The questions come fast. Is this a good investment? Is this artist going anywhere? Am I paying too much? Should I wait? What if I’m wrong? And underneath all of it, the quieter fear: what does it say about me if I choose this and it doesn’t matter to anyone else?

This is where most first-time collectors get stuck, not for lack of interest, but because the art world has a way of making personal desire feel like it requires external validation before it counts. The market has its own logic, its own hierarchy, its own consensus about what’s worth paying attention to. When you’re new to it, that consensus can feel like the only reliable guide you have.

It isn’t. Taste, instinct, and a willingness to look carefully are genuinely all you need to begin. The rest, context, knowledge, a sharper eye, comes with time and accumulation. But it starts with trusting that your response to a piece of work is worth something, even before you can fully articulate why.

Here is what that actually looks like in practice.

Start by tracking what you return to, not what impresses you

Before spending a dollar, pay attention to what stays with you. Not the piece that commands the room, not what everyone gravitates toward at the opening, but what you find yourself thinking about two days later. What image comes back to you in the middle of something unrelated?

One of the first pieces I collected was a small canvas by Kai Jenrette, through April April gallery in Pittsburgh. I found his work on Instagram and kept going back to it, day after day, the same canvas, the same question I couldn’t quite answer. When I finally reached out to make the purchase, the anxiety was immediate: was this the right choice? Was I thinking clearly about value? What exactly was I doing? I still can’t fully explain what kept pulling me in, and at some point I realized I didn’t need to. It felt like something I wanted to live with. So I bought it.

That’s the signal, and it’s quieter than you’d expect. Less epiphany than accumulation. The pieces that become meaningful aren’t always the ones that hit hardest on first contact. They’re the ones that continue to ask something of you, even when you’re not standing in front of them. Give yourself time before deciding. If you’re still thinking about a work a week later, that means something.

Be honest about the difference between taste and social proof

The art world has a strong gravitational pull toward consensus. Certain artists, movements, and price points carry a kind of social proof that can easily be mistaken for personal conviction, but they’re not the same thing. Social media flattens the distinction between cultural participation and genuine desire. Owning a particular work can start to feel less like a choice and more like a membership.

Before committing to a purchase, ask yourself honestly: do I keep coming back to this, or do I keep seeing it? Those are very different things. Work that is everywhere right now, on every art fair Instagram story, in every emerging collector roundup, is not necessarily work that will mean something to you in your home, in your life. Buy what you’re drawn to, not what you’ve been convinced matters.

Look beyond the obvious platforms

If your taste keeps landing in the same crowded territory, it’s worth asking where you’ve been looking. Major art fairs surface work that has already been market-tested. Instagram’s algorithm is not neutral — it shows you more of what you’ve already engaged. Online retailers offer commerce without context, moving work the way any product gets moved. Blue-chip galleries exist to sell you on the canon. None of these are bad starting points, but none of them are designed to help you find something genuinely surprising.

Go further. Artist-run spaces, open studios, and regional scenes without strong PR infrastructure are where some of the most interesting work at the most accessible price points actually lives. In Philadelphia alone, there is a substantial amount of work being made outside the gallery system that rarely gets the visibility it deserves. You may have to leave the house to find it, but that is also part of what makes collecting interesting. Your lane is built over time, through seeing a lot, paying attention to what lingers, and being willing to move toward work that hasn’t already been validated for you.

On the anxiety of actually doing it

The first purchase carries a disproportionate amount of weight. It shouldn’t, but it does. There’s the financial question: am I spending this responsibly? The taste question: does this reveal something embarrassing about me? And the permanence question: what if I hate it in five years?

A few things worth knowing. Your taste will change, and that’s fine. The desire to own a specific piece at a specific moment in your life is its own kind of document. It marks where you were, what you needed to live with, what moved you. That doesn’t disappear as your eye sharpens; if anything it becomes more interesting. The collectors with the most compelling holdings didn’t arrive with a fully formed vision. They bought something, learned from it, and kept going.

Practically speaking: buy at a scale that feels real but not reckless. See the work in person before committing if at all possible, since a piece that reads beautifully on a screen can land very differently on a wall, and vice versa. Research the artist a little, not to validate the purchase, but to understand the context of the work and what the practice looks like over time. And if you keep coming back to something across days, across doubt, across other work, that is usually enough.

Your first piece doesn’t define your collection. It begins it.

The art market will always give you reasons to hesitate. Another fair, another artist everyone is suddenly talking about, another reason to feel like you don’t know enough yet. You know more than you think. The question is what holds your attention and whether you’re willing to trust it. That’s where collecting actually begins.

