Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006 | 7:35 a.m.
Living artists
Lee Ann Groff-Daudet considers herself a lifelong collector.
She grew up in Cazenovia, N.Y., with parents who collected art and was dragged to museums and galleries as child. She studied art history, painting and drawing at Smith College.
After moving to Las Vegas where she works as director of external affairs for Blue Man Group, Groff-Daudet joined the Guggenheim Hermitage's Young Collectors Council as a way to continue her artistic experience.
Her 20-piece collection includes work by artists such as Ryan Spencer and Damien Hirst. A Bavington pastel, based on the Weezer song "Say It Isn't So," hangs in her kitchen. She also owns a Ruscha-Raymond Pettibon collaboration from the Holy Bible series.
She'd love to own work by emerging Southern California artist John Baldessari.
"I enjoy the story behind the artist and behind the piece that was created."
The eclectic
Roger Thomas says his love affair began at 8 years old when he got a Douglas V. Snow as a gift.
At 13, he used his summer allowance to buy an Ashanti fertility doll, and he received an Alexander Calder as a high school graduation gift.
An executive vice president of Wynn Design says he's 24/7 on the hunt for art - personally and professionally.
His collection knows no bounds - "from the sublime to the ridiculous," he says. In the same week he acquired a 10th-century Anasazi piece, he bought an Ellsworth Kelly.
He favors artists that he knows or has known. His Warhol and Mapplethorpe collections include portraits of himself. "When I was 30 I felt that portraiture was languishing," he says.
His collection also includes work by Donald Judd and Las Vegas artist Tim Bavington. His favorite painter: Sir Howard Hodgkins.
"I fall in love, and I buy it if I can."
Of collecting, he says, "I don't understand people who don't understand it. I can't imagine living without art. Certainly it's considered a luxury, but to me it's essential. Art is the way I explain the world. Relate to the world."
Family affair
Collecting is a family effort for MGM Mirage President Jim Murren and his wife, Heather.
They're responsible for the impressive contemporary art collection at the Nevada Cancer Institute. Murren also invests in art with Glenn Schaeffer, the former Mandalay Resort Group president and Institute of Modern Letters founder.
The Murrens consider their home a sanctuary - "all other responsibilities in our lives end at the gate." Their collection is clean, calm and relatively simple. It includes work by emerging artists and by established "names" such as Frank Stella, Edward Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Tuttle. The family also owns a Joel Shapiro sculpture and a James Turrell hologram.
"We select pieces that mean something to us as a family. We talk about art and the kind of emotions and feelings we're getting from a painting or picture," Jim Murren says.
Even their 8- and 11-year-old sons get into the act, giving tours to the occasional guests. "Both of them have a really good eye. They like color. They'll tell me when something looks just too bizarre."
Everything in the collection is contemporary.
"When I walk by a very affordable and approachable print by Ellsworth Kelly, that makes me feel good, like I'm approaching a place in history and stopping time."
The eye
Naomi Arin's collection is intensely personal.
"It tells about my emotional states at different times of my life. I don't keep a journal, but I can look at a piece and know exactly where I was when I bought it."
She says she is growing out of some of the 100 works she owns. "I'm ready to let that time in my life go. In a way, it holds you back."
The lawyer owns work by Tom LaDuke, Betsabe Romero and Cindy Sherman. Arin had been e-mailing back and forth to London on a Marlene Dumas lithograph that she finally acquired.
"I can't even touch her paintings. They're hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not enough to just have money, you have to get on a waiting list."
She also co-owns the downtown Dust Gallery with artist Jerry Misko, so she's always scoping out cutting-edge artists.
But her personal collection gives her a rush. "It's an addiction. You start to twitch if you can't get what you want. But at least you have something to show for it, other than illness."
Arin says she doesn't look for art every day. "It's like going down a rabbit hole for me. When I was in Boston I would not pay my rent. I would pay my art dealer. That's when it bites you."
The Californian
Eye doctor Frank Schneider says art collecting gives him a "wonderful disease to deal with."
He started collecting in the '80s, intrigued by an academic, historic and aesthetic approach. "I've never in my entire life bought a piece and thought it was going to be worth more," he says.
He favors post-war artists from the San Francisco Bay area, including work by David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Manuel Neri. "They were beautiful to look at, a little mysterious, a little vague and a little lonely."
He also collects Bay-area abstract movement artwork of that era: Hassel Smith. Frank Lobdell. Clyfford Still. "I'm still on the hunt for great '50s and '60s pieces from Southern California."
Schneider hired an architect so that his home would have ample wall space for the hundreds of pieces in the collection. He and his wife hired an installation company to rotate the work; a recent placement of two pieces required 38 pieces to be removed.
"To rehang a collection is very exciting. It makes the piece fresh and new."
His favorite piece, he says, is "the next piece I get or that last piece I acquired.
"I don't think you ever get to the end."
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