“Art is meant to be shared, not coveted,” says Chelsea Mehra. Recently, the young collector and founder of venture capital firm RUCA Capital has taken that sentiment further than most—in 2023, she established the RUCA Foundation, an arts organization and private museum.
Mehra, who grew up just outside of Washington, DC, chose historic Georgetown to house the fledgling institution, which showcases works from her expansive contemporary collection and will soon be made accessible to the public. These days, as the foundation’s executive director, she spearheads programming efforts and the collection’s curation.
Strolling through Mehra’s Art Deco apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park, one finds works by Robert Longo, Issy Wood, and Ed Ruscha. An Anna Weyant hangs in the 30-year-old’s dining room. She tells me, offhandedly, that she won it in a bet with friends at the Armory Show. “My focus has always been to support today’s most compelling living artists,” she says. “I prefer to know that my patronage is directly impacting an artist during their lifetime.”
Although her tastes are firmly situated in the present, the collector—who sits on MoMA’s Young Patrons Council and is also a patron of the National Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum, and LACMA—took inspiration for the RUCA Foundation from the great art patrons of the past, from the Medicis to the Fricks. “Collecting art is one of the oldest forms of storytelling,” she explains. “I want to build a world-class institutional collection that will exhibit and preserve some of the most important masterworks of our time.”
To date, the collection boasts works by heavyweights like Cecily Brown and Katherine Bernhardt. The latter painting—acquired from the legendary collection of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, role models of Mehra’s—is a favorite. But Mehra understands that building a world-class collection can’t be rushed. “It can take months, sometimes years, to truly understand an artist’s practice,” she notes. “I am extremely disciplined about acquiring pieces that fit my vision.”
Mehra hopes that the RUCA Foundation’s impact will extend beyond contemporary art. “I was raised with the idea of sangha, which in Sanskrit refers to a culture held intact by a like-minded community,” she says. “I feel a responsibility, as a steward of many cultural assets, to try and tell the story of humanity.”
For more from the 2024 Young Collectors list, read conversations with Daniel English, Noora Raj Brown, and Andy Gao and Peter Wei.
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