Daniela Lazo-Cedré

What do you do at Bonhams?

I recently joined the 20th/21st Century Art team in New York as a Senior Specialist of Post-War & Contemporary Art after spending over eight years at another international auction house. I am excited for my first marquee week with Bonhams this May!

Where are you from? And what inspired you to go into the auction world?

I was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. My grandparents both grew up on coffee farms in the deep countryside, and my mom—who left the island for the first time at age 17—always dreamed of traveling, so I grew up visiting museums around the world during our visits to other countries.

I have loved art for as long as I can remember, and while I was pursuing my undergraduate studies in New York and Paris, I had great professors that encouraged me to visit exhibitions in the city every week. Pretty quickly I knew that seeing and thinking about art is what I wanted to do forever, and in this role, I get to do that every day. 

What was your first job? 

My first non-internship job was at a contemporary art gallery while pursuing my Master's degree in Barcelona, Spain. I loved working directly with artists to support their work and exhibition set ups, as well as helping to do research for interested clients. 

What is most exciting about your upcoming auction?

I'm particularly excited about a work by Lauren Halsey in our 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale. Halsey has been garnering a lot of attention over the past few years from collectors, galleries, and institutions alike, and for good reason. 

I love that she centers her community—that of South Central Los Angeles—as her ongoing muse and subject, and the way she documents its people, objects, and stories into hieroglyphic symbols representative of a time and place. Her work feels especially poignant now—in its celebration and historicization of a culture—amidst the ongoing threats of gentrification, globalization, and cultural erasure many communities are facing. 

There is so much to say about this piece, but I'll note that our work is extra special due to its metallic surface, which at once references ancient civilizations (like Egypt, Nubia and Byzantine) as well as Afrofuturism and outer space—connecting past, present and future. It's also impossible for me, knowing Halsey as a collector of images, to not think of the art historical lineage of the silver metallic surface, arguably the most important color in Andy Warhol's body of work—an allusion to the 'silver screen', photography, and the proliferation/mass consumption of images that has so deeply affected (and continues to affect) modern life. 

What is your strength as a specialist?

I obviously love art very passionately, but my first love was actually writing. I think that writing, together with training my eye and mind over the many years I have worked with and studied art, has given me an ability to look at something and quickly interpret, distill and synthesize for others why it is special.

I love nothing more than talking about art which is why I love working with collectors - my philosophy is that it's partnership where I can get to know them and their interests to serve as a resource and sounding board for their collecting journey, goals, and vision.

What was the last museum you visited?

I recently saw the new Jack Whitten show at MoMA, and was blown away by the depth and scope of his ingeniousness when it came to inventing materials, tools and processes in ways that I haven't seen other artists do before. I found the way he challenged dimensionality through materiality very refreshing and powerful, especially because he manages to do so in a way that ultimately feels rather subtle.

I see it as a sort of postmodern interpretation of trompe l'oeil, in the sense that what you think you see in his paintings initially are in fact infinitely more complex up close—when you realize that what looks like 'tiles' are individually constructed elements of paint, or that the perplexing sheen on a surface is not metallic paint but rather the result of alchemical experiments with common media. And then that all of this was used to bring in narratives around history, politics, and so much more but through abstraction (again, another trompe l'oeil) makes for profoundly interesting and thoughtful work. A must see show if you are in New York City in the coming months.

Do you have a hidden talent?

I speak four languages (English, Spanish, French and Swedish) and am working on learning my fifth (Portuguese) now. I've also dabbled in Italian and Catalan in the past and would love to learn Arabic, Russian, German, and Latin if I had the time. I am totally fascinated by etymology and the ways different cultures express certain ideas, since to me it reflects a lot about of who they are as a collective. I think it stems from growing up in a bicultural and bilingual household, where half of my family didn't speak English and the other half didn't speak Spanish so I had to adapt constantly to make myself understood.

Which work of art has changed your life?

Many works of art have changed my life, but none more than Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. I had a sort of transcendental experience with it when I was 12 years old while visiting the Museo Nacional del Prado
in Madrid; I was totally captivated by it.

A curator at the museum saw me amongst a crowd of people mid-fixation, and stopped to say to me, "something special happens to you when you look at art, doesn't it?" Being so young, this shocked me because before this moment I couldn't really understand what I was feeling or experiencing, only that it was deeply moving to me. His comment rang instantly true, and made me want to know why—so I began reading deep into this painting. There began my love for art history.

Daniela Lazo-Cedre is a Senior Specialist in 20th / 21st Century Art in New York. She can be reached at: daniela.lazo-cedre@bonhams.com

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