A Houston expert shares 5 newways to display art
Art consultant Lea Weingarten takes an innovative approach
Nothing adds soul to a room like thoughtful art. And after months of staring at our walls like never before, we could all use more of that.
Think you don’t have room or the right kind of space? Art consultant Lea Weingarten, principal of Weingarten Art Group, offers some inventive solutions. She recently collaborated with Lucinda Loya and HGTV’s Tiffany Brooks on rooms in House Beautiful’s 2020 Whole Home Concept House near Denver (viewable online and in the magazine’s November issue); and with Marcus Mohon on a room for the recent Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Dallas.
With just a few exceptions, Weingarten sourced all of the works locally. Supporting Houston’s galleries and artists is especially important now, to keep them going during the pandemic, she says. “And if you’re just starting out, they also are your best resource in terms of access.”
1. Turn a corner.
“I always try to have at least one gallery wall, to make it easy for clients to mix objects of sentimental value with fine art,” Weingarten says. Loya envisioned artwork on a shelf that wraps around the corner of a potentially awkward entry space. Weingarten turned that into a new kind of gallery wall, using small
works by more than a half- dozen regional artists, including Helen Altman, Page Kempner, Al Souza and Shaun O’Dell. The wall-hung works weren’t all flat; some were sculptural. All played on the room’s nature theme, and some had gold touches because Loya is also all about glam. A small cairn of found river rocks on the shelf cost nothing.
2. Play with patterns.
That corner “wall gallery” also happened against some pretty dramatic zebra-patterned wallpaper. Weingarten thinks of the works against the bold pattern as an “intervention.” Loya also papered bigger spaces with a neutral, stonepatterned design. “Putting art against a pattern or curtain gives everyone a fresh look. It’s a way to push your comfort zone a little,” Weingarten says. “It’s trickier if you have a lot of art, but if it’s just one piece, lean it against the wall first or lay it on a sample of the wallpaper first and stand back to see how it makes you feel.”
3. Scale up.
Weingarten and Loya placed a 10-foot-tall botanical print on a narrow wall with a 16-foot ceiling. “Most people would have put a mirror there, or a grid of four pieces,” Weingarten says. You don’t need tall ceilings to pull this off, she adds. “One big piece immerses you in the art.”
4. Embrace texture.
That big botanical, Linarenos Moreno’s “Art Forms in Mechanism XXIV,” is printed on burlap and stapled to the wall, unframed (as the artist stipulated). Along with smaller works in the room, the burlap adds to the room’s organic feel.
5. Honor the passage of time.
Mohon wanted to evoke the feel of an elegant hotel in Paris. To create a sense of the bridged history one might encounter in such a place, Weingarten combined works from a variety of materials and eras: A layered digital photograph by Alex Spoth nods to the tradition of portraiture (and it’s displayed on an easel, since most of the walls were covered with curtains). A Dorothy Hood canvas suggests midcentury dreams, and a monochromatic work of canvas and plywood by Josh Sperling is cleanly contemporary.