After numerous years working as a volunteer in the visual and performing arts, and following board associations with The Friends of Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, and the Museum of African Art, Thea Westreich founded Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services - a private consultancy serving individuals building fine art collections.
Since 1982, Thea has advised private collectors throughout the United States and Europe. She has worked with clients to build collections focused variously on Impressionism, American, Modern, and Contemporary Art. She has curated collections in specific media, such as video and film, photography, and works on paper, in addition to the more traditional genres of painting and sculpture.
Thea has built a research library of over 11,000 volumes, which underlies her firm's dedication to thorough research and analysis in vetting works of art. Along with her husband, Ethan Wagner, Thea also publishes artists' books.
After a long career in the public policy arena, most of which was spent as a communications and issue advertising consultant with two national firms he co-founded, Wagner recently joined his wife, Thea, on a full-time basis to help manage Art Advisory's expanded services.
Wagner's art interests go back more than two decades, to his days in California when he collected contemporary and outsider art, published artists' books, and was involved with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other art organizations.
In addition to managing Art Advisory's business and financial practices and external communications, Wagner is actively involved in canvassing the international art market on behalf of the firm's clients, and in publishing artists books, together with Thea.
Having joined Art Advisory Services as a registrar, and now an associate working with clients in all aspects of their collecting activities. She previously worked in the Education Department at the New Orleans Museum of Art and as Adjunct Faculty at Tulane University, where she taught art survey courses. Suzanne was also once employed as teh assistant to the director of the Fine Arts Gallery in New Orleans. She received her undergraduate degree in both art history and history from Miami University, and took post-graduate studies at Tulane University.
After completing her MBA at Columbia University Business School, Rachel Carr joined Art Advisory Services as Business Manager. She is now an associate of the firm. She works directly with clients in all aspects of their collecting activities as well as managing the firm's affairs. Rachel studied art history as an undergraduate at Yale University, and received her MA in modern art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She has worked in the Department of Photographs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Sotheby's in New York.