Cataloguing & Documentation
- Meticulously maintained bespoke, confidential inventory systems and databases
- Condition reports
- Professional photography
- Archival services
- Catalog publication
Collection Management / Installation / Curation
Discreet, trusted care for private collections
We handle the unseen work: safekeeping, documentation, maintenance, presentation, succession.
Who we are
We bring the same standard of care to a private collection that institutions and galleries bring to their own holdings.
In Private Hands is a specialized collection management firm serving individuals, families and businesses holding significant art, luxury objects, and fine collectibles. We provide the same level of care, maintenance, documentation, and continuity that institutions and galleries apply to their holdings and handle collections the way a trusted family advisor would: personally, discreetly and for the long term.
Along with collection management, installation and curatorial guidance are offered both as part of an ongoing retainer and on a standalone, project basis.
Our clients include private and corporate collections, art advisors, artist studios and estates.
We are not a gallery, an auction house, or a marketplace, and we do not buy, sell, or promote. We work with what you already own and meet the collection where it is.
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Provenance often goes undocumented, insurance values lapse out of date, and works sit in storage or hang without thought because the collection never had access to the kind of curatorial eye or registrar's discipline a museum or gallery builds into its own practice. No one beyond the owner knows what exists, where it lives, or what happens to it next.
The risk is not only financial, but a progressive 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.
Core services
What we handle, on retainer or by the project.
Care & Preservation
- Conservation
- Framing
- Climate-appropriate storage
Insurance & Valuation
- Ongoing coordination with appraisers and insurers
- Coverage always reflects current value and is reviewed on a regular schedule
Estate & Legacy Planning
- Long-horizon planning for succession, donation, or sale
Installation
- Plan and oversee hanging, siting, and display across homes, offices, and private galleries
- Placement, lighting, and safety treated with the same care given to museum and gallery installations
Curatorial Services
- Understanding a collection's internal logic
- Arrangement, rotation & presentation
Art Libraries
- Compile artworks' educational files: provenance, exhibition history, correspondence with the artist, estate or gallery, catalogs, monographs, and all related documentation
- Assemble a working reference and research library
Approach
We aim to know a collection, and a family, for decades.
What a collection means to a family
A work of art carries significant meaning well beyond its cultural and market values: a collection is also memory, identity, and legacy. This understanding shapes how we work with a collection and with the family itself.
Discretion first
Every engagement is confidential, which means we do not publicize client relationships, name collections in our marketing, engage in social media, or introduce a collector to anyone they have not asked to meet.
A trained eye, not just a ledger
How a collection is hung, sited, and organized within a private space shapes how it is experienced and understood. That eye comes from years of building collections and exhibitions, not from an interior designer hired for the occasion.
The trusted advisor model
We often work the way a family's attorney, private banker, or personal physician works: on long-term retainer, present across generations rather than for a single transaction. Continuity of the collection and the relationship is the whole model.
One point of contact
A single, experienced advisor knows the collection's full history and oversees every specialist, from installers and conservators to appraisers, insurers, shippers, and estate counsel, so the collector never has to manage a roster of vendors.
Project Based Engagements
Not every collector is ready for a long-term relationship, and not every collection requires one. For collectors with smaller holdings, a single project is also where the relationship begins. Whether it is placing a new acquisition, rehanging one room or an entire home, we offer project-based guidance rather than ongoing engagement.
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 started her career in New York at Jim Kempner Fine Art before spending several years at Paula Cooper Gallery, one of the field's most respected programs, working as an artist liaison and assistant to both the Director and 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 for a high-net-worth family whose collectors were named among ArtNews' Top 200 Collectors from 2012 through 2019.
In 2017, she launched and was named Director of the Marciano Art Foundation, where she oversaw the transformation of a 100,000+ square foot former Masonic Temple into a public-facing, contemporary art space and organized numerous large-scale installations, rotating exhibitions, site-specific projects, educational programs and public engagement.
Following her resignation in early 2019, she served as an advisor to 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 was a Co-Director at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, bringing her institutional and private-collection background into a commercial setting, managing and supporting the gallery's roster, while expanding community outreach and 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 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.