John Wieland, photo: Deanna Sirlin
House Hunting: A Conversation with Art Collector
John Wieland at The Warehouse
By Deanna Sirlin
Installation view, The Warehouse, Atlanta, Georgia photo: Deanna Sirlin
In the spring of 2024, The Warehouse, the exhibition space that houses the John and Sue Wieland collection, opened to the public once a month. Visiting The Warehouse in a light industrial area of Atlanta in the Northwest corridor of the city is a kind of art pilgrimage. It is one of those jewels that is worth taking the time to see.
I have quietly been making art pilgrimages since I decided that I had to find the Prada Foundation’s installation by artist Dan Flavin, which is housed in a church in suburban Milan. Since this was pre-Uber, we took a bus to the outskirts of the city to visit S. Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa. The church is located on Via Neera; the trip takes 30 minutes from the Duomo but feels much longer. One can only visit the church between 4 and 7 PM every day, so it might be closed when you get there. Inside the church, Flavin’s “site-specific artwork Untitled, with green, blue, pink, golden and ultraviolet light, constitutes the sole source of illumination and permeates the entire space, accompanying visitors. Walking through the entryway, the chromatic succession of the nave, transept and the apse suggests the natural ‘night-dawn-day’ progression of light.” Another art pilgrimage, which has been undertaken by many at this point, is to Marfa, Texas to visit the Chinati Foundation to see the works of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, among others. Since Marfa is three hours from any commercial airport, perhaps this is a more difficult art trek. But I must report that these journeys are important and well worth the effort. When one comes to Atlanta (which hosts the busiest airport in the world), a journey to The Warehouse to see the Wielands’ collection is another pilgrimage to see an art collection of significance.
Since John Wieland is a home builder and developer, the collection he and his late wife, Sue Wieland (1938 – 2021), assembled focuses on themes of house, home, and domesticity. Like most good collections, the focus is personal. The Wielands began collecting art in the 1980s in Atlanta, Georgia. Their collection, now comprising more than 400 works by nearly 300 national and international artists, is located at The Warehouse, a former furniture warehouse the Wielands purchased and remodeled for this purpose. Their son, Jack Wieland, serves as curator, and their daughter, Lindsey Wieland Parker, often visits art galleries and exhibitions to add to the collection.
Deanna Sirlin
Atlanta, Georgia
Interior view of the Warehouse, Atlanta, Georgia photo: Mike Jensen
The way the artworks are hung in The Warehouse (curated by Jack Wieland) creates many provocative juxtapositions. It is wonderful, for example, to come across an early Louise Bourgeois ink drawing from 1946 next to an early drawing of a picket (fence) by Anne Truitt, a kind of visual poetry. In an adjacent gallery is Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #20 from 1978 where the artist in her retro outfit is seen leaving a house. With that photo still on the retina, one comes upon a sculpture by Hew Locke, his Jumbie House from 2019. The collection and installation are thoughtful, and the experience allows the viewer to rethink their ideas about house and home as the content of so much fantastic and iconic art.
A favorite work of many visitors is Hans Op de Beek’s A House by the Sea, 2010, a miniature house of the kind one might see in a Hitchcock film such as Psycho. It is made in shades of gray using materials such balsawood, fiberboard, plywood, Styrofoam, polystyrene, paint, and glue paste. In the video room at The Warehouse, seven videos play in a loop, including Op de Beek’s Staging Silence #3. In this dreamlike work, two hands build and recreate a house in a theatrical and magical performance, all in Op de Beek’s palette of a rich array of grays.
John Wieland graciously allowed me to interview him about this collection in September of 2024. The following is an edited conversation about how this collection was realized.
Interior view of the Warehouse, Atlanta, Georgia photo: Mike Jensen
Deanna Sirlin: Please tell me about the beginnings of your collection. When did you start collecting art?
John Wieland: When did Sue and I start buying art? Because we didn't start buying art as a collection.
We started buying art because we liked it. We had walls that needed something. It really all started on our honeymoon.
We were driving around Europe in a little Volkswagen that we had picked up at the factory in Germany in 1965. We drove around Europe for nine weeks. What a great honeymoon. We spent five dollars a day for everything except gas.
We bought our first, what we thought was, piece of art, which was a poster by Pablo Picasso. And then we guarded it carefully and brought it back to our apartment in New York City. Not too long after that, we moved to Georgia and started thinking about the walls of my office. And then we moved from the apartment to a house. We needed something for those walls. After we settled in, I don't know why, but we decided we would collect Southern landscapes.
