In 2004, dealer Michael Rosenfeld and artist Betye Saar came across a discovery at an antiques fair in New York that seemed too good to be true: a work by Lee Bontecou priced at just $850. Bontecou is now known for her pioneering abstractions made during the postwar era—but it wasn’t always that way. Like many female artists of her time, she had been sidelined in favor of her male contemporaries, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose pieces were selling for eight figures. Rosenfeld and Saar happened to find the work as Bontecou was having a MoMA retrospective; later that year, her work made a new auction record of nearly $850,000, and today it stands at $9.2 million.




Rosenfeld knew that the antiques fair work, a drawing done in gesso and pencil, was a steal, so he bought it from the dealer after checking its authenticity. Only after the sale did the dealer realize what she had parted with. Feeling bad, Rosenfeld sent her another $400.




“Connoisseurship, right?” said Rosenfeld one recent morning in the Upper West Side apartment he shares with his wife, halley k harrisburg , with whom he runs a New York gallery. Behind them was another Bontecou, a small wall assemblage resembling some of the artist’s most famous works, in which an alien form extrudes from the canvas, creating a void at its center. It was placed there like a tiny trophy hidden in plain sight.




For three decades—since they opened Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York— harrisburg and Rosenfeld have been building a star-studded collection that places these Bontecou works alongside gems by other major American artists whose seismic contributions the mainstream has only recently begun to recognize. The collection reads like a who’s who of American art history: brilliantly colored paintings by Alma Thomas, an intricately crocheted hanging wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa, rich abstractions by Norman Lewis, sleek figurative scenes by Florine Stettheimer, all-over abstractions by Alfonso Ossorio, a minimalist sculpture by Martin Puryear, Surrealist visions by Victor Brauner, and a whole lot more. “Many of these artists haven’t become precious until the past decade,” harrisburg said.



Three leather-clad sculptural heads by Nancy Grossman preside over the couple’s living room.




Rosenfeld and harrisburg’s holdings lack the blue-chip artists one comes to expect in major collections—Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat—and they are hardly the only dealers with a sizable collection. But where theirs stands out is in its art-historical richness. Long before curators, dealers, and critics grew interested in diversifying the country’s art history, harrisburg and Rosenfeld were effectively helping preserve the reputations of American artists, in particular female and Black ones, who have only recently moved inward from the margins. Because their prices have remained so low, harrisburg and Rosenfeld have been able to buy some of the most important works ever produced by these artists.




The couple never had a stated focus on race or gender, however. “We just look at the quality of these artists,” harrisburg explained. “So it doesn’t surprise me that the world has now finally seen what we’ve been seeing.”




Indeed, curators from across the globe have been coming to harrisburg and Rosenfeld when they need key loans. Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, approached the couple when he was organizing “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas,” a groundbreaking survey of art and the transatlantic slave trade that opened in Brazil in 2018. “He came to us not as a last resort, but almost because he couldn’t find the works he wanted,” harrisburg said.




Around 30 pieces from the couple’s collection and their gallery ended up heading to São Paulo for the exhibition, in addition to works from their holdings that have appeared in retrospectives for Alma Thomas, Agnes Pelton, and Bob Thompson; the traveling show “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”; and a new version of the “Histórias” exhibition, “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” which has made stops in Houston and Washington, D.C. That last show includes a Romare Bearden collage that once hung in harrisburg and Rosenfeld’s living room, and that will go on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in December.



Florine Stettheimer’s 1920 painting Asbury Park South , 1920, which Rosenfeld and harrisburg purchased in 2012. It was a highlight of a Stettheimer survey at the Jewish Museum in 2017.




Compared to most collectors’ homes, harrisburg and Rosenfeld’s is relatively modest. Located near the American Museum of Natural History, it is a well-furnished space whose walls are hung tightly with art. A Yayoi Kusama hangs in the bathroom, while one of their children’s bedrooms displays a William Wegman photo. Asbury Park South (1920), an iconic painting of a beauty pageant by Florine Stettheimer, shares wall space with Migrating Birds (1954), the painting that won Norman Lewis the top award at the esteemed Carnegie International in 1955, making him the first Black artist to do so.




As harrisburg and Rosenfeld ambled around their apartment, their dog begging for treats and harrisburg mostly obliging, the couple expressed some sadness that they didn’t have more space for their art. They were about to sign a deal on a country house that they hoped could show more of their collection.




“The challenge of living in New York is obviously real estate, and we only have so many walls and surfaces,” Rosenfeld said.




Harrisburg cut in, saying, “People say to us, ‘Why don’t you just sell a painting at this point and buy a new apartment?’ We don’t think that way.”



A cabinet in the dining room with ceramics by Toshiko Takaezu, a small Lee Bontecou sculpture, photos by Weegee and Sally Mann, and a gouache by Yayoi Kusama.




Neither of them come from wealth. Rosenfeld grew up in Oceanside, a Long Island enclave a train ride away from New York City. His love of art, he recalled, was fostered by his parents, who were not art lovers but were fascinated by the thought of “having things around.” His first purchase was a print by Rufino Tamayo that the couple has held onto. An internship under the aegis of Pace Gallery dealer Arne Glimcher put him on track to open a gallery of his own.




Likewise, harrisburg was lured toward art by her mother, who, when she was raising harrisburg in Portland, Maine, made a priority of taking her to the museum at Westbrook College. As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, harrisburg realized that her calling was art history when she took a course on East Asian art. After college, she moved to New York and took a position as a front-desk assistant at the now defunct Josh Baer Gallery. Baer let a cash-strapped harrisburg pay off some of her earliest purchases, such as a Lorna Simpson photograph, by working extra days.




In 1989, Rosenfeld founded Michael Rosenfeld Gallery; harrisburg joined the business three years later. The two married in 1994.




Rosenfeld and harrisburg have focused ever since on supporting the underdogs of art history, both at the gallery and in their collecting. Occasionally, there is some intersection between the two—they own works by Beauford Delaney, Nancy Grossman, and Mary Bauermeister, all of whom the gallery represents—but for the most part, their collecting has remained a separate but related endeavor.




While harrisburg and Rosenfeld’s paintings and sculptures have featured heavily in important museum shows, the decorative objects they have amassed over the years largely have not. That will soon change, however.



Rosenfeld and harrisurg had shelves installed in a large dining room window to display Beatrice Wood’s ceramics. A sculpture by Ken Price is on the adjacent credenza.




Harrisburg said she was recently approached by the Noguchi Museum, which is organizing a retrospective for Toshiko Takaezu, a Hawaiian artist of Japanese descent whose vessel-like ceramics appear in the current Venice Biennale. Takaezu was “like an Abstract Expressionist painter who uses her vessels in the forms she throws as surfaces to paint,” harrisburg said. Inspired by a studio visit years ago to artist Lenore Tawney, who collected the works herself, harrisburg and Rosenfeld have bought hundreds of Takaezu’s creations.




When the Noguchi Museum contacted the couple regarding loans, harrisburg sent a list of the Takaezu works they own, and the curators selected several of possible interest. She invited the curators over to see the Takaezu works laid out on a table. As Harrisburg recalled, “Michael comes in, and he was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is our whole inventory of Toshi.’”




“That’s not what I said,” Rosenfeld responded. “I said, ‘I can’t believe we have so many.’”




“It’s not conscious,” harrisburg said. “We don’t think: Oh, we already have two of these. We should move on to another artist. We want to continue to investigate artists…”




Her voice trailed off, and Rosenfeld completed her sentence: “…and then you just see another piece you love.” 




A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews ’s Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “Ahead of the Curve.”