Jack Pierson’s first taste of the object trade was as a small boy running around the flea markets of Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the late 1960s. His mother ran an antique shop out of a chapel, and young Jack absorbed her love of old stuff. He developed uncanny salesmanship, trawling the swap meet aisles, angling for deals on sheet music and sterling silver to sell high. Pierson would offer $5 for something—charming the seller by saying he needed to ask for his mother’s permission to make the payment—then flip it for $15. “It was a nice way to augment lawn-mowing money,” he says.
This was long before the artist, known for his photographs and assemblage works, emerged from the so-called Boston School—a cohort of pioneering photographers including Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and the Starn twins—that anchored the city’s queer underground in the ’70s and ’80s. In 2023, after a decades-long career that saw his work land in the permanent collections of American institutions including the Met, LACMA, and the Whitney, Pierson parlayed his youthful flea-market huntsmanship into Elliott Templeton Fine Arts—a gallery he named for the wealthy aesthete in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel, The Razor’s Edge—on the Lower East Side.
While the space’s remit has evolved from an antique shop housing its proprietor’s wares to a contemporary art gallery showcasing artists he admires, it remains an earnest reflection of its founder’s eye—and love of the marketplace. “I’m the typical toxic masculine collector,” Pierson confides. “I’ll want something really badly. Then once I get it, I don’t need it anymore.”
Today, the polymath’s personal collection—the pieces he can’t bear to part with—is spread across his homes in New York’s Greenwich Village and Palm Springs, California. (The latter graces the cover of CULTURED Editor-in-Chief Sarah Harrelson’s first book, The Cultured Collector.) For the second issue of CULTURED at Home, Harrelson and Pierson sat down to talk shop.
Sarah Harrelson: Do you remember when you first started to consider yourself an artist?
Jack Pierson: I was always doing watercolors and making things, but I wasn’t the teenager in a beret announcing, “I am an artist.” It was more like, “I do this and that, and I like to collect a little.” It was nothing systematic. Real collectors are completists. They say, “I have to have every single one of these.” Do you know what I mean?
Harrelson: Totally.
Pierson: I have to have every single thing for the three days I’m into that thing. Then I forget it, and I’m on to the next. I’m not a completist. I’m a magpie.
Harrelson: Did any of your collecting patterns change as your art career grew?
Pierson: My career started around 1990, and I had this intuitive urge to do for others what had been done for me. People bought work from me early on; they helped me. I wanted to pass that along.
Harrelson: Are you impulsive when you buy?
Pierson: Super impulsive. Gut, sentimental. Will it help someone, or won’t it? I’m not strategic.
Harrelson: I love “Will it help someone?” I’ve done that in small ways too. Those are the pieces you never regret, no matter where the artist’s career goes.
Pierson: Early on, when people bought from me, I never thought they were being helpful. I thought, Oh my god, they really want it. Maybe they did. But people trust artists’ opinions—when they buy a work, it makes a difference. When Ross Bleckner bought two of my drawings in 1990 or ’91, that was news for a month. They were probably $250. But “Ross Bleckner bought two”—it does something for your confidence.
Harrelson: Do you trade with other artists?
Pierson: I trade if someone asks. I want to do it more, but I’m shy about it. I trade with Richard Tinkler all the time, even though I don’t need to—he just gives me things. I love his work.
Harrelson: Tell me how you collect in California versus New York.
Pierson: California tends to be smaller—can it fit in a suitcase to get it out here? I’m also a big fan of the “country auction,” afternoon sales. That’s where you find a Walt Kuhn watercolor. Walt Kuhn, to me, is a huge artist.
Harrelson: You mean LiveAuctioneers?
Pierson: Yes.
Harrelson: There are always unbelievable deals from the photography-only auction house on there.
Pierson: Probably, but I don’t tend to collect photography. I don’t really think it’s art.
Harrelson: Jack!
Pierson: Old black-and-white photography, maybe. But whatever.
Harrelson: So what do you collect, then?
Pierson: Let me tell you a story first. This was one of the first times I was taken to a fancy collector’s house. It was in San Francisco, and the lady was giving me a tour with her—what do you call it?—curator beside her. “This is the Rothko, this is the Rosenquist, this is the Rauschenberg.” Then she comes to a little square painting—white brushstrokes, a foot square—and goes, “And this is the—,” and looks at the curator, who says, “Ryman.” I knew it was a Ryman anyway, but I thought it was so funny. She didn’t know her own Ryman.