We started to do that but it didn't seem very rewarding. What year was that? That would have been 1973. And shortly after that, we thought, well, we're in the South, we ought to be collecting Southern artists, artists who either were born in the South or worked in the South. And we started on that and then realized that there were some very key people in that category, such as Cy Twombly, Benny Andrews, and more. And that sort of priced out our budget.
And then we thought, doesn't it make sense to acquire works that relate to house, home, and domesticity? Because my business is home building. We started on that. We had some expert guidance from Atlanta gallerists, initially David Heath and then later Fay Gold and then Annette Cone-Skelton.
At the turn of the century, we started to think, maybe we're collecting art. We need to be more methodical, and we need more space. And in 2010, we were able to buy the building that we're sitting in today.
Exterior view of the Warehouse, Atlanta, Georgia photo: Mike Jensen
DS: Can I back up a little?
JW: Yes, sure.
DS: When the corporate offices of John Wieland Homes were in Gwinnett County, Georgia there was a Vito Acconci sculpture outside in front of the building. And I don't know why I was driving that way, but whenever I traveled to I-85, I passed your headquarters, and always paused to view the Vito Acconci sculpture, Bad Dream House 2, 1988. For me it was an important landmark.
JW: The Vito Acconci is a fun story because it was part of a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1988.
When the show was over, we had been talking to the Chicago dealer Rhona Hoffman about possibly acquiring the work and hadn't come to any conclusion. When the show's over, you know, they clear out the gallery. So 10 o'clock on Monday morning, Rhona's on the phone and wants to know what I'm going to do.
And I said, well, I'm just thinking about it. It's expensive. It's big. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. And she said, well, you better think fast because it's on the 18-wheeler and it's parked on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. And if you are going to buy it, it's coming South. And if you aren't, it's taking a right-hand turn and coming to me in Chicago. And I said, well, give me 10 minutes and I'll call you back.
What happened during those 10 minutes? I decided, you know, that we could put it on the lawn of our building in Gwinnett. We were pleased. It was there for a long time. Then Vito came down and spoke at the High Museum.
But Bad Dream House 2 did not hold up well outside. We wrote Vito and said, you know, we need to make repairs on it. We'd like your permission to make repairs on it.
And he wrote back two sentences. Sentence number one, “it was very poorly built.” Sentence number two, “you can do anything you want.” So, we actually ended up moving the sculpture to our corporate headquarters down in College Park, Georgia. From College Park, we moved it here to the Warehouse.
DS: Did you make repairs on it?
JW: Yeah, we totally rebuilt it twice.
DS: Well, you are a builder.
JW: It's actually beautiful. Fortunately, we stayed in touch with the individual that fabricated it for Vito. And then I had, as you're suggesting, the people that knew how to lay brick and, you know, replace the rotted wood and so on and so forth.
It always needed to be an indoor piece even though the scale was so beautiful the side of the road.
Vito Acconci, Bad Dream House, Installation view photo: Deanna Sirlin
DS: I would like to go even further back in your history. Do you remember the first work of art that impressed you as a young person or child? Did you go to museums or galleries?
JW: I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. We had regular bus trips from school to the Cleveland Art Museum. And the nice thing about the Cleveland Art Museum is that it had a great room of armor. So, the boys all went to see the armor. I don't know where the girls went.
DS: Did you think about them as works of art or just something very cool?
JW: No, I don't think so, except that my parents weren't collectors or anything like that, but they appreciated art, and they went to Oberlin and the museum. And we lived in Cleveland, and Cleveland is a cultural city, thanks to John D. Rockefeller and other people in the heyday.
DS: Is it interesting for you to know the artist who made the artwork?
JW: Obviously, that's an interest of mine. Right now, we have nearly 300 artists in the collection.
When an artist comes to The Warehouse, we tell them that one of our rituals is to take their photograph with their work. We've just rehabbed one of our back-of the-house spaces and we have a wonderful gallery of a couple dozen artists who've been here.
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Hew Locke with his work, Jumbie House 1, 2019
DS: Well, what's also interesting about the collection for me is that it seems to me that you have an overall understanding of the house as subject matter and how it relates to each artist’s work. And within this subject matter, each artwork has its own presence.
JW: Well, and you'll appreciate this, we’re expanding the collection now by interpreting house, home, and domesticity very broadly.
We just purchased the work of an American artist, Haley Barker. The work is of a Christmas tree. What could be more about home than a Christmas tree?
DS: How did you find that work and this artist?
JW: Actually, my son saw it in a show in Edinburgh. We try to look at everything. Somebody looks at prospective artworks in person. Used to be me. Now it's more often my son Jack.
