Art Is Leaving the Gallery. Myrtha Herrera Is Deciding Where It Goes Next.

Forget the white cube. The most culturally charged spaces in the world right now are not galleries or auction rooms or art fair booths. They are private residences and luxury hotels and developments where someone, somewhere, made a decision that most people in the art world still aren’t taking seriously enough: that art belongs in the places where life actually happens.

Myrtha Herrera made that decision a long time ago. As the founder of collēctum, a New York–based art consultancy, she has spent years positioning herself at the precise point where contemporary art meets the world outside the institution — and building a practice that operates with the curatorial seriousness of a museum and the market fluency of an auction house.
The result is something genuinely rare: an advisor who doesn’t just place art, but shapes the cultural identity of the spaces it enters.

Taste, Before the Market Catches Up

The clearest measure of an advisor’s eye is not the artists they place after the world has already agreed on their importance. It’s the ones they choose before.

When collēctum was commissioned to select the landmark sculpture for Cero5Cien — the most luxurious residential complex in its country — Herrera chose Alma Allen. At the time, it was a curatorial conviction. It has since become a statement of fact: Allen will represent the United States at the 2026 Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious platforms in contemporary art. The selection, made on instinct and knowledge long before that announcement, says everything about how Herrera operates.

She is not following the market. She is reading it — and moving slightly ahead of it, every time.

The Experience Is the Work

What separates collēctum from a conventional advisory practice is what happens around the art, not just the art itself. For Herrera, collecting is not a transaction to be completed and filed away. It is an ongoing relationship — between a client and a collection, and between a client and the artists whose work they live with.

That philosophy has led to some of the most unusual and memorable experiences in her clients’ lives. Private dinners in collectors’ homes — from Manhattan to Mexico City — with artists of the stature of Daniel Buren — one of the most significant conceptual artists of the last century — are not uncommon in collēctum’s world. These are not networking events or PR moments. They are intimate encounters, carefully constructed so that a collector can sit across the table from the person who made the work on their wall and understand it, and them, in a completely different way.

The experience extends further still. collēctum takes clients to galleries, art fairs, and shows — not as a concierge service, but as a curatorial education. Herrera walks alongside collectors in the same spaces where she is making decisions for them, shaping their eye and deepening their understanding of why one work matters and another doesn’t. It is the kind of access and guidance that transforms a buyer into a genuine collector.

Art That Speaks to the Architecture

Herrera works closely with architects from the earliest stages of a project — not as a vendor brought in at the end, but as a creative collaborator embedded in the process. The conversations she has with architects are about vision, identity, and the kind of experience a space should create for the people who inhabit it. Art, in this context, is not decoration. It is the thing that makes a building feel like it was built for someone specific.

That collaboration produces results that generic placement never could. For Nobu Hotel Los Cabos, collēctum developed a full artist-in-residence program — selecting Evgen Čopi Gorišek to create work in direct dialogue with the property’s architecture and landscape. Guests didn’t encounter finished art during their stay. They encountered art being made, in a space it was made for. The line between the building and the work dissolved entirely.

At AVA resort, the scope expanded to a gallery program of over 100 works by internationally acclaimed artists, a collection valued above $500,000, curated as a spatial experience rather than a series of individual placements. The resort became a cultural destination. That was always the point.

The Bigger Shift

What Herrera is building with collēctum is a response to something the art world has been slow to acknowledge: that the most meaningful encounters with contemporary art are increasingly happening outside its official institutions.

The collectors who sit down to dinner with Daniel Buren in their own homes. The hotel guests who watch an artist at work in a space designed around that process. The residents of a development anchored by a sculpture made by the artist now representing the United States at the Venice Biennale.

These are not peripheral moments in the life of contemporary art. They are, increasingly, where contemporary art is most alive. And Myrtha Herrera is one of the people deciding what that looks like.collēctum is a New York–based art consultancy specializing in advisory services for collectors, architects, real estate developers, and hospitality groups.

Myrtha H is a New York–based art advisor and the founder of collēctum. MA Art Business Sotheby’s Institute of Art.