In 2014 a local San Francisco artist suggested Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall check out the David Hockney exhibition then on view at the de Young Museum. New to Hockney’s work, at the show the couple found themselves enraptured. ‘It was so colourful and so queer,’ Rob Thomas-Suwall tells Christie’s. Rob, an ENT surgeon, and Eric, a political theorist, live in Minot, North Dakota, and were relative outsiders to the art world, but on seeing Hockney’s exuberant depictions of gay life, they were inspired to learn more about contemporary art and start their own collection.
Since then, the Thomas-Suwalls have amassed an impressive grouping of painting and sculpture with a focus on queer and female emerging artists that has attracted international attention via their Instagram The Icy Gays. Their collection — featuring 55 works including paintings by Anna Weyant, Salman Toor and more — is the subject of a new exhibition, FULL DISCLOSURE, on view at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo through 20 October. Here we take a look at what’s shaping the couple’s collecting journey.
Have a point of view
Rob and Eric didn’t explicitly set out to build a collection centred on colourful works by queer and female artists, often with a surrealist, humorous streak. And yet as they bought more and more paintings that spoke to them, these themes emerged, uniting works ranging from GaHee Park’s otherworldly nudes (Kissing in the Tree, 2017) to Julie Curtiss’s hair hat sculpture (Spider, 2018), the latter reminiscent of Meret Oppenheim’s infamous fur teacup amongst other touchstones of feminist art.
