Art Box: Christen and Derek Wilson

For anyone who’s interested in contemporary art, Derek and Christen Wilson’s collection is exciting. For one thing, it’s rare to see so many museum-worthy art pieces in a private home, and the fact that it’s local makes it all the more compelling. The Wilsons’ 7,500-square-foot house in Highland Park boasts works by modern masters such as Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt, among dozens of other minimalist, figurative and conceptualist paintings, sculptures and objects. Enough to set any contemporary art lover’s heart aflutter.

It’s one thing to admire modern art, another to live with it. So it’s even more remarkable to find minimalist artist Fred Sandback’s 1967 red elastic cord installation trailing along the Wilson’s family room floor, or Los Angeles artist Sterling Ruby’s 2008 Time Machine, a gritty, cage-like object that dominates a large chunk of space near the entry.  What’s even more astonishing, however, is to learn that the Wilsons live here, among all this investment-quality art, with their 4-year-old son, Truman, and 17-year-old daughter, Trinity Lewis, Christen’s daughter from a previous marriage. On top of that, Christen and Derek are expecting another child next spring. No area is off limits (although skate-boarding and biking through the house have been banned) and even the children’s rooms display good art. Yet, is there no fear of havoc that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich can wreak?

“We’re lucky in that it’s never been an issue with our children,” says Derek, co-founder and chairman of web management company NeoSpire. “We just teach them not to touch the art. We learned this from (art dealer) John Runyon and other collectors we know who have children. In fact, our 4-year-old tells his friends not to touch the art when they’re playing in the house.”

The Wilsons didn’t set out to be collectors. Married in 2004, their art collection grew along with their family, and soon the house was full of paintings, sculptures and children. Derek, who hails from Washington, D.C., started buying art there from local artists 15 years ago. “I found I could walk down to my local gallery and I could buy a piece of art that I liked for the price of a Rothko poster,” he says. When he moved to Dallas to be near his mother in 1994, Derek, now 44, joined the Junior Associates at the Dallas Museum of Art, where he met others interested in art. He also fortuitously joined the same gym as art dealer and then-gallery owner John Runyon, whom he got to know. “He started mentoring me and teaching me about contemporary art,” says Derek. “We’d walk the museum together and we went on trips with the Junior Associates to see collectors’ homes in other cities. I had never seen houses with contemporary art in them before. Seeing that you could have that kind of art in your house got me hooked.”

Thirty-eight-year-old Christen, who moved to Dallas from Los Angeles in 1999, where she had been a rep for cinematographers, became smitten with minimalism at age 15, when she attended a museum show in New York of works by Judd, Flavin, and Sandback. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is art?’ I was taken out of the box of what modern art could be,” she says. Her creative work with cinematographers kept her in the circle of artists, but she didn’t start collecting until she married. “Derek and I started collecting art as a hobby together,” she says.

As their involvement with the art scene grew, so did their connections to top collectors. Shortly after the couple was married, Derek saw renowned Dallas contemporary art collector Howard Rachofsky at a party at Forty Five Ten and introduced himself. Soon, Rachofsky was a mentor, offering to take the couple on trips to visit galleries in New York and L.A., and introducing them to artists. “The Dallas art scene is small but very strong,” says Christen. “Most people in the community (of collectors) know each other and are very friendly and helpful, not competitive at all. That’s not necessarily the case in other cities.”