‘CULTURED’ Founder Sarah Harrelson Gathers NY’s Cultural Power Brokers to Launch Her First Book

Last night, New York’s art, fashion, and design leaders descended on Away co-founder and collector Jen Rubio‘s West Village home for an intimate cocktail celebrating CULTURED Editor-in-Chief Sarah Harrelson’s forthcoming book, The Cultured Collector. Hosted by Rubio and Harrelson in partnership with Ginori 1735, the evening brought together a packed crowd of cultural heavyweights, including director Celine Song, actor Julianna Margulies, designer Athena Calderone, entrepreneur Lauren Santo Domingo, curator and Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent, and more for a first look at the new release.

Guests explored Rubio’s art collection in person, before flipping through images of it splashed across the matte pages of The Cultured Collector, now available for pre-order ahead of Harrelson’s multi-city book tour. Ginori 1735 put its Italian design heritage on display with a tablescape conceived with Alimentari Flaneur, featuring the line’s hand-decorated Catene, Labirinto, and Arte porcelain collections by Gio Ponti. Cocktails and music accompanied the evening’s conversations, which moved between the art on Rubio’s walls and the collections captured in Harrelson’s pages.

Among those in attendance were filmmaker Griffin Dunne; entertainer Kareem Rahma; artists Lisa Yuskavage, Sam McKinniss, Sheree Hovsepian, and Hugh Hayden; and designers across fashion and interiors Joseph Altuzarra, Todd Snyder, Olympia Gayot, Daniella Kallmeyer, Giancarlo Valle, Jane Keltner de Valle, and Adam Charlap Hyman. The guest list also included stylist Kate Young; curators Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni; advisor Amy Cappellazzo; Chanel president of arts, culture, and heritage Yana Peel; patrons Jamie Tisch, Robert Soros, and Jamie Singer Soros; CULTURED x Art Arena leadership Isolde Brielmaier and Michi Jigarjian; and writers and editors Vanessa Friedman, Molly Jong-Fast, David Haskell, Mark Guiducci, Nate Freeman, Marisa Meltzer, and Kristina O’Neill.

Inspired by CULTURED‘s popular Collector Questionnaire column, The Cultured Collector takes readers inside 30 major art collections through more than two hundred photographs and candid conversations, featuring musicians Alicia Keys, Swizz Beatz, and Joe Jonas; artist Rashid Johnson; patrons Michelle and Jason Rubell; producer Scooter Braun; journalist Don Lemon; and chef Daniel Humm. In the book, Harrelson makes the case for collecting as an intensely personal pursuit, revealing the stories and sensibilities behind the works people choose to live with.

For a project devoted to the art of living with art, the setting offered a fitting introduction: an evening spent inside a collector’s home, surrounded by the works and people that make a collection more than the sum of its parts.