The Icy Gays Built a Collection By Cultivating Relationships—and Ignoring Market Hype
The collecting journey of Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall (widely known on Instagram as the Icy Gays) is one of those narratives that demonstrates how genuine passion and human connection can go a long way toward overcoming the traditional barriers imposed by a furtive market. Now based in Richmond, Virginia, they started acquiring art more than 10 years ago when they lived in North Dakota, gradually making a name for themselves globally through conversations and close relationships with artists. In the years since, they have created a thriving online community by openly sharing their journey and the collection they’ve built on social media.
It all started with a David Hockney survey at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. “We went, and the show was so figurative, so queer and so colorful. It really opened our eyes to what contemporary art could be,” Rob tells Observer. He later bought a large Taschen Sumo book on Hockney, thinking of it as a commemorative object. “It was a $5,000, three-foot book. It came with a print, but Eric said, ‘Honey, I feel like we could use that money to support a young artist doing something amazing. Let’s find an actual work of art rather than a book about art.’”
Rob initially responded that he did not think they could get anything good for $5,000—a pronouncement they treated as a challenge. They started searching and found a vibrant, geometric abstract painting by Corydon Cowansage, Stairs #3, from her first solo show at Miller Contemporary, a small gallery focused on emerging and underrepresented women artists. They thought it likely that the painting had already sold, but called anyway. It had not, and it cost exactly $5,000.
At the time, the Icy Gays were not art collectors in any formal sense. They had inherited objects and artworks they liked, but no strategy, no familiarity with the rules of the gallery system and no particular market knowledge. Their early approach was spontaneous and direct: if they loved something, they called. A year after the Cowansage acquisition, they bought two more works: the Gahi Park painting that framed them during our interview and a large painting by Sophie Larrimore.
Artists, more than the market, became their entry point into the art world. Cowansage invited them to her Bronx studio, encouraging them to come to New York during Frieze and visit the fair. “It was our very first Frieze experience. We paid to get in, and we paid for a VIP tour on a Saturday,” Eric recalls. At the time, Cowansage was running an online flat-file project, through which they discovered many other artists. “We would ask her who she was excited about,” and their collection developed through those recommendations and through direct conversations with the artists.
“It was about discovering a community of people doing amazing things, but at the time, we were living in North Dakota, so we were geographically and culturally isolated,” they explain. So they began going to New York more often, always planning art visits and reading Roberta Smith reviews to understand what was worth seeing.
A few shows around that time were foundational in their collecting journey. After the Hockney retrospective, the David Wojnarowicz show at the Whitney became another key moment in understanding what type of art they were resonating with. They saw that the late artist was represented by P.P.O.W. and went to Chelsea to introduce themselves. “We said, ‘Hi, I’m Rob. This is Eric. We’re from North Dakota. You don’t know us, but we were just crying at the Whitney about David’s show, and we had to come say hi,’” they recall. That marked the start of a longstanding relationship.
As the pair tells it, they did not initially encounter the major barriers many new collectors do. Their winning personalities, genuineness and directness likely helped them gain access from the start, but the fact that they were not chasing the same artists as everyone else probably played a larger role. “Eric taught me something important: I can be more trend-driven. I read articles and look at lists and think, ‘I want to buy the list.’ Eric says, ‘I want to make the list,’” says Rob.
“That is how we have always collected. We tend to buy hyper-emerging artists, and we have been fortunate that many have gone on to amazing success,” Eric adds.
The 2017 Whitney Biennial was another important moment for them. “That biennial had Jordan Wolfson, Dana Schutz, Raul De Nieves and so many wild artworks. It expanded our conception of contemporary art in an amazing way,” Rob recalls.
The couple started collecting in 2016, just as Instagram was really taking off, and the platform gave their collection a second life. Realizing that very few people in their town would ever see the works in person, they began posting under the name the Icy Gays. “I was a little trepidatious because I thought, ‘These artists want to be on the Upper East Side, in London or in Paris.’ It turned out they loved it,” Eric says, noting how much artists appreciated the enthusiasm and visibility. The account helped turn their holdings into a narrative and a community, first digitally and then in person, as online relationships became studio visits, dinners and friendships. “Our passion for the artists came through in conversations with galleries.”
