Cheryl McGinnis and Eugene Faba

NEW YORK—Cheryl McGinnis is proprietor and director of the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, one of the newest galleries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Before opening this space, she ran a collector’s salon from her home. She spoke to ArtInfo about the collection she shares with her husband, Eugene Faba, owner of the video production company Volvox Motion Inc.

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Our First Acquisition: It was a work by Zhang Hongtu. I started representing him in 1997 at my salon. He had a lot of success early on with his images of Mao Tse-tung, but, by that time, he had sort of fallen through the cracks of the art world. He told me he couldn’t make a living any more, and he was going to go and point bricks with a friend of ours who does architectural restoration. I told him, “You absolutely cannot point bricks! You have to get into your studio and work, and I’m going to take a bunch of your stuff and I’m going to sell it and I’m going to support you.”

So he went into his studio and started doing this new series of paintings, and I remember selling those pieces between 1997 and 2000 for between $2,000 and $10,000. Recently, at both Christie’s Hong Kong and Sotheby’s New York, the same works fetched over $70,000. I had bought one of those early pieces, and it’s worth so much now, and people approach me to buy it all the time. I get calls every day because he’s on my Web site. But I won’t sell this piece no matter how much I’m offered. It’s a phenomenal piece.

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Our Most Recent Acquisition: There have been two. One is a piece by Maddy Rosenberg, an artist who was in the show “Mother Lode” at my gallery over the summer. I just adore her work. She’s very into architecture, and the first thing that I studied, even before art, was architecture. I’m so drawn to her work that I just had to buy one and bring it home. It was listed at my gallery for $4,000, and I always pay the full amount to the artist, so that was what I paid.

Also, I just purchased a piece by Kristin Flynn for my husband for our wedding anniversary, which is next week. He is passionate about evolution and the beauty of science. He has opened up a new world for me with regard to science and art, and I am now very interested in exhibiting work, especially by women artists, that delves into microspace, evolution and science in general.