameter. Outside of US and Europe education is a privilege that few receive. And of course, I accept that there are other reasons why we call an artist an outsider, and that they share certain problematics. But I keep asking myself, what are human beings expecting to get from art? Many times art is used to fulfils gaps for us on our personal issues. We all do it at certain level. It is somewhat unfair to expect art to embody this role for us, but there are indeed artists who are not fully functional in society and do not have a choice on the matter. These are intimate questions intrinsic to the art work of each artist individually.
The first art piece I bought in my life was probably from a Brazilian outsider artist, but no one ever has presented her that way. Influenced by its Academia line of thought and colonial historical narratives, the West has a knack and a need for stereotyping and putting things into boxes, which gives them some kind of assurance… everything needs to be categorised. Where should we place outsider artists? - they don’t belong here nor there. I think sometimes, things should be embraced even if they don’t have a label, and we have to deal with the uncertainty of not being able to define it. Let them just be.
12. What’s next for you? And are you looking to continue to add works to your collection – what sort of things?
We bought a space in Chicago – a 3,000 square feet loft in an art nouveau building. We are currently refurbishing it to eventually move back from Asia. Our idea is to live there, and create a reunion space for art and people to express and reflect on questions that need to be tackled. We love inviting people to our house and talk about art. Sharing food and drinks is always a great pleasure. We will have the capability to host performances, curators and artists. There is a lot to be done in Chicago in relation with Latin American art. African American art and culture are fantastically well represented in Chicago. The city has a very intimate relationship with it, yet somehow Latin America has been forgotten. There is still a lot to be done and to be addressed.
Visit to Intuit with the international women group