Hassan Smith Builds a Home Collection Around Black Artists, Legacy, and Living With Art
For Hassan Smith, collecting began with a Yoruba mask bought in Lagos in 2000 — a purchase that now sits on his desk as a kind of origin point. The entertainment executive, who is senior advisor for John Legend and founder of Ellaby Holdings LLC, has since built a North Atlanta home collection that treats art less as decoration than as a daily environment, one meant to be lived with, studied, and passed on.
Smith said his early art education came from his parents’ record collection and childhood museum visits, but his understanding of contemporary Black artists deepened only after he entered the music industry. Before that, he said, his frame of reference was shaped largely by Old Masters. Visits to the homes of cultural figures such as Jay-Z and Swizz Beatz helped widen that view, showing him artists working at a high level who shared his experience.
A decade after buying the Yoruba mask, Smith moved more decisively into collecting. At an auction for the Gordon Parks Foundation, he bid on works from Parks’s “Harlem” series, and he now owns 16 photographs from the body of work, including a portrait of Malcolm X and images tied to the Civil Rights Movement. He placed them upstairs near his children’s bedrooms on purpose. The idea, he said, is for them to encounter those images every day and understand that the struggles and questions of the 1950s and 1960s remain visible in the present.
That intergenerational impulse runs through the house. In the living room hangs Esther Mahlangu’s large four-panel geometric painting “Untitled (2024),” one of 30 works by the South African artist in Smith’s collection. He has described himself as especially drawn to Mahlangu’s vibrancy and to the history behind her practice. The collection also includes works by Patrick Eugène, Rashid Johnson, Tony Lewis, Mario Joyce, Beauford Delaney, Betye Saar, and Hank Willis Thomas, creating a conversation across eras rather than a single aesthetic line.
Smith said curiosity drives his collecting as much as connoisseurship. He prefers to know artists personally when possible, and many of the living artists in his home are people with whom he has built real relationships. One example is Eugène, whose work now appears both in the living room and in the sunroom, a light-filled space that functions like a private gallery and a gathering place for parties and fundraisers.
That room captures the larger logic of the collection: legacy, community, and education folded into domestic space. Smith, an active board member at the High Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, has turned his home into a site where art is not only displayed but activated. For his children, and for the guests who move through the house, the collection offers a sustained encounter with Black artistic achievement across generations — and with the idea that collecting can be a form of stewardship.
