Fine Art Collection Profile >
Jack Esterson AIA and Hon. Richard Montelione of Brooklyn have collected art throughout their 40 years together. Now the co-founder and principal of Think! Architecture & Design, Esterson declares that “Art has always been in my DNA.” As a young artist from Syracuse, he was lured by the irresistible pull of New York City, and while studying architecture at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute found himself surrounded by artists, designers, and art historians. “I had no money to collect,” he recalls, “so I made art and bartered with my artist friends.”
Esterson continues, “What I had learned rubbed off on Rich, who is a brilliant legal intellect [in fact, the native New Yorker is now a State Supreme Court judge] but once lacked self-confidence in assessing art. Today, after four decades of visiting galleries, museums, and fairs — not to mention deep immersion in a creative community — Rich has definitely found a wide frame of references for experiencing art in all its modalities.”
As time went on, the couple started collecting from the many artists working in the lively Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, as well as ones associated with Pratt Institute. “Sadly,” Esterson notes, “most of them have passed away, left the area, or been priced out, and that has dramatically affected how and what we acquire now.”
Esterson still has the bug, though: “When asked what I want for Christmas or a birthday, I always reply ‘Art, please.’ Rich says there is no more wall space, but this does not deter me. We rearrange.”
Hundreds of artworks adorn the couple’s three locations — a 19th-century Brooklyn brownstone, a 200-year-old farmhouse in Columbia County (three hours north of New York City), and Montelione’s three-room judicial chambers. The collection ranges widely in date and media. The oldest pieces are 19th-century American and British landscapes, which look at home in the historic rooms of the renovated farmhouse upstate. Displayed throughout the Brooklyn house are WPA-era prints and an array of abstract paintings and collages dating from the 1950s through the Hip Hop era. Esterson’s own drawings and paintings also adorn these walls. He has designed some of the homes’ furniture, and at one point he caught what he laughingly calls GPS (Gay Pottery Syndrome), which has resulted in a plethora of studio ceramics, mostly American and European, plus the occasional piece of Arts & Crafts metalwork.
Confident that the contrast of great modernism and great classicism creates a compelling visual experience, Esterson has arranged most of the figurative work on the brownstone’s garden level, which contains Arts & Crafts furniture brought to Brooklyn from a now-sold summer cabin in Woodstock. The modernist pieces are concentrated on the parlor floor, with its grand scale and classical detailing.
Esterson and Montelione are proud to own paintings by Audrey Frank Anastasi, Sandra Jones Campbell, Sarah Hall, Susan Rowland, J.D. Siazon, and Lois Silver; collages by Keith Maddy; and sculpture by Woody Pantilla. Pride of place, however, is given to a triumvirate of gifted painters who offer what Esterson calls “an intimate take on urban documentation”: Robert Goldstrom and Ella Yang of Brooklyn, and Doug Madill of Jersey City. The couple own at least 30 Goldstrom views of the distinctively shaped tower of downtown Brooklyn’s Williamsburgh Savings Bank, which many locals still use as a landmark while moving around the borough. Esterson is particularly fond of Goldstrom’s studies and drawings, admitting “they are like an addiction for me; I just cannot resist them.” Also here is a variety of Goldstrom’s male nudes, usually shown as portions of the body rather than in full.
Another star in the collection is Esterson and Montelione’s close friend Harvey Wilson, who arrived at Pratt in 1957 and has remained in Brooklyn ever since, still admired for his joyful abstract paintings. Now living in a nursing home nearby, Wilson has closed his studio and loaned all 450 of its works to Esterson, who recently designed a low-income residential complex in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. Stretching between its two buildings is a long, climate-controlled passageway that the architect has always called “The Gallery.” This season its inaugural show is a large Wilson retrospective that Esterson curated for the visual delight of the hundreds of people living there.
“Our collection is sprawling; it’s everywhere, but looking back,” Esterson concludes, “Rich and I see a through-line in it — an emotional connection to audacious color and dynamic movement. There’s also a virtuosity that resonates deeply for both of us” — and surely for anyone lucky enough to visit their art-filled spaces.
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