If you’re looking for art advice, consider asking your bank.
Rebekah Bowling, an art advisor at Citi, helps ultra-high-net-worth clients in Citi Wealth manage and build their art collections and knows how hard it can be to make sense of the market. Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and UBS are among the other banks offering art advice to wealthy clients.
Bowling spent a decade at the global auction house Phillips, where she ran the midseason and day sales, before moving to LA and focusing in part on client development. She joined Citi in July.
Her day-to-day can include keeping clients in the know about auctions, suggesting artists who might fit well in their homes or collections, or planning events.
In her mind, it’s not wise for anyone to buy art they don’t actually enjoy — “you will only be disappointed,” — but she knows that many are concerned with finding artists who represent good value.
Start with emerging artists
For anyone who is just getting into collecting, Bowling said focusing on galleries that represent emerging artists is a good place to start. These days, Bowling said, historically underrepresented or overlooked artists are gaining attention.
High-net-worth individuals were increasingly open to buying art from artists they hadn’t known before, according to Art Basel and UBS’s 2025 Survey of Global Collecting. Sixty-six percent bought work from artists they discovered in 2024 or 2025, a rise of 8% from the year prior. Although the art market is experiencing a downturn — global sales value decreased by 12% year-over-year, according to Art Basel and UBS’ 2025 Global Art Market report — some galleries have been bucking the trend. The smallest dealers posted a 17% increase in annual sales, according to the report.
Textile trends
Bowling told Business Insider that institutional support for artists who toe the line between fine art and craft is “very strong, which has led to soaring prices for these artists at auction.” Sculptor Ruth Asawa and textile artist Olga de Amaral are among those gaining traction, she said. In September, one of de Amaral’s pieces sold at an auction for around $1.14 million, almost three times the low-end estimate according to Christie’s.
Asawa isn’t underground — her retrospective recently opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan — but Bowling said that Kay Sekimachi is an artist who fits into the same market trend and remains somewhat under the radar. She’s a fiber artist who was friends with Asawa, and her work is currently being shown at a gallery in Manhattan. The prices aren’t listed on the gallery’s site, but a group of three woven bowls recently sold for $3,800 at an auction in California, exceeding the high-end estimate, per Invaluable, a fine art marketplace.
No matter the potential monetary gains, though, Bowling says it’s crucial to be guided by taste.
“From an investing perspective, you really shouldn’t buy anything that you don’t love,” she said.
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