Cataloguing & Documentation
Bespoke, confidential inventory systems and databases, condition reports, photography, and provenance records, held privately and never published or shared.
Collection Management / Curatorial / Installation
Discreet, trusted care for private collections
We take care of the quiet, unglamorous work of keeping what matters safe, documented, organized, maintained, thoughtfully presented, and transitioned responsibly, always handled by a single, experienced advisor who answers to you alone.
Who we are
We give a private collection what an institution gives its own holdings.
In Private Hands is a collection management firm serving individuals and families who hold significant art, luxury objects, and fine collectibles. We provide the same level of documentation, maintenance, care, continuity, and guidance that institutions apply to their holdings, brought into a private home and handled the way a trusted family advisor would handle it: personally, quietly, and for the long term.
Installation and curatorial guidance are offered both as part of an ongoing retainer and on a standalone, project basis, whether that is a single room, a new acquisition, or a full rehang of a home. Not every collector is ready for a long-term relationship, and not every collection requires one, so the scope of the work is set by what is in front of us rather than by a predefined subscription. For many clients a single project is also where the relationship begins, a low-commitment way to see how we work together before deciding whether an ongoing engagement makes sense.
We are not a gallery, an auction house, or a marketplace, and we do not buy, sell, or promote objects. Our only client is the collector who hired us, and our only mandate is theirs.
The problem we solve
Significant collections are acquired with passion, patience, and expertise, but they are rarely managed or shown with the same rigor.
Provenance often goes undocumented, insurance values lapse out of date, and works sit in storage or hang without thought, because the family never had access to the kind of curatorial eye a museum takes for granted. No one outside the family knows what exists, where it lives, or what happens to it next.
The risk is not only financial, but a quiet erosion of a legacy that took a lifetime to build, and a collection never fully lived with. In Private Hands exists to close that gap, without ever exposing the collection to the wider market, to public record, or to unnecessary eyes.
Core services
What we handle, on retainer or by the project.
Care & Preservation
Coordination of conservation, framing, and climate-appropriate storage, with vetted specialists bound by the same confidentiality standard as the firm.
Insurance & Valuation
Ongoing coordination with appraisers and insurers so coverage always reflects current value, reviewed quietly and on a regular schedule.
Estate & Legacy Planning
Long-horizon planning for succession, donation, or sale, developed alongside the family's own attorneys and advisors, on the family's timeline.
Installation
Hands-on planning and oversight of hanging, siting, and display across homes, offices, and private galleries. Lighting, scale, sequence, and safety handled with the same care given to museum installs.
Curatorial Services
Guidance on how a collection is arranged, rotated, and presented, building a private collection's internal logic the way a museum builds an exhibition, whether for a single room or an entire home.
Project-Based Engagements
For collectors with smaller holdings who do not need a full retainer: hands-on help hanging a home or a single room, offered by the project rather than the ongoing engagement.
A Single Trusted Advisor
One named point of contact per family, available directly, who carries the full history of the collection and the relationship.
Approach
We work the way a family's attorney or private banker works, on retainer and across generations.
Discretion first
Every engagement is confidential by default, which means we do not publicize client relationships, name collections in our marketing, or introduce a collector to anyone they have not asked to meet. Discretion is the product itself rather than a policy applied on top of it.
The trusted advisor model
We work the way a family's attorney, private banker, or personal physician works: on long-term retainer, embedded in the family's circle of trust, present across generations rather than for a single transaction. Continuity of the relationship is the whole model, and we aim to know a collection, and a family, for decades.
Rigor without spectacle
We bring museum-grade documentation, conservation standards, and insurance discipline to private collections, delivered without institutional bureaucracy or public exhibition. The work is exacting, but the presence is understated.
A trained eye, not just a ledger
Installation and curatorial judgment are part of the offering rather than an add-on, because how a collection is hung, sited, and sequenced in a private home shapes how it is experienced and understood. That eye comes from years of building exhibitions, not from an interior designer hired for the occasion.
One point of contact
A single advisor holds the relationship and oversees every specialist, from installers and conservators to appraisers, insurers, shippers, and estate counsel, so the family never has to manage a roster of vendors or repeat their story to strangers.
What a collection means to a family
A master's degree in art therapy underlies the approach as much as the résumé does. Objects and the creative process behind them carry meaning well beyond their market value, and for a family a collection is also memory, identity, and legacy. That understanding shapes how we work with a collection and with the family itself.
Founder
Jamie Manné
In Private Hands is built by Jamie Manné, a Los Angeles-based arts professional, whose twenty-year career in the art world has spanned gallery and museum leadership, private collection management, curatorial projects, exhibition organization, publications, and community-facing programming.
Manné completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at The George Washington University, earning a master's degree in art therapy in 2006 while working concurrently for a major private collector in Washington, DC. She then relocated to Manhattan, where she gained gallery-floor experience at Jim Kempner Fine Art before spending several years at Paula Cooper Gallery, one of the field's most respected programs, working as an assistant to both the Director and to Paula herself.
After returning home to Los Angeles in 2010, a brief period at Margo Leavin Gallery preceded a formative shift within the industry: nearly a decade as Collection Manager and Advisor to a high-net-worth family whose collectors were named among ArtNews' Top 200 Collectors from 2012 through 2019. Manné was personally responsible for all aspects of developing and maintaining a large private contemporary art collection, including acquisitions, deaccessions, gallery and artist relations, museum and exhibition loans, insurance, storage, transport, and installations across various private homes and businesses.
In 2017 she created and served as Director of the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles, where she oversaw a 100,000+ square foot public space and organized numerous large-scale installations, rotating exhibitions, and site-specific projects with artists including Jim Shaw, Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama, Glenn Ligon, and Ai Weiwei. Following her resignation in early 2019, she advised newly appointed Director Klaus Biesenbach at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles during his transition into the role.
From late 2019 through 2021, Manné served as Co-Director at the Los Angeles gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran, bringing her institutional and private-collection background into a commercial setting, managing and supporting the gallery's roster, while expanding the gallery's community outreach and public programming.
She has since consulted for, advised, and contributed to a range of private and public collections, institutions, artists, brands, media outlets, and nonprofits.
Inquiries
Every conversation is confidential, including the first one.
An initial conversation carries no obligation, whether it concerns an ongoing engagement or a single room that needs hanging. Tell us what you have, where it lives, and what you would like handled, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.
- [email protected]
- Telephone
- (202) 997-2601
- Based in
- Los Angeles, California. Available to travel.