R: The surfaces of your sculptures have such a distinctive quality—both in texture and color. Could you walk us through how your material process evolved?

carrie R: A big part of my process is really influenced by materials. I used to build everything with chicken wire and plaster, but when you mix pigment into plaster, it comes out really pastel—I didn’t love that. So I was working mostly in black and white, which actually pushed me to start drawing on the sculptures with oil bars. That was a real moment of discovery. After that, I switched to aqua-resin. It’s a powder and liquid mixture that hardens—a lot of people use it to make molds, but I use it more like paint. I make it a thicker consistency and put the pigment right into it, so it’s strengthening and coloring at once. The pieces end up super lightweight but really strong.

The vibrant color actually came from a side project I had a hard time with at first. A couple years ago, I started making functional objects—pots and lamps. Because it was such a low-stakes project, I really started experimenting with color. I was squeezing pigments so richly into the aqua-resin, playing with textures and combinations I never would have tried on my “serious” work. And then I brought all of that back into my sculptures. The color process didn’t exist until I had something that felt less consequential or risky—and that freedom let me experiment.

R: How do you approach form and gesture in your sculptural work?

carrie R: A lot of it comes from thinking about drawing and then pushing that three-dimensionally. The way to make something three-dimensional from a line is to make multiples of that line, and it can start to take on these organic, almost creature-like qualities. But for me, I’m really just playing with gestures. My mantra when I’m working is: how can I make it just a little bit weirder? I’ll sit in front of a piece and think, it needs to feel stranger. What if the limbs don’t continue in the direction you expect, but just go off to the side? Or I’ll add something to throw off the symmetry. I’m always pushing it in that direction.

Left:   fly in the vaseline, 2025, Right: protector 1, 2025

R: Your work has such a strong relationship to gravity and movement. Do you mind elaborating on that? carrie R: It’s something I didn’t plan but couldn’t avoid. About thirteen years ago, a month after I graduated art school, I had a serious accident that impaired my mobility for a while. As a sculptor, you can’t help but think about your body’s relation to the world. I didn’t want to make work about my body or the accident, but I realized I kept coming back to questions about what it means to put something in space and to take up space. If a piece is going to lean against a wall, why? I want each piece to have a really specific relationship to gravity—to depend on a particular design to balance. Sometimes I’ll give something a little limp, or a side hip. Movement and balance became the gestural components I’m most interested in.

R: Your day job is in communications—how does that relate to your art practice?

carrie R: Everything else in my life is super planned. In communications, I’m telling a really specific story. And right now with AI, authorship and authenticity are getting pretty fuzzy. I feel more than ever that there’s nothing more human than your imagination. I’ve had studio visits where people want more of a narrative—some deeper story. But this is the one place in my life where I can experiment just because I can. I can play, pull things from my imagination, sit in front of a piece and let my mind dictate where it goes next. The art being the opposite of planned storytelling is really important to me.

Huge thanks to Carrie for participating in this interview and allowing me into her studio. It was a real pleasure to see her work in person. For her upcoming Holiday Open Studio event, Carrie will be selling work alongside painter Michael Saunders.

It started as a members club for art collectors based in Philadelphia — a space to build community around art and welcome the art-curious. But a members club felt intimidating, and honestly, a little premature. So I had to figure out how to pivot.

What I kept coming back to was a feeling I had when I first moved back to Philadelphia after living in London. I remember typing “galleries in Philadelphia” into a search bar and sitting with the results for a long time. Not because there was nothing there, there was, but because something felt missing. A connective tissue. A way in. London, and frequent trips to New York, had made me used to walking into a gallery on a Tuesday and encountering work from artists I’d never heard of, from places I’d never been, and leaving with the sense that the world had gotten a little larger. I wanted that feeling here.

Philadelphia has real collectors, genuine curiosity, and a creative energy that doesn’t get enough credit. What it lacks — at least for now — is a consistent, direct line to the global art world. No galleries with major international outposts. Few shows featuring artists working across borders. A scene that, for all its strengths, can feel turned inward.

The Radius is my attempt to change that. Not by leaving Philadelphia behind, but by expanding what it’s connected to. This newsletter is for first-time collectors, for the art-curious, for anyone who has ever walked through a gallery and thought I could live with that — and didn’t know where to begin. It’s a place to encounter artists, ideas, and works from across the world, with someone you can trust to help make sense of it.

The community piece hasn’t been forgotten either. The writing lives here, but I hope to show up beyond the page through studio visits, curated events, or simply a coffee and a conversation about what we’ve been seeing and what we’re excited about next.

Consider this an open invitation. We’re happy to have you.