The first art that Carmelo Anthony was exposed to came in everyday forms: graffiti and, later, album covers. “Records were always art pieces to me,” the celebrated basketball player turned entrepreneur tells me. “You’d have these vinyl collections, and the covers, those were art.” Hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy and woo-woo funk band Earth, Wind & Fire were early touchstones. “Everything is a message,” he says of the rich symbolism layered into the latter’s trippy visuals.
Now 41 and retired from the NBA, Anthony—who is set to be inducted into the Basketball hall of fame this Saturday, as the league’s 10th leading career scorer and a three-time gold medal Olympian—has applied the same unrelenting devotion to amassing an impressive collection with an emphasis on street art and photography.
Personal highlights include five works by Nelson Makamo, and pieces by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Ernie Barnes, and Marcus Jansen, but despite the capacious wall space available at home, Anthony confesses that the collection has grown too large to display coherently in its entirety. “My taste is very intentional,” he adds. “Every room in my house has a steady flow, and there’s a message in each piece that I collect.”
“When you hear those stories, it makes you want to go on your own journey.” —Carmelo Anthony
Though Anthony’s relationship to art has evolved since he retired in 2023, the Brooklyn and Baltimore native began collecting in earnest while still starting out in the league, thanks to the guidance of older players like Juwan Howard. “I’d hear these older guys talk about Black art, how they’d go down to SoHo in the 1980s and buy pieces. When you hear those stories, it makes you want to go on your own journey,” Anthony recalls.
Young, driven, and hungry—both on the court and off—Anthony started to educate himself by interacting with art in any way he could: visiting museums and galleries, touring private collections, and meeting artists at their studios.
“When you get a chance to step into another artist’s world, it makes the artist that much more meaningful,” he says. “I was very observant at the beginning, just studying the game, trying to understand the industry and people’s collections,” he continues, thinking back on his early days. “You go to someone’s home and they have certain pieces and it’s like, Oh, that’s cool. I want to do my own version of that.”
This love of art is part of a bigger passion for beautiful, well-crafted things. “It’s all interconnected,” Anthony notes. “I love luxury at the end of the day; I love details. Whether it’s art, watches, or design, I like to see something executed at a high level.”
“When you get a chance to step into another artist’s world, it makes the artist that much more meaningful.” —Carmelo Anthony
While various leitmotifs ebb and flow through the collection, there’s an emphasis on the Black experience. “A lot of the Black artists … They’re talking to me about things that I’ve gone through or been a part of,” Anthony muses. “I like to be able to extend that story to people who enter the house or ask me about my collection. That experience has to surround me at home, because it’s what I relate to.”
New additions are born from a mix of research and instinct; though he consults gallerists and solicits tips from friends like Swizz Beatz, Anthony notes that he often finds himself captivated by a work regardless of its provenance. “Sometimes it takes real effort to understand a work,” he says, “but I’ve also [collected] pieces without even knowing who the artist is. If a piece speaks to me, it speaks to me.”
Today, Anthony pays forward the invaluable generosity that older athletes offered him early in his career by advising younger players who might feel unwelcome or trepidatious in art-world circles on how to build up a fulfilling collection—and a life in general. “It’s very individualistic,” he says of the process. “There’s nothing wrong with what you like. Nobody can tell you that a work of art is not good if you feel it.”
At some point, he’d like to share this labor of love with a wider audience by curating shows from among the works in his possession—but like any real athlete, Anthony knows that the right things come with time. “Thinking about my legacy,” he concludes, “I’d like to cement myself into the art world as a collector, [and] eventually show the world my full collection. But we’ll get there. I’m not in a rush.”
Executive Production by Dionne Cochrane
Set Coordination by Thalia Saint-Lot
Interior Design by Cassandra Bonhomme
Digi Tech by Olivia Demetros
Styling Assistance by Keith Pearson and Nasir Williams
Production Assistance by Brittany Thompson
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