Harrelson: I have a few stories like that, too.
Pierson: Now I’m about to be just like that, because I just got a painting by an artist whose first name I don’t even know. Last name is Yackulic. I got it from Gern en Regalia in New York for $2,000. [The artist is Will Yackulic.]
Harrelson: What kind of collections do you like to see?
Pierson: Really expensive, highly curated ones.
Harrelson: With your work in it.
Pierson: I guess I do like that too. But honestly, I like to see people having fun. In my old age, I’ve leaned further into my own aesthetic, which is clutter and dust and stuff I like. We all have dreams of a minimalist environment with one perfect Ryman on a white wall in the hallway. But that’s never going to happen to me.
Harrelson: You have the warmer, more inviting approach.
Pierson: There are people who do the spare thing so well. I was once invited to the great decorator-architect Axel Vervoordt’s—
Harrelson: The castle.
Pierson: It’s so fucking cool. He puts the Andy Warhol piss painting against a wall with all its paint peeling off, and it looks fantastic. That guy blows my mind.
Harrelson: Me too. It’s really not my aesthetic, but I love everything he does. In the 30 to 40 years since you started collecting, do you have a favorite piece or collecting story?
Pierson: Five or six years ago, The New York Times Magazine sent me to photograph George Condo in his studio uptown. I’ve known him forever—a Boston guy too, though they never put him in the Boston School. On his desk, I see this crappy black-and-white picture of him, young. I said, “What’s this?” He said, “Oh, Andy took that of me in the ’80s. It came up at auction, and I figured I should get it.”
I walked out thinking, What a loser I am. I was in New York in the ’80s, I saw Andy Warhol, and I never said anything to him because I wanted to wait until the right moment. George Condo was photographed by Andy, and now here I am photographing him. What a schmuck.
Cut to two weeks later. It’s the anniversary of Stonewall, so Sotheby’s does a big sale. They plundered Warhol’s archive for anything gay—Fire Island, all of it. In 1983, my crowd was the Pyramid Club drag queens: Taboo!, Hapi Phace, Jimmy Paul, who’s a famous hairdresser now. I never did drag, because I was too homely or whatever, but I was their roadie. But for Gay Pride ’83, they put me in semi-skag drag, just sunglasses and a wig and a weird T-shirt, and I walked down the street in the middle of the three of them. Suddenly, Andy Warhol stepped off the curb and took our picture. We giggled. Never thought about it again for 40 years.
I’m scrolling through the gay auction, and, boom, there’s the picture. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to tell anyone because, in my mind, it was going to be very in demand. I lose things at auction all the time by waiting until it’s live. So I took a deep breath—I need this picture—and put a $10,000 reserve on it. I got it for $900.
Harrelson: No way.
Pierson: I know. I wasn’t collecting it as a work of art. I was collecting it because it’s an Andy Warhol picture of me.
Harrelson: I want to know more about your Palm Springs house.
Pierson: I’ve been working on it since I got it in 2000. There’s plenty besides art. This lamp was an early purchase from the Billy Wilder auction. I saw it in the catalog and thought, Fun to have a little bedside lamp and say it was Billy Wilder’s. I won it for $600. Then the invoice comes, and the shipping is $3,000. I call Beverly Hills: “Why is the shipping $3,000?” They said, “It’s six feet tall.” I thought it was a night-table lamp. That’s an ironic collecting story.
Harrelson: I have to come visit Elliott Templeton, your gallery on the Lower East Side. It grows right out of the antique shop, doesn’t it?
Pierson: Part of the Elliott Templeton idea was, Maybe I can get rid of some of this stuff. Then it became, Better to sell work by people still making things than my old stuff. That collecting mentality turned me into a shop owner. But really, it came out of the last show I did with Shaun [Caley Regen, the founder of Regen Projects, the gallery which represents Pierson], where I curated my own work into a retrospective. At the end of the install, I thought, This is what I really like: putting things on the walls and making them look good, putting this next to that. I wanted to do it more than twice a year at my own shows, so I got a gallery just to let the impulse out. That’s what I love most, even more than the studio—getting it on the wall and making it make sense.
Harrelson: Artist, collector, curator.
Pierson: Right now, I’m just a dopey guy with no pants on because I was late for your call.
A version of this story appears in The Cultured Collector, a new book by Sarah Harrelson. Order your copy here.
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