Every week, Artnet News brings you Wet Paint, a gossip column of original scoops. If you have a tip, email Annie Armstrong—who’s summer in Los Angeles has come to an end—at [email protected].

Have you been keeping up with my colleague Katya Kazakina’s “Shop Talk” interview series? If you haven’t, I encourage you to take a look—there’s a lot of good tidbits in these interviews. Among my favorite details to come out of the series is that Stefania Bortolami’s daughter Maya Fuchs Bortolami has just been tapped to help curate a new Casa Tua location that is coming to New York in The Surrey hotel on the Upper East Side. For the uninitiated: News of a new Casa Tua in New York is a pretty big deal for many in the art set. The beloved restaurant has spots in art-world stops like Miami, Paris, and Aspen. (If you weren’t at Hauser and Wirth’s party there during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023, where were you?)

I met the younger Bortolami once and was pretty impressed by her ambition and poise, so I was eager to see what her burgeoning career in art will look like. Let’s hear a bit about what she’s been up to… 

Annie Armstrong: Hi there! Congrats on the gig. How’s it been going? 

Maya Fuchs Bortolami: It’s good! I’ve actually only been working here for three days. 

Oh, wow. What were you up to before this?

Well I got the job in July, but just now started. Before that I was living in Venice, working on projects for the Biennale. I graduated from St. Andrews last year.

What made you want to start working at Casa Tua?

I was looking at jobs that were not in galleries and this fit that, and it also offered something that I didn’t really anticipate as a first proper job, which is the aspect of collaboration and being able to work with galleries, sourcing works. I mean, that is my job. I’m sourcing works and putting on exhibitions for all Casa Tua locations.

Oh! So you’re not just working on the new New York location?

Nope. I’ll be based in New York, but I’ll be planning all of their shows with Miky and Leticia Grendene [Casa Tua’s founders]. They’ve been doing this for over two-and-a-half decades, and they’re growing so much that they needed to hire someone to help. They’ve been curating until now, and it’s definitely their taste and their identity as Casa Tua. So it’s not a blank slate. There’s a lot of history there that they want to continue to uphold.

Maya Fuchs Bortolami. Courtesy of Maya Fuchs Bortolami.

That probably creates a unique challenge in itself. From your eyes, what is the Casa Tua brand? 

They’ve been doing mostly photography up until now, mostly of things that they love. And the entire brand of Casa Tua is about home. So the art is meant to feel like you’re walking into an interior that is someone’s home.

So what’s your first show at Casa Tua going to be? Can you give us any hints? 

Yes, we are putting together a show that celebrates 25 years of Casa Tua and the collecting style of Miky and Leticia. lt’ll include some works by Walton Ford, Vera Lutter, Roe Ethridge, and Malick Sidibé. There are going to be many, many others, but we’re currently kind of weeding through everything.

I’m sure you grew up around art your whole life. Did you always know that you wanted to work in it, or did you have some resistance to the idea? What was your path?

I mean, I spent the first 10 years of my life pretending to hate it. And I am an only child. So my parents, really, they took me everywhere. There were no boundaries in that sense. I really was at every single gallery, museum, artist’s studio, art fair. I mean, we only traveled to see art. I was sitting at the dinners and I listened to what people were saying, and it was a very intense exposure for a young person.

There was no way for me to really avoid it, it was either I was going to hate it forever or I was just going to admit the fact that I found comfort in it. And I definitely did. So by the time I was 12, I announced to my mom a bit embarrassed that I wanted to study art history.

I bet she was thrilled.

I think she tried to hide the fact that she was so excited because she wanted to leave me room to change my mind. But it became something that we could really share as a passion, and we’ve taken full advantage of that together. Our relationship is really strong for that reason. We get to do everything together and we consult each other. I mean, she consults me and I obviously consult her on almost everything.

What is your personal taste like?

My taste is reliably old and conceptual. I mean, I can name a million movements, it’s very difficult to name names, but Arte Povera, Ab Ex, antiquity, modernism, Minimalism, Constructivism. I mean, the list literally can go on forever. But in terms of contemporary art, I don’t love any of it until proven wrong.

That’s a wise approach.

Yeah, but I can name a couple of contemporary artists that I’m particularly interested in at the moment, I could say Charles Ray, Elizabeth Peyton, David Hammons, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, and I guess as a super young artist, Leonardo Meoni. He’s an Italian artist who shows with Amanita. He does these beautiful velvet paintings. I really love them.

WE HEAR 

 

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Its the collaboration I didn’t know I needed: Kim Deal has tapped Alex Da Corte to stage-design her next music video… Start-up art fair Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week lists Ben Genocchio on its masthead (alongside TEFAF founder Michael Plummer)… Speaking from experience, anyone who has ever wanted to live in Athens, Georgia, absolutely should. And the perfect opportunity to do so has arisen, as the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art is looking for a new gallery director.. Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is closing its location in Boston, shifting focus solely to its space in Los Angeles… Bill Powers’s memoir Glissando is coming out in two weeks, and from a galley I acquired I can confirm that there is a lot of gossip in its pages… The Parrish Art Museum acquired new work by Suzanne McClelland, Bernard Meniel, and Cornelia Thomsen… And lastly, here’s some amazing internal museum drama to kick off your weekend…

The National Gallery in London is renovating its Sainsbury Wing and they’ve just found a secret letter from one of the original donors, sunk into a concrete column, saying that he hates the columns and is glad they’re being demolished.
10/10 unhinged rich man behaviour, no notes pic.twitter.com/q56QpaNFKi

— madeline odent (@oldenoughtosay) August 27, 2024

For more, read my colleague Richard Whiddington’s story.