ADVISOR: These aren't just acquisitions. They're moments of recognition, relationships, and vision.

Whether you’re just starting out or refining a  collection, our advisory approach is rooted in trust, dialogue, and market knowledge. We work closely with each client to identify opportunities that reflect their taste, values, and long-term goals, placing works that are not only meaningful, but strategically sound.

Our strength lies in the details: knowing when to move, how to negotiate, and which works are worth building around. We source from a trusted network of galleries, artists, and private collections, always with transparency and discretion. When it’s time to sell, we offer the same care and strategy,  helping you position works thoughtfully in the secondary market.

Every placement tells a story. From the first conversation to final install, we guide the entire process: sourcing, framing, delivery, and beyond. We also offer experiences like artist studio visits, private viewings, and curated walkthroughs of murals,  museum shows and art fairs.

Whether you're collecting for passion, legacy, or investment — or all three — Joe Ellis Art offers the rigor, relationships, and intuition to guide your next move.

This was a moment of clarity the kind that quietly changes everything. I was leading a group of collectors through Untitled Art Fair in Miami, explaining my approach to contemporary painting. I told them it’s not so different from hip hop. Just as producers sample from the past: soul, gospel, jazz  to build something new, today’s painters are sampling from all of art history. From antiquity to graffiti, Cubism to Pop, the best don’t just quote: they recompose.

The fair was loud, chaotic, beautiful. A blur of people, energy, commerce, performance.

Then we stepped into the booth of Max Estrella, a dealer from Madrid. There was calm. Silence. Pos(t)kärd 3 by Nacho Martín Silva was on view: a large-scale painting made of several smaller canvases, all creating a single image, each section rendered in a different visual language from paintings history. It stopped time.

I explained what I saw. Why it mattered. Why it stood out. We negotiated the price. The collectors bought the piece. In that moment, I recognized my strength: I’ve looked at thousands of paintings: brilliant, boring, broken, virtuosic. I’ve made them, destroyed them, talked about them, sold them. That cumulative seeing is my lens. I can feel when something is real. And I can help others feel it too.

From 2002 to 2006, I studied painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Rosson Crow was there around the same time.

I remember visiting her senior studio: massive canvases of grand interiors, made with spray paint, house paint, acrylic, oil. She used tape, projections, whatever the painting called for. The materials were fluid. The work was electric, even then.

Years later, while advising a collection, the client’s focus began to shift. What started as a study of specific art historical moments evolved into a desire to engage what was happening right now.

At the Armory Show in New York, we saw The Triumph of Magical Thinking in the booth of The Hole. The painting felt immediate, connected to the ruptures of COVID and the aftermath of George Floyd. The scale, the palette, the energy. It spoke clearly.

The title likely borrowed from Joan Didion, only deepened the meaning.

What I offered in that moment wasn’t just strategy. It was perspective. I had seen this artist’s arc begin. I understood where this painting lived in the larger body of work.

We acquired the painting shortly after. A full-circle placement, personal, pointed, and perfectly timed.