A fine art gallery in the US is seeking a senior commercial builder to lead its next stage of growth. Their 10+ year strategy is to secure management, representation, and sales rights to historically important, museum-relevant but under-recognized artist estates.
This executive will build a repeatable estate-growth platform: develop artist markets, personally close important private sales, build a broad advisor and collector network, recruit and lead a sales organization, establish commercial discipline, and help secure new estate mandates. This is a hands-on builder role, not a conventional gallery-floor or purely curatorial position.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
- Set growth and sales strategy by artist, estate, inventory segment, geography, channel, and buyer profile
- Create estate-by-estate plans for positioning, pricing, inventory segmentation and release, scholarship and exhibitions, institutional placements, and sales execution.
- Personally originate and close high-value private sales, strategic placements, and complex negotiations
- Build a national and international network that can grow to hundreds of art advisors, private dealers, designers, collectors, collection managers, curators, institutions, auction specialists, and referral partners
- Lead, expand, and hold accountable an internal sales team and a distributed network of commission-based agents and specialists; and recruit other leaders as the platform scales
- Establish CRM discipline, lead ownership, pipeline, forecasting, sales cadence, and performance accountability
- Identify, evaluate, and help negotiate new estate management, representation, and sales-rights opportunities, including the investment thesis, risks, resource needs, and expected return.
- Partner with ownership and operations to balance revenue and gross margin with scarcity, artist legacy, market protection, and long-term enterprise value.
CANDIDATE PROFILE
- Entrepreneurially minded with senior experience in gallery sales, auction-house private sales, art advisory or private dealing, artist estates or foundations, secondary-market inventory, or a comparable relationship-driven business
- Documented record of originating and closing meaningful transactions, growing revenue and pipeline, and developing high-value client relationships.
- Existing relationships across collectors, advisors, dealers, designers, auction specialists, collection managers, institutions, and other intermediaries – plus the ability to expand them systematically.
- Evidence of recruiting, coaching, and holding accountable a network of sellers, agents, consultants, or distributed commercial partners.
- Strong judgment on pricing, discounting, inventory release, provenance, condition, scarcity, and long-term artist-market development.
- Comfort with budgets, P&L, gross-margin thinking, CRM, forecasting, data-based decisions, team leadership and hands-on selling.
- High integrity, discretion, persistence, and emotional intelligence with families, trustees, scholars, collectors, advisors, and owners; willingness to travel extensively (national/international)
No college degree or prior CEO/President/Partner title is required. Fifteen or more years of relevant experience is preferred, but demonstrated sales results, judgment, leadership capacity, integrity, hunger, and fit matter more than title, tenure, academic pedigree, or conventional art-world polish.