Top 200 Collectors

J.K. Brown and Eric Diefenbach have been collecting since 1992 and have never sold a work since then. Having initially started by collecting artists from Eastern Europe, the US, Germany and Japan, they have branched in the intervening years. Asked in 2023 about their recent acquisitions, they listed works by Lois Dodd, an American artist known for her stark landscapes, and Meriikokeb Berhanu, an Ethiopian painter roughly five decades Dodd’s junior who had appeared in the Venice Biennale the year before.

Within the US museum world, Brown and Diefenbach—a senior managing director at the investment firm Coatue Management and a lawyer, respectively—are well-known for their philanthropy. They once helped the Museum of Modern Art acquire a Michaela Eichwald painting; the institution ended up featuring it in its permanent collection galleries for two years. Diefenbach has long been on the board of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and Brown is currently president of the New Museum in New York. The two have also supported shows at the Whitney Museum, the Hammer Museum, and other museums across the US.

But supporting artists has remained their primary passion. “We started buying the work of living artists whose practices interested us to enable them to continue creating art,” the couple told ARTnews. “Our collecting has evolved to also include assembling groups of work that reveal broader conversations happening in different times and places.”

Periodically, Brown and Diefenbach have also made headlines for an entirely different reason: their real estate purchases. In 2016, they plunked down $1.66 million on singer James Taylor’s childhood home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Midcentury Modern home had fallen into disrepair at the time, and so the couple put another $2 million toward renovating it in 2021. Diefenbach, humble as ever, did not speak of the project in grand ways, however. He told the Wall Street Journal, “We had been looking for another platform for art and the house was ideal.”