Their encounter with Salman Toor is a prime example of the impact of their unique brand of connection-based collecting. They had been following his work online and wrote to him to ask for a studio visit. To their surprise, he already knew them from Instagram and was happy to welcome them. “It was fabulous. We talked about growing up queer in conservative cultures—he in Pakistan, Rob in Alabama. Those experiences seem far apart, but there were shared experiences,” they recall. “His paintings are spaces of queer joy and sometimes queer terror.”
Only later did they realize that the works they had seen in the studio were a preview of Toor’s first Whitney show. Yet despite being on the verge of a major institutional and market leap, their genuine warmth let Rob and Eric acquire a painting from his upcoming gallery show. “Salman reached out to the gallery and said he would love for us to have a painting. They sent us the PDF. I asked, ‘Can we have two?’ They said no and no discount. By then, we had learned about discounts, but we said, ‘That’s fine. We’ll definitely take that one.’”
Rob and Eric describe the early art boom as something they took part in without fully understanding it. They were mostly buying what they loved, following their intuition. One telling moment was their timely acquisition of an Anna Weyant painting from her first show at 56 Henry. “I was at work—I’m an ENT surgeon—between cases in the operating room when Eric said, ‘You have to open this PDF. There is a painting of two girls doing yoga that we have to buy,’” Rob recounts. “I loved it, and immediately called the gallery. It was on hold, but the people passed, and we bought it. It was one of the first paintings she had ever sold.”
Weyant’s opening was also the first gallery dinner they ever attended. From there, they watched her career move rapidly through Blum & Poe to Gagosian and international visibility. People asking to buy their paintings alerted them to the speculative heat surrounding the artists they had supported early on. “That opened our eyes to the market… but it is still hanging there,” they say, pointing to the work that they still have on the wall.
Despite the market attention around many of the artists they acquired early in their careers, Rob and Eric have never sold anything. They acknowledge that deaccessioning lets collectors with limited funds support more artists, but it’s not a strategy they’re pursuing—at least not at this time. They credit the late satirical art-world persona Jerry Gogosian (a.k.a., Hilde Lynn Helphenstein) with teaching them about the market’s absurdities; seeing her approach helped them realize they could be distinctive simply by not behaving badly: “We decided we did not want to flip people. We wanted to continue collecting them and working with the galleries. By celebrating younger artists early, we did get access to some people as their careers grew.”
Today, they still make every decision as a couple. Their shared taste, they say, is close enough that disagreements are rare. “We joke that we each get one veto a year, but even that is rarely needed. We both research, look at things, show each other and talk them through.” Rob says he tends to follow the market and galleries more closely, reading everything and tracking shows and representation, while Eric remains more instinctive and resistant to hype.
Asked to identify some thematic threads in their collection, they suggest that it has, over time, developed an organic focus on women and queer artists: “It is not a litmus test, but it is still mostly what we collect. We are drawn to sweet surrealism, humor and a little shock—not shock for the art world, but for people who come into our house.”
After a decade of collecting, they now have an overall strategy and some rules, though they admit to breaking them frequently. For years, they prided themselves on living with everything they bought and avoiding putting works in storage. The move from North Dakota to a smaller house in Richmond made that impossible. “Our buying had to become more strategic,” they explain. “We ask where a work can go and how we can live with it practically.”
Eager to take a more active role in supporting artists and making an impact in their own community, Eric launched Main Projects in 2025, a contemporary arts space in Richmond that he operates with Laura Martin Mills. The goal was to bring many of the artists they have collected or want to support into an underserved Virginia community outside the main art centers, yet full of existing and potential collectors who can help sustain their careers. “We do installations, community shows and projects that bring our friends from New York and Los Angeles here, while pairing them with local artists doing incredible things,” he explains. “It is about helping artists’ careers and helping the art world. Our goal here is to create a new generation of collectors. Richmond has a market, but we want to open it further.”
