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Clayton Press

Clay began collecting art in earnest in Chicago, after graduating from the University of Rochester, with concentrations in anthropology, art history, and black studies, where he was awarded the Genesee Scholarship and the Francis G. Wells Scholarship for academic excellence. In 1968, at a time before fine art was widely available, he purchased his first work of art from London Grafica Arts, contemporary master printmakers and itinerant sales people. The work—squares within squares—was purchased without any previous awareness of Malevich, Albers, or LeWitt. The work become a signifier.

Between 1968 and 1968, Clay attended Howard University in Washington D.C. on exchange, where he studied ethnomusicology with Olufela "Fela" Sowande MBE, Afro-American studies with Gregory U. Rigsby, and Afro-Caribbean studies with Jane Philips. He earned his master's degree in exceptional psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Subsequently, he completed PhD studies in anthropology and material culture at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale). His dissertation focused on the impact of mass tourism on traditional values in Barbados.

In his first career as an anthropologist, he was a researcher for the Smithsonian Institution (Mandeville, Jamaica); a research fellow for the International Labor Office (Kingstown, St. Vincent), a consultant to The World Bank (Washington, D.C.), and a Doctoral Research Fellow of the Organization of American States (Bridgetown, Barbados) at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, Barbados. 

After relocating to Los Angeles in 1985, he was a partner in a salon-style gallery, New Strategies, while working for Towers Perrin management consultants, Clay’s second career. Subsequently, Clay was a partner at A.T. Kearney and Accenture where he specialized in strategy, marketing, and operations, serving such clients as Bell Canada, ConAgra, Deutsche Lufthansa, Petromin (Saudia Arabia). After 9/11, In 2001 Clay opened a specialty consulting practice dedicated to family offices and non-profits in the fine and performing arts. He merged his practice into linn press | specialists in contemporary art in 2006, where he is a partner.

Clay wears many hats in the contemporary art business. Between 2011 and 2024, Clay was an adjunct professor at New York University, where he taught art market economics and art history. (His complete course listing is highlighted under talks and courses.) He also served on the university’s Fulbright U.S. Student Program review committee. Since 2016, he has been an active visiting researcher at Princeton University’s Marquand Library of Art and Architecture.

As an author, Clay recently authored To Walk with Nature: Kathleen Jacobs. He also wrote the catalog essay for Joan Mitchell vis-à-vis Christine Ay Tjoe for New York’s Mnuchin Gallery. His monograph about Georgy Frangulyan, a late-Soviet : post-Soviet Russian monumental sculptor was published by Skira Editore (Milan) in November 2022. Clay previously wrote REDS (Mnuchin Gallery, 2017), Next to Nothing. Close to Nowhere: Kathleen Jacobs (2016), LOVE STORY, Anne and Wolfgang Titze Collection [Belvedere u. 21er Haus] (2014) and ПЯТь {FIVE} (Baibakov Art Projects, 2010.) For two years, Clay was a visual arts essayist at Forbes.com, where he contributed nearly 150 essays. Formerly, Clay wrote for Arteviste.com, a London-based cultural platform. His books and essays have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.

As an essayist, Clay contributed two long articles to a catalog about the work of Nikita Seleznev, whose first bi-lingual (English-Russian) catalog was published in August 2021. Clay has also contributed essays to Germán Venegas Todo Lo Otro (Museo Tamayo, 2020), Disidencia: Minerva Cuevas (Mishkin Gallery, 2020 and 2019), More Heart Than Brains: The Collected Plays of Bailey Scieszka (What Pipeline, 2019), and Robert Mangold, A Survey 1965-2003 (Mnuchin Gallery, 2017). As a collaborator and curator, Clay helped to script and perform in Point of Sale, a 2002 three-screen, time-based media work by Christian Jankowski, which is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (This was also the first work of art purchased by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, for its permanent collection.) He has also worked helped to organize numerous exhibitions in Antwerp, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami Beach, Moscow, and New York. (See shows / talks.)

As a market observer, Clay has frequently spoken about contemporary art and art market economics in a variety of settings—from art fairs to universities—in Cologne, Miami Beach, Milan, Moscow, New York, and Venice. He is a frequent speaker about art as an asset class to private banks and wealth management firms. His opinions and insights are frequently sought by leading business publications, including Alternative Latin Investor, The Art Newspaper, Business Insider, Forbes Magazine, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Robb Report, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and The Wall Street Journal. Clay was the primary research scholar for BOOM, Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, a 2019 book that was a fact-based primer about the notoriously opaque art sector.

In the 1980s, Clay was elected to the Board of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, where he served as Treasurer. In the 1990s he was a member of the 20th Century Acquisitions Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Currently, Clay is a patron of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. With Gregory, he has been a benefactor to The Art Institute of Chicago, the City of Chicago (Department of Cultural Affairs), the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.