Hayley Barker, My Folks' Xmas Tree, 2024, oil on linen, 85 3/8 x 51 3/8 inches
Courtesy of Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland
DS: Are there any artists in the collection whom you've met and this particularly added to your appreciation of their work?
JW: Well,… Yeah, one fun visit was with Hans Op de Beeck from Belgium. We have a fabulous sculpture by Hans of a house. And as he explained, it's a house on the coast in Belgium. It's not a particular house, but it's typical of the kind of construction in that part of world.
In the same gallery, we own a watercolor by Hans. The watercolor is one of the first pieces that we have that didn't have a direct reference to a house. But it's a reference to where that house is located. It has a relationship to the sculpture. And then Hans specified the molding and the color for the gallery and the carpet.
We also have a 45-minute video by Hans called Staging Silence. And that's the third of his “staging silence” videos.
DS: Was this the first of your collecting videos?
JW: No, we purchased a few other videos. By now we have seven house-related videos.
Hans Op de Beek, Staging Silence III, single channel video, 44:32 minutes
DS: Have your thoughts about how the works in the collection changed over the years? Has your viewpoint changed? Is your relationship to the work different?
JW: That's a very thoughtful question. I think that what's changed is we've acquired more work and we put the original pieces more into context. The work of Jennifer Bartlett would be a good example because we have a wonderful installation that she did, I don't know, from 30 years ago or something like that. Then we bought a series of 25 of her prints.
That's the last thing we bought from David Heath. And then, of course, Jennifer passed away three or four years ago, and they deconstructed her studio about two years ago and found, interestingly enough, some very, very early works where she started to work at the house image on paper. We were able to acquire some of her early works. We have her very first house piece, which is just in pen, and her second piece where she started to add color. And so, because we've been fortunate to be able to acquire more art, then this piece talks to that piece… you understand what I'm talking about? The collection actually develops a conversation between works of art.
My daughter, who lives outside Boston, just made a studio visit to Laurie Simmons and we just acquired another piece of hers. It would be our fourth piece by the artist in the collection. Walking House was the first work we acquired by Simmons. We bought it from Metro Pictures. Laurie was very pleased to know that we owned the piece and not only that, but we bought it from Metro Pictures. We didn't buy it as a resale. And so, we owned it from the beginning.
DS: Can you tell me about it?
JW: Well, it's what she calls a “deep photograph”. So, it's a photograph that she took some time, you know, maybe 20 years ago. And then she has made it 3D.
It's one of her well-known kitchen scenes where she incorporates plastic foods attached to the photograph. So, there's a three-dimensionality to it... like a diorama. We also recently acquired one of her archival photographs.
We're going to expand, add a few galleries out of our unfinished space, and we're thinking about having a gallery just for Laurie. The photograph we're looking at was done the same year as the Cindy Sherman in the collection (Untitled Film Still #20, 1978). We bought it before the housing recession.
Jennifer Bartlett, Untitled, 1971 and Untitled, 1971, colored pencil on paper, photo: Mike Jensen
DS: What led you to open your collection to the public?
JW: We did a complete reinstall of the collection, with my son Jack serving as curator.
We closed down for a year and tore the whole place apart. We added a mezzanine and recently finished some additional galleries in the back.
We're at the point where we're very presentable. We have the guest spaces now in terms of the gathering space and lockers and bathrooms and a commercial kitchen, to welcome everybody in. And we think that we have something to add to the Atlanta art ecosystem.
We're really looking to the future. The collection is owned by my wife's trust. And it is promised to the Wieland Warehouse Art Foundation when I die. We have Phillip Verre (who was the COO at the High Museum) as our director. We are preparing ourselves to be a not-for-profit museum.
DS: What you said about the ecosystem of Atlanta is important. I think that having your collection open to the public will be very stimulating to the people in Atlanta. Coming here is kind of like a pilgrimage, isn't it?
JW: One thing that's very interesting is that the more people know about art, the more they enjoy this collection.
John Wieland is an art collector and home builder. The Warehouse is a contemporary art space in Atlanta’s Westside which opened to the public in 2024 exhibitiing the private collection of John and Sue Wieland.
John Wieland
photo: Warren Bond
Deanna Sirlin is an artist and writer from Brooklyn, New York currently living and working in Georgia. She received an MFA from Queens College, CUNY where she studied with Robert Pincus-Witten, Charles Cajori and Benny Andrews. She has received numerous honors, including a Rothko Foundation Symposium Residency, a grant from the United States State Department, a Yaddo Foundation Residency and a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Award for its Art Writing Mentorship Program.
Deanna Sirlin, photo: Jerry Siegel