The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 48

you go there,” she said. When we got up to Kukuli’s RP: In spite of the rigorous demands of your studio in the Bronx there was no heat, just plastic professions both of you clearly made time to pursue over the windows. She only had small space heaters your art interests. Most people are more casual scattered around. She not only worked there but lived acquiring one piece here, another one there. In your there as well. It was another fascinating visit. She was case you approached art collecting with an intensity a child prodigy. She was a painter who had come that you both shared. to the United States from Peru. Here she turned her PH: I think that came out of a very real emotional attention to ceramics—ceramics imbued with deep response to the work and the medium. It wasn’t that social commentary. Her parents were well-established we had ever planned to be collectors. We just did professionals in their respective fields. But here was it. As Stephen said, we may have been guided by this opportunity for us to engage with this unbelievably gallery owners early on, but subsequently, whatever intelligent, creative individual and yet you looked we bought was because the work resonated with us around and realized that basically you were in a derelict emotionally. In those days, the 1980s through the squatters’ building in the middle of the South Bronx. 1990s and into the early 2000s, we were collecting SH: We were willing to go anywhere when we were a lot. It was a key part of our lives. I give Stephen excited about an artist and were interested in their work. credit because he would go through art magazines, journals, and auction catalogs. If he saw a piece PH: One last story is about visiting Peter Gourfain. We met Peter at an exhibition of his work and said we would love to visit him. He agreed and gave us his address in Williamsburg. He had moved there before it got to be such a high-rent district. We found him living in an old row house above the garage, which he heated with a wood stove. He did all his work in the garage. he would do the research and pursue it: Who is the artist? Where do they live and work? He would call the artist and say, “We just saw this piece and are really interested in your work. Can you send us images; are you represented by a gallery?” Collecting just became totally integrated into our lives. He showed us the carved wooden ox yoke telling the SH: This is a common theme when you talk about tragic story of Michael Stewart that is now in the Chazen collectors. You become totally obsessive about doing collection (Michael Stewart, 1989). Peter was and is it. We also followed that pattern. We became totally very far left politically, however, as we talked to him he obsessive about acquiring work that we loved. We decided that we were the only capitalists he liked. He would go to a gallery and the owners might make saw through our business suits and recognized that we a suggestion, but we were really confident in our had a passion for art. We still joke about that to this day. own vision. A view of the Hootkins’ home in the Tribeca area of New York. 46