Art Collections Management | Installation & Curatorial Services
We handle the unseen work: safekeeping, documentation, preservation, presentation, succession.
Who we are
In Private Hands is a collection management firm serving individuals, families, and businesses with significant holdings of art, luxury objects, and fine collectibles.
Curatorial guidance and installation oversight are offered as part of an ongoing retainer or as standalone projects.
Our clients include private and corporate collections, artist studios, foundations, estates, art advisors, interior designers, and real estate professionals.
We are not a gallery, marketplace or auction house. We do not buy, sell, or promote objects. We work with what you already own and meet the collection where it is.
The problem we solve
Undocumented
Provenance goes unrecorded, key artwork details go missing, and insurance values lapse out of date.
Unseen
Without a curatorial eye, works sit in storage or hang without thought or intention.
Unprepared
No one beyond the owner knows what exists, where it lives, or what happens next.
The risk is not only financial: it is 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, confidentially and with precision.
Services
Cataloguing & Documentation
01Care & Preservation
02Insurance & Valuation
03Estate & Legacy Planning
04Installation
05Curatorial Services
06Archival Services & Art Libraries
07Approach
What a collection means
A work of art carries meaning well beyond its cultural and market value. Over time, a collection becomes more than its objects: it is also memory, identity and legacy. That understanding shapes how we work with both the collection and the family.
Discretion and integrity first
Every engagement is confidential. We do not publicize clients, name collections in our marketing, or make introductions a collector has not asked for. We accept no commissions or finder's fees from dealers, galleries, auction houses or specialists.
A trained eye, not just a ledger
A collection is experienced through how it is placed: the dialogue between works, the sightlines, the light, the negative space. Decades of building collections and exhibitions inform every placement.
One point of contact
A single, experienced advisor knows the collection's full history and oversees and liaises with every specialist: shippers, installers, conservators, appraisers, insurers, financial advisors, and estate counsel.
The trusted advisor model
We often work the way a family's attorney, private banker or physician works: on long-term retainer, present across generations. We approach every collection with continuity of stewardship in mind.
Project-based engagements
Not every engagement is ongoing. We also take on single projects, from inventorying a collection to placing a new acquisition or rehanging a room or an entire home.
“We are all caretakers, not owners.
— Anonymous Museum Registrar
The art will outlive us all; our job is simply to keep the story organized and safe.”
Founder
Established in 2026, In Private Hands is built by Jamie G. Manné, a Los Angeles–based arts professional whose twenty-year career has spanned private collection management and advisory, gallery and museum leadership, curatorial projects, exhibition organization, publications, and community-facing programming. She also holds an M.A. in Art Therapy from The George Washington University.
She began at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York before several years at Paula Cooper Gallery as an artist liaison and assistant to both the Director and Paula herself. After returning to Los Angeles in 2010, a brief period at Margo Leavin Gallery preceded nearly a decade as Collection Manager and Advisor to a family named among ArtNews' Top 200 Collectors from 2012 through 2019.
In 2017 Manné launched and was named Director of the Marciano Art Foundation, overseeing the restoration and transformation of a 100,000-square-foot former Masonic Temple into a public-facing contemporary art space and organizing large-scale installations, rotating exhibitions, site-specific projects, catalogue publications and educational programs.
In early 2019, she went on to advise newly appointed Director Klaus Biesenbach at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles during his transition into the role, contributing to a number of special projects at the museum alongside her advisory work. From late 2019 through 2021, Manné was Co-Director at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, bringing her institutional and private collection background into a commercial setting, managing multiple artists on the gallery's roster while expanding community outreach and programming.
Her advisory practice has since extended to private collections, cultural institutions, artists, and nonprofit organizations.
Contact
An initial conversation carries no obligation, whether it concerns ongoing engagement or a single project. Tell us what you have and what you would like handled, and we will tell you whether we are the right fit.
Telephone
(202) 997-2601Based in
Los Angeles, California
Available to travel