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The Icy Gays Built a Collection By Cultivating Relationships—and Ignoring Market Hype

Rob and Eric Thomas-Suwall turned a $5,000 Hockney book debate into a 150-work art collection rooted in queer joy, support for women and the belief that collecting should be guided by meaningful encounters.

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.

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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........

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