Today we’d like to introduce you to Keli Hogsett.
Hi Keli, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I noticed a gap between how many people genuinely love art and how few of them actually collect it. People often feel like they need more knowledge, time invested, and a more refined eye before they’ll confidently commit to a purchase. That belief just quietly keeps them on the sidelines.
Building a meaningful collection does deserve time. It’s something that unfolds over years, sometimes a lifetime. The challenge is that most people who love art also have full-time jobs, families, real lives. So they get stuck in this loop where they never feel ready, they can’t commit to the right piece, and they end up either buying nothing or making a purchase they regret.
And on the other side of that equation are artists who deserve to have their work seen, lived with, and supported, not sitting in a gallery for a month before going back into storage. That felt like a missed opportunity on both ends.
Art leasing was my answer to removing some of those up front barriers to collecting. I’ll help people discover new artwork that resonates with them, let them experience it in their own home, and refine their collection over time. The result is a collection that they truly love, and a low pressure and seamless process.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
A big challenge is that every single piece of art is unique and there is only one. Likewise, art collecting is very personal and every client is just as unique. It’s a fun and creative matchmaking challenge and it’s rewarding to get it right.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I came to art advising on a pretty roundabout path, but looking back it makes complete sense.
I started at UT Austin as a studio art major because I genuinely loved creating. But I had this itch for faster-paced, business-minded thinking, so I ended up pivoting to the communications school and graduating with a Masters in Creative Advertising. That led to a long career as a Creative Director working on major global brands, and I loved it. Solving business problems creatively, working with talented people, big budgets, real stakes.
But the pull back to the arts never went away.
By that point I had spent years thinking about consumer experience professionally, and I kept coming back to this one thing that genuinely puzzled me. So many people love art, but almost nobody actually lives with it. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized the industry had made it that way. It’s built on exclusivity and a kind of pomp that quietly signals to most people that collecting isn’t for them.
That felt like a massive missed opportunity. For the people who genuinely want to collect but don’t know how to start. And for the artists who deserve to have their work out in the world, in people’s homes, actually experienced. When the idea of art leasing clicked for me, everything started pointing in the same direction.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
“The industry is already in motion. We’ve seen a real wave of new thinking, shared ownership models, reimagined gallery formats, alternative ways of connecting artists to collectors. A lot of that is coming from necessity as the older models just aren’t proving as sustainable as they once were.
But I actually think the most interesting catalyst is going to be AI. There’s something that happens when everything becomes instantly generatable. People start craving what can’t be replicated. The hand, the decision-making, the hours, the humanness behind a physical object. I think AI is going to drive people back toward genuinely hand-crafted work in a way we haven’t seen in a while.
It won’t happen overnight. But I’m genuinely excited about where it’s heading. There’s a real opportunity right now to put value and meaning back into the arts, and I think the audience for that is bigger than people realize.”
Pricing:
- Monthly leasing is based on the value of the artwork. For example, if the artwork is $13,000, you’ll pay $250 per month to lease that artwork.
- art values range from $3,000 up to $80,000
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.cocollect.art
- Instagram: @cocollect.art
