Komal Shah is a California-based art collector. Shah is one of a tiny group of collectors who come from the tech industry- she worked as a computer engineer and quit her tech job to give a platform to women and artists of colour. Now she concentrates on art collecting and on a host of other roles, including being a trustee at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and on the North American acquisitions committee and a trustee at Tate, as well as being on the advisory council of Berkeley’s Center for Equity, Gender and Leadership. She is working on a conversation series with Stanford University called “Artists on the Future”, bringing together artists and cultural thought leaders to look at the issues of the day.
She recounts how after studying computer science in Ahmedabad she was accepted at Stanford for a masters degree. She says her father, a textile trader, could not afford the Stanford education cost of about $12,000. So he took a mortgage against his house to support her first quarter on the condition that she could take care of the rest of her education. She was able to secure a teaching assistant position in ‘AI techniques’ and was able to stay at Stanford for the full programme.
But she says when she got to Stanford there were only three women in a class of 100 masters students. She felt it very strange that the US - which we consider so advanced on so many different fronts - does not treat women equally. But she says the gender disparity didn’t cause her an issue. But when she saw her daughter growing up in America, she realised more and more how the odds were stacked against women in this country. This is why she gave the focus and impetus to her collection, which is now only devoted to women and artists of colour.
Shah quit her career in tech in 2008, and plunged into the art world. She had no education in art nor an art background, and so she was advised to just go look at art and see what connected with her. She read voraciously and took thousands of pictures. Foremost among her mentors were Tate curator Mark Godfrey and Gary Garrels (senior curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA). It was Godfrey who helped her move towards her focus on the art of her time. She also cites the Fisher collection at SFMOMA and the Anderson collection at Stanford as major influences.
Komal is among the most astute and thoughtful patrons of the 21st century, says Adam Sheffer, vice-president of Pace Gallery in New York. Four painters are fundamental to her collection - Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl, Jacqueline Humphries and Laura Owens. “The work is ungendered, you can’t tell by the work itself that a woman artist painted it,” says Shah. “I started getting to know them better and being at their openings and becoming friends with some of them and that’s when it struck me how much disparity is there in the art market as well.” From this core, Shah has extended to other women artists.
“We have Lynda Benglis, Phyllida Barlow, Zarina Hashmi, Joan Snyder, Pat Steir, the last work by Joan Mitchell, as well a beautiful Helen Frankenthaler from 1962. Eventually I would love to get a significant work of Frankenthaler - when I can afford it!” For the moment some are in her two homes, about 10 per cent on loan to museums, and some in storage.
Shah has also moved on to collecting artists of colour, among them Mark Bradford, Kevin Beasley, Charles Gaines, Sam Gilliam and Anish Kapoor. “The same impetus drives me for artists of colour as for women artists,” she continues. When asked how many works she has in her collection, she explains that the figure of 150 doesn’t reflect the reality. “It’s tricky to count that way because we have the Joan Mitchell and also prints. But I do tend to acquire pretty significant works of artists that I care about. As a collector I have limited resources so I have to be thoughtful about what I can focus on. Sometimes people don’t realise [the collection] is about women in the art world - indeed I have tended to stay away from art that is explicitly about feminist issues and female bodies. I am trying to level the playing field and show that women are as capable as men in doing strong, amazing work!”
