Soho Beach House's New Photography-Focused Permanent Art Collection

Soho House currently displays about 11,000 works of art from nearly 4,000 artists across its properties in 17 countries. Since 2016, Kate Bryan, Soho House’s Global Director of Art, has helmed the expansive curation which tends to place local artists, both emerging and established, in houses closest to their practice. Now, for the first time since it opened 15 years ago, Soho Beach House has introduced an entirely new permanent collection with a global perspective but unified by photography as an art form.

“We’ve had a year to think about this,” Bryan tells Surface on a tour during Miami Art Week, around which the collection’s debut coincided. With a second location in town, Miami Pool House, that highlights a localized collection, Bryan felt like an opportunity opened to present an international collection, instead. “I really felt this house and its members deserved that, just given the fact that in the 15 years since we’ve been open Miami has become the most extraordinary melting pot for the art world,” she says.

When reflecting on the strength of photography in Soho House’s preexisting collection, and the changing perception of photography as an art form, Bryan began to consider it as a unifying factor for Miami acquisitions. “We have so many standout artists who work in photography, and I’ve had so many conversations with them over the years,” Bryan says, “people like Laurie Simmons, who have said to me, ‘you know, when I began, photography was sidelined. It wasn’t taken as seriously as the big-named painters of New York.’ This collection is a rebuttal to that and to the historic prejudice around photography.”

Bryan sees Simmons as a premiere example of changing attitudes toward the art form, alongside Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Marilyn Minter, who is also in the Soho Beach House collection. “Laurie found her place within the photographic genre and showed that it had such robust art historical chops. It wasn’t just a secondary proposition,” she says.

Corresponding with her observation of the expansion of the medium itself, Bryan sought out non-traditional photographic works—cameraless photography, photograms, Polaroids, lenticulars, and works at the boundary of photo and sculpture. “We didn’t just want to do photography,” she says. “We wanted to show off how exciting the medium is and how it has made such a firm place for itself in the contemporary art landscape.” She also knew if she committed to one medium, she’d need to convey the different scales and textures.

The timeline and installation presented challenges. “When you’re opening a new house, putting together a collection is quite straightforward,” Bryan says. “You have a couple of years. Everybody’s building the house. The interior designers are coming in, and you have your window of a week, roughly, to install, during daylight hours. It’s very civilized. I came here three weeks ago, and I started work at 11:30 p.m., and led the installation through the night with my team. That meant getting everything off the walls that’s been here for 15 years, wrapping it and cataloging again, and bringing in everything new, getting it up, and making the lobby look presentable by 8:00 a.m.”

Ultimately, Bryan needs to curate a collection that aligns with the design of the hotel but also demonstrates the inspirational power of the artists involved. Pieces must converse with one another, as well. “We want each individual piece to be a robust work from an artist that we believe in,” she says. “We get the best piece possible from the artists.” For Miami, this includes Isaac Julien, Walead Beshty, Ming Smith, Catherine Opie, Hank Willis Thomas, Rene Matić, Dayanita Singh, Thomas Dozol, Douglas Gordon, Basil Kincaid, JR, and more.

The Miami Art Week alignment was not tangential; it underscores Soho House’s commitment to the arts. The curation also informed programming on site. “In pure scale alone, nothing can really compete with Art Basel Miami Beach. It has become such a cultural and lifestyle phenomenon,” Bryan says. Regarding JR, who participated in an artist talk, Bryan included his work in the house to “showcase what a staggering achievement he has had internationally, and what he’s been able to achieve with the activist work that he’s doing.”

Bryan hopes members learn the stories behind the works. Maps have been printed for self-guided tours, as well. “I think I’ve learned to be quite a specialized curator in the sense that I have curated at the British Museum, at a commercial gallery in Hong Kong, and in London’s oldest gallery on New Bond Street,” Bryan says. “But curating for Soho House is very particular, because we have a museum-level collection, with some of the most important living artists, but we are a working house. We don’t have security guards next to our art. You can bring in your baby. You can dance next to it. There are DJs. This is not a blank white cube. There are certain challenges that come with that. Then there’s also something very freeing.”