How To Build An Art Collection with Jodee Gamel
Courtesy of Jodee Gamel
I spoke with Philadelphia-based artist and art collector Jodee Gamel about her collection, how she got her start, and the unifying themes behind the works she acquires. Gamel also discusses her long term vision for her collection, and more. Enjoy!
1. Why is collecting art important to you?
Collecting artwork for Galerie Gamel situates me within a temporal continuum of voices and visual languages, and I view it as a stewardship, especially in preserving the ideas that contemporary women artists are exploring at present.
The present is the only time any collector can truly claim authority in nuanced understanding.
Through any collection, a particular scope is imparted into the zeitgeist, a particular narrative with the spiritual essence of my own experiences. A collection, to me, is at once an autobiography, a biography, and a historical artifact. It is a massive body of evidence of many people’s intelligence, woven together by the lens of one individual.
Courtesy of Jodee Gamel
2. How did you get started collecting artwork?
My interest began with folk art. I spent time at Eyes Gallery in Philadelphia before it was burned down, and at The Magic Gardens Gallery, where my own work has been exhibited. I was moved by the work I saw on Navajo reservations in Arizona, as well as by the 1930s Native American tapestries my grandfather collected directly from artists. Those expressive, tactile works laid the foundation for my collecting. Later, I was drawn to North American women mixed-media painters and found-object sculptresses, whose experiments in surface, play, and symbolic narrative reflect qualities central to my own work. My peers are part of my own story. Presently, there is a strong sorority among women painters in the United States. Having attended an all-women’s college for my BFA and an all-women cohort in my MFA program, I’ve made for myself, and for any curious visitor, a world of women artists.
3. Is there a unifying theme to your collection?
The collection is unified by texture, color, and mythic narrative in the present epoch. I am most interested in when artists occupy, experience, and record their feelings, be they impactful, magnetic, peaceful, illuminated, inspired, empowered, or nurtured. My collection explicates these narratives of emotional experiences and sustains a charged vibrational current in the space, a palpable atmosphere of feminine creation and resonance. This electric vibration is very present in my own paintings. My collection reminds audiences that women share a knowledge of the importance of their intuition, emotions, and instincts.
Courtesy of Jodee Gamel
4. How does your own work inform your collection?
My work and collection are in dialogue. In my painting and altar-assemblages, I use flotsam and layered media to create allegorical shrines of care. The art I collect mirrors those qualities—whether through materiality, symbolic presence, or narrative depth. Collecting is a way of curating a mirror back to myself: I see in those works the formal daring and thematic tenderness that I aspire to in my own practice, and even in pieces I have been told I inspired. Together, they create a shared environment of values through beauty, ritual, and resilience.
5. What advice would you give a potential collector who is unsure of how/where to start?
One builds a world first; meaning arrives afterward. Trends follow the collector’s eye, never the reverse.
6. What future plans do you have for your collection?
Through Galerie Gamel, I am shaping a private collection conceived as a long-term cultural foundation. The emphasis is on circulation through loans, research, and curated presentations. Over time, it is intended to take physical form as an intimate museum-like setting.
7. If you could acquire one piece of art, any in the world, what would it be?
I would choose a neon handwriting piece by Tracey Emin. Her work combines vulnerability with conviction, turning personal confession into universal resonance. Her neons in particular illuminate love, longing, and survival, thus mirroring the way I want my own work and collection to function: drawing from the intimate to articulate the collective. Emin’s practice embodies what it means to honor women’s lived experience through both fragility and strength, which is at the heart of my vision.