Run Ryu (TOP) and Go Ryu (BOTTOM) by local artist Sush Machida Gaikotsu at the Buddha Balm office

 
  Naomi Arin at the Alias corporate office, one of many stops on her private art tours
 
  The Red Sun (2000) by SueSong in a private high-rise loft
 
  Simon George (2008) by Kehinde Wiley at Alias

“This place is so different now. I hadn’t been here in awhile,” says Naomi Arin as we order lunch at Bar + Bistro, the year-old eatery inside downtown cultural complex The Arts Factory. Eight years ago, Arin was at the forefront of the burgeoning Arts District when she and painter Jerry Misko opened Dust, a gallery on the Arts Factory’s ground floor. The gallery, which moved to a Main Street storefront location by the end of the year, enabled Arin to meet every art collector, curator, and artist in town. Now, she has an enviable networking platform for her latest brainchild— guided tours of the best private art collections in Las Vegas.

In a town with a paucity of fine art museums, this is a juicy concept for serious collectors; some of Vegas’s finest art is personally owned, not displayed. And it takes someone with Arin’s credibility to gain the trust in people necessary to enter their homes and give a tour of their impressive collections.

Arin’s tours are customized to the client’s tastes, which might mean a stop at a secret, climate-controlled storage space to view paintings on Main Street, not far from Dust’s former location. Or she might take a client to UNLV to see Claes Oldenberg’s Flashlight sculpture. Or make an appointment to tour the Old Vegas signs in the Neon Boneyard. Or detour to the corporate headquarters of a company across from Spearmint Rhino, where renowned artist Sush Machida Gaikotsu creates vibrant Japanese classical imagery in a contemporary context. Or listen as a private collector in a downtown high-rise eagerly relates the stories behind the acquisitions on the walls.

Arin arrived in Vegas in 2001 to join her family after spending five years in her native Boston at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where she served as director of philanthropy and membership programs. It proved a good warmup for her involvement in Vegas’s fledgling Arts District, as she joined forces with Cindy Funkhouser and the late Julie Brewer to form the First Friday-founding organization, Whirlygig. Arin attended lectures by art critic Dave Hickey and became friends with future Las Vegas Art Museum executive director Libby Lumpkin.

“I called them when I was opening a gallery,” Arin says. “And [Lumpkin], of course, whistled once and said, ‘You’re crazy!’ I said ‘Yeah, maybe I am.’”

After a year of featuring Vegas artists, Arin widened the gallery’s scope and realized much more was possible. “I took a page from the Institute of Contemporary Art’s book,” she says. “Their mission was to bring artists from around the world to exhibit in Boston. At that time Boston had very limited gallery space for contemporary art, surprisingly.”

Largely because of her networking efforts, Arin became acquainted with some of this city’s most prolific private collectors. Although hesitant to draw attention to the individuals behind the valuable works, she mentions Todd VonBastiaans as owning one of the city’s finest collections, and arts benefactors Wally Goodman (now deceased) and Patrick Duffy as private collectors who were part of her early tours.

By 2008 Arin had moved Dust into SoHo Lofts and become more involved in what she calls art’s secondary market. “That’s when you sell a work that’s already owned by somebody else,” she says. “In essence, you’re a broker. I just sold an Ed Ruscha drawing. It was located in Chicago in a private collection and I sold it to a collector in Las Vegas. I never saw the work before it was sold. I never put my hands on it. I didn’t have to ship it anywhere. I never had to insure it. I did the entire transaction in my pajamas on my couch.”

The serious collectors who fly to Las Vegas for Arin’s private tours are charged from $1,200-$2,500 a day (depending on length of stay, size of group, needs, etc.). Locally, she has become close to the collectors who let her tour their home galleries. In a neat full circle, Dust has showcased art now owned by some of the private collectors included in her tours. VonBastiaans’ collection includes Feel Like Makin’ Love, a piece he bought at a 2006 Dust show that featured artist Mickalene Thomas’s “Brawling Spitfire” series. The paintings, composed with Swarovski crystals, which were purchased by attendees at that show, have appreciated several times over. “The work that they purchased in the range of $18,000 to $25,000 is now worth $125,000 to $150,000,” Arin says.

For Arin, who spent time in the fertile collectors’ climate of Laguna Beach, California, after closing Dust in 2009, returning to Vegas and giving exclusive tours has provided an outlet for her devotion to sharing fine art with a wider audience. “The best collections I’ve seen come from a real place of passion,” she says. “It’s all they read about, it’s all they think about. When they go on vacation, it’s the only place they go. It becomes an avocation. It becomes your life.” Naomi Arin, 702-324-5868