On the walls now · Toledo, Ohio

The House Collection

Thirteen works of contemporary art, hanging in a Members' House in downtown Toledo. From the collection of Mark Bevington, curated by Paula Baldoni of River House Arts. The hang rotates with the seasons.

Works
13
Cities
9
Velvet ropes
0
Walk the collection → Watch the films

Why it's here

A House can hold a bar, a kitchen and a room full of people talking. It can also hold a Venice Biennale artist, a weaver in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, and a painting that is still slowly changing colour on the wall. We think it should hold both at once.

Nothing here is reproduction and nothing is decoration. These are works by living artists from Tokyo, Accra, Harare, Maputo, Paris, Port Sudan, London, Los Angeles and Brooklyn, most of them shown in museums, all of them hanging where Members eat, work and argue. There is no ticket and no velvet rope. That is the entire idea.

The Collector

Mark Bevington

“Work this good should be in front of people, not in a crate.”
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Mark Bevington began collecting with River House Arts less than a decade ago. In that time he has built a collection serious enough to put him in contention among the leading collectors in the country, and, unusually, he would rather it were not in storage.

That instinct is the reason this page exists. Most collections of this calibre are seen by appointment, in private, by people who already know what they are looking at. Mark's is hanging in a House where somebody can walk past a Qualeasha Wood tapestry on the way to get a coffee, stop, and stand in front of it for ten minutes without asking anyone's permission.

The Curator

Paula Baldoni

River House Arts

Every wall in this collection is a decision she made: what hangs, what it hangs beside, and when it comes down.
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She opened River House Arts on the Perrysburg waterfront in November 2009, after decades in non-profit management in Boston and Ann Arbor, for a blunt reason: Toledo artists with international reputations had nowhere at home to show their work. The gallery is now in the historic Secor Building on Jefferson Avenue downtown, run with her husband William Jordan, and has staged more than three hundred exhibitions. Admission has always been free.

What she does at TolHouse is a harder version of the same job. A gallery wall is neutral and quiet. A Members' House is neither. It has furniture, noise, low light and people with their backs to the art. Work that survives that and still stops somebody mid-sentence has been placed by someone who knows exactly what they are doing.

riverhousearts.com · 425 Jefferson Ave, Toledo

The Works

Thirteen pieces, currently on the walls.

Tap any image to see it full screen, then tap again to lean in. Every piece is shown the way the photographer caught it: the full work, the details you only get standing close, and the wall it lives on.

The Room

Hung together, they start a conversation.

Lila de Magalhães and Matt Bollinger, side by side.

In their words

The collector and the curator, on the pieces they keep coming back to.

Which ones stopped you?

Your picks from the wall.

The collection rotates with the seasons.

Come see it
before it changes.

See public events Apply for Membership

On view

TolHouse
Toledo, Ohio

Curation

Paula Baldoni
River House Arts

Collection

Mark J Bevington
Collection

All works © the artists. Photography courtesy of TolHouse and River House Arts.