The couple acknowledges that not everyone in the art world welcomed their transition from collector to dealer. But after several shows, it became clear that their project was different from a collector opening a vanity space or a competitor gallery. “It is very community-focused. Our gallery friends have seen the programming for a year and a half and understand that it is authentic. This is not a collector looking for a way to monetize things,” Eric emphasizes. “In our collecting, it mattered to us to buy emerging artists because we know how impactful that sale can be financially and motivationally. It tells an artist that someone is paying attention. Now the gallery lets us pursue that in another way.”
The Icy Gays think of themselves as connectors between artists, collectors and institutions. In North Dakota, the collecting community was too limited to sustain the kind of ecosystem they wanted, yet they still managed to present their collection at the Plains Art Museum with “Full Disclosure,” a full exhibition curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre in 2024. For them, it was a grand finale to that chapter and a chance to share queer and women artists in a place where such visibility mattered. Since moving to Richmond, they have built strong relationships with the ICA at VCU, the VMFA and local artists, curators and collectors. According to Rob and Eric, VCU’s MFA program attracts serious faculty and students, and they see studio visits with graduate artists as part of the same discovery process that once took place online. Last year, Eric curated a show at the VMFA based on a Dalí painting in the museum’s collection, bringing together work by artists including Kim Dacres and Julie Curtiss.
Because they do not have children, the couple is starting to structure their will so the collection will eventually go to institutions. And they are beginning more serious legacy planning conversations about that future, especially with local museums.
Toward the end of our conversation, we asked them about their thoughts on the state of the market. The couple was blunt. Eric and Rob say they collected through eight or ten strong years and had often been warned that a downturn would come, though they did not fully believe it. The current correction, they acknowledge, has been painful to watch, especially for artists whose markets inflated too quickly and for galleries that depended on emerging art collectors. “That market has dried up, and many of those collectors have disappeared. We have seen it affect many friends,” they say. Asked what went wrong, they point to three factors: too much inventory, prices rising too quickly and access becoming too rigid. “The doors closed on new collectors at the same time prices rose. The entry point changed from $5,000 to $20,000-30,000. New collectors were priced out.”
Art fairs, meanwhile, multiplied the costs and obligations, making the experience of collecting feel transactional and exhausting rather than joyful. The relationships that had drawn them into the art world were being replaced by status. “It became about money, and that is boring,” they say. “Even if you are new to the art world, you can tell when the vibe is off. For us, getting into collecting gave us so much joy at the onset. It was fun. What has happened in the art world is that a lot of that joy has been taken out of it.”
“[Collecting] has to be because you love it, and because the gallery and the artist treat you like you matter,” they argue, adding that the solution is to return to personal relationships, rather than being driven by hype or auction numbers. “Focus on what you really want to live with for the rest of your life and make the experience of acquiring it good. Then you want to repeat it. Celebrate and support people who hold the same values as you do.”
Today, the Icy Gays continue to discover artists, but they are now more intentional about where they go and what they buy. They still attend fairs, and will be in Paris in October, but reject the idea that collectors must be everywhere. “It is about curating the experience: not trying to do everything, not trying to be everywhere and not trying to buy everything.”
Their collection now includes roughly 150-160 works. They are still buying, but more slowly and strategically. In terms of regrets, they point to what they missed buying at the right time, including works by Kat Lyons, Jenny Morgan and especially Emma Webster. Asked about holy grails, their answers diverge while still being complementary: Rob would choose Alice Neel’s portrait of Andy Warhol, drawn to her psychological treatment of celebrity, pain and the portrait’s ability to reach the essence of a person. Eric would instead go for a Clyfford Still painting, drawn to its abstraction, lifelines and philosophical intensity. It’s a split that aptly captures the breadth of their shared vision.
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