Komal Shah has grand plans for female artists — her new show is just the beginning

It’s been a busy six months for entrepreneur Komal Shah, who, alongside her husband, the tech investor Gaurav Garg, has amassed one of the world’s most impressive collections devoted to women artists. In May the philanthropic couple, who live in California, released their first book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, edited by the art historians Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel. This November an exhibition of the same name, featuring their trove of museum-quality works, was unveiled to the public at Dia Chelsea’s former New York City outpost.

Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art and the artistic director of the 2022 Venice Biennale, Making Their Mark is on view in New York through 27 January 2024, and will travel to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in September 2024, followed by the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis in 2025.

‘The collection is at once personal, passionate, colourful and serious — all adjectives I would apply to Komal herself,’ says Alemani, who has known the collector for nearly a decade. Alemani, whose Biennale exhibition featured more than 80 percent women artists, was the perfect choice to curate Shah’s debut show.

So where did this collection featuring more than 80 female artists begin? Christie’s 2011 Asian Art Week. Inspired by a friend who is one of the foremost South Asian contemporary art collectors, Shah visited the sale preview exhibitions in New York, where a mixed-media work on paper by Indian-American artist Rina Banerjee caught her eye. ‘The fact that she had immigrated when she was young and was trying to find her sense of belonging — though she still felt she was a New Yorker — spoke to me,’ says Shah, adding her appreciation for Banerjee’s use of Indian motifs and deities.

Having grown up in Ahmedabad in Western India, a city known for its embellished textiles and intricate Jain architecture, Shah was steeped in a rich visual culture at a young age. In 1991, she came to the United States to study computer science at Stanford and later became a successful computer engineer and business executive. When Shah met Garg, who had come to America in 1984, the two increasingly visited galleries and museums across the country, where they found themselves especially attracted to Abstract Expressionism.

However, it was only in 2011 that the couple felt compelled to make its first significant acquisition. Not having registered for the sale at Christie’s, Shah asked her friend to raise her paddle when Banerjee’s piece came up. The work she won that day, which began her historic collection, can be seen on the second floor of Making Their Mark.

Another turning point for the collection came in 2014 when Shah visited the Whitney Biennial with the Tate North American Acquisitions Committee — her board and acquisitions affiliations currently include SFMOMA, the Hammer Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoMA. ‘I remember being mesmerised by the works of Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries, their scale, the audacity, and the gorgeousness,’ remembers Shah.

Guided by former Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey, she embarked on a journey of discovery that also entailed building close relationships with artists and learning about past makers who inspired their practices. These artists, along with Charline von Heyl and Amy Sillman, form the core of her collection, which contains abstract and figurative works across all genres and many generations.

The collection has grown to include historic works like one of Joan Mitchell’s final diptychs, recently featured in the touring Joan Mitchell Retrospective, and Mary Corse’s 1969 Untitled (White Grid, Horizontal Strokes), her second-ever glass-and-acrylic painting from her White Light series — the first is in MoMA’s collection — which Shah and Garg acquired directly from the artist.

Mitchell and Corse, along with Judy Chicago and Simone Leigh, are among the established artists represented in Making Their Mark. Intentionally given equal weight are the latest breakout stars, like Brooklyn-based painter Naudline Pierre and the British painter Jadé Fadojutimi, as well as underrecognised names such as the late Japanese-American ceramist Toshiko Takaezu and German-American textile artist Trude Guermonprez.

Prior to exhibiting in New York, Shah and Garg welcomed a veritable who’s who of the art world — including 40 international museum directors for a Museums of Tomorrow event — into their home to study and experience the diverse collection. While most of the works in Making Their Mark normally hang in their residence, some are simply too large to fit — though, Shah is far from intimidated by their scale:

‘I come from the tech world and always thought of myself as an equal to all men,’ says Shah, who was one of three women in her class of 100 at Stanford. ‘I have never felt that I’m inferior or that there were any ceilings, so I’m not afraid to collect large pieces. I love it when women make massive works. It gets me excited.’ Shah also hopes to stir a reaction in exhibitiongoers: ‘I want to prove that women can do everything men can and better.’

Perhaps most illustrative of Shah’s grand ambitions is Firelei Báez’s For Améthyste and Athénaïre (Exiled Muses Beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon), Anacaonas, a mammoth 21-foot work of oil on canvas over wood panel with hand-painted wood frames. Reflecting the Dominican Republic–born artist’s interest in Afro-Latina and Afro-Caribbean diasporic histories, the work depicts Améthyste and Athénaïre Christophe, daughters of the first king and queen of Haiti, who were forced into exile following their father’s death.

A site-specific installation for MoMA’s exterior window on West 53rd Street, the painting was on view from 2018-2019. When the museum did not acquire it, Shah could not resist. ‘Everybody — including those from MoMA — who has seen it hang in both places says it looks much better here,’ says Shah.

‘I do not collect with a view that I have to know where each work is going to go. I know that at some point things will align, and I will be able to give the work its due space’, says Shah. Above all, her chief collecting criteria remains ‘falling in love’ with a work that elicits a ‘visceral reaction.’

‘Over my years of collecting, I have learned to look for what’s novel and what’s important in the story the work is trying to tell. I want to understand the artist’s journey and how a body of work is contributing to the canon,’ says Shah.

Though she collects independently of an advisor, Shah feels grateful to have benefitted from the knowledge of brilliant mentors and curators, such as Alemani, Godfrey, and Siegel, Research Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Discovering new artists through Instagram, art fairs and gallery hopping is one of her favourite parts of collecting: ‘the joy of just looking is immensely pleasurable and also critical.’ Another is the chance to share her collection with the public: ‘It feels so good giving light to these works and making them accessible. It feels like I’m making good on my promises and the artists’ implicit trust.’

With the success of her show, Shah feels encouraged to explore a permanent public home for the collection. ‘I have a singular focus and am able to actualise visions fairly quickly because I am not weighed down by the bureaucracy of museums’, she says emphasising that being an institution is key for furthering research and educational initiatives, such as a female artist conversation series she began five years ago at Stanford.

Alemani applauds Shah’s commitment to expanding scholarship. ‘Komal’s book is an incredible tool to not only talk about the collection but also create literature where there isn’t any. For instance, little-known textile artists share the pages with Joan Mitchell or Julie Mehretu,’ says the curator. ‘The most important thing in presenting the work of female artists is to ensure that these are not episodic appearances.’

Without a doubt, Shah is doing her part to amplify and edify, says Alemani: ‘Walking into an exhibition that could be in a museum and realising that these are 84 women artists is extremely powerful and profound.’