Interior designers George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg collect art

One afternoon last fall, George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg stopped by 125 Newbury Gallery on their way to their offices in Tribeca. The couple had been drawn to the gallery’s Peter Hujar exhibition, “Echoes,” which examined queer life in New York City from the Stonewall riots of the 1970s to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The two were unfamiliar with the artist at first, but they soon became avid collectors and advocates of his work.

“That period was very interesting,” Yabu tells Artsy from his home in Toronto. “I just wanted to emphasize that the New York life in the West — the docks and the gay [community]There was an agreement with the local police that if they had a tryst on the dock the police would not touch them – it was a very dangerous time… It was a very unique period, documented by the ‘Peters’ of the world.”

The pair’s work with artists reflects their approach to collecting art, which is driven largely by intuition and personal affection. “When we collect art, it’s very personal, there’s no strategy at all,” Yabu said. “You have to go with your gut, you have to be a little fearless,” added Pushelberg in New York, where they have an apartment in the West Village.

Yabu and Pushelberg first met while studying design at Ryerson University in Toronto. They drifted apart until they reunited professionally in the late 1970s, when they founded their eponymous design firm in 1980, counting Four Seasons Hotels and Louis Vuitton among their clients. Along the way, they steadily built a collection that includes works by Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and a four-foot-tall bronze pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama.

As their collection grew, Yabu and Pushelberg maintained a preference for pieces that evoked personal memories – a core focus of the design duo’s impressive collection. [or] “I never thought about putting together a personal collection, but it became very personal,” Yabu said. Another thread was works that were tied to memories and life stages. “We started collecting works that reminded us of our youth, so we did that, and it was a trend for a while,” Pushelberg said. Their love of photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus stemmed from their college years in the 1970s.

The couple’s turning point came when they were fortuitously hired to design a space for fellow Canadian and seasoned art collector Bruce Bailey, who subsequently introduced Yabu and Pushelberg to the nuances of buying art. He introduced the collectors to works by Canadian artists, such as four pieces from John Massey’s “Modern Waiting Area” series from 1997-99, which they acquired from Olga Korper Gallery in 1999. “When you’re young and you’re curious about art but you don’t know anything about it, it’s always good to have a mentor who can show you something and get you started and start to feel the reactions to what you’re doing,” Pushelberg said.

The same resonance also attracted them to buy Hujar’s work when they visited 125 Newbury Gary Schneider in Contortion I and Gary Schneider in Contortion II (Both 1979). The impact of Hujar’s photographs, which vividly captured important social movements, particularly those related to the LGBTQ+ community and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, inspired the duo to continue researching the artist’s work, and they are currently working with the Art Gallery of Ontario to expand their collection of his work.

In fact, Yabu and Pushelberg are often happy to loan out their art—whether to institutions, friends, or their studio (which includes a gallery space)—to increase accessibility to works from their private collection. “Art is meant to be shared and shown, not to be hidden and buried, because there’s a lot of that on the planet,” Pushelberg says. “We literally put our art in all of our studios, in our homes, and actually in some of our relatives’ homes, so that it can be on the wall and people can get exposed to it.”

There are currently two works owned by Yoshitomo Nara and his wife. pee and Urinating “midnight” (both 2001)—which they purchased from Tokyo’s Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2002—are on loan to the Guggenheim Bilbao for the museum’s retrospective of the artist, which runs through November. The couple is also actively working with other organizations to help expand access to art. For example, Yabu and Pushelberg are working with the charity RX Art to commission work from Canadian artist Marcel Dzama—whose My pawn has become a queen (2021) lived in the couple’s New York apartment to create a mural for a Canadian AIDS hospice called Casey House.

One artist in particular that has recently intrigued Yabu and Pushelberg is the emerging Inuit artist Ooloosie Saila, whose work was recently exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere.” Their connection to Saila’s art began by chance when he was offered a Isolated iceberg (2018) at the 2019 Art with Heart charity auction in Canada. Her fascinating story and the struggles of Indigenous artists are fascinating, as is the 2019 New York Times articles, and they purchased more of her work.