This is part of a collection of stories celebrating the many shapes retirement travel can take. Read more here.
When I was growing up, my parents traveled the globe working in the art world. My mother, Lynn Zelevansky, now 76, spent her career as a contemporary curator and museum director, focusing outside the classic New York and European spheres of that time on artists from South Korea, Mexico, and beyond. My father, Paul Zelevansky, 77, a visual artist and professor, traveled with her as often as he could, soaking up every culture like a sponge. When my mother was curating an enormous installation—constructed from church candles and cow bones—by Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles at MoMA, for example, feijoada brunches became a norm in our household. When my parents traveled back and forth to Tokyo as she organized a Yayoi Kusama retrospective at LACMA, Japanese techno became our daily soundtrack.
When my mother retired from working full-time at institutions and my father stopped teaching, I wondered what they might do.
Keep traveling—that’s what.
Their adventures have persisted as predictably as their omnipresent black wardrobe, whether they’re hitting the Venice Biennale every fall without fail, touring Spain’s Basque Country after an opening for an Ad Reinhardt show in Madrid, or meeting art world friends in Vietnam a talk on minimalism, given by my mother, in Singapore.
Lured by a sense of intrigue, community, social connection, and multilayered cultural experience, a widening circle of retirees (and semi-retirees) are spending their newfound leisure time traversing the globe from Berlin to Morocco to Mexico City in pursuit of art, attending bustling art fairs, lavish parties, intimate artist studio visits, private gallery tours, and museum openings, not only to see and buy art, but also to connect and stay stimulated while immersed in beauty. “The art world is really a global community,” my mother muses.
Because the artistic sphere is both a social network and an industry, retirement-age people who travel for art are both former insiders and hobbyists. “The social element of the art world is very central to what it is,” says Paul. “And so you go to these events to meet people, reconnect, make new connections.”
J. Patrice Marandel, 79, a Frenchman with an infectious smile, missed the ease of that social and professional overlap as well as the nearly constant travel to acquire work when he retired from being chief curator of European painting at Los Angeles County Museum of Art after twenty-three years in 2017. “I used to say that my real residence was the Frankfurt airport because I changed planes there so often,” he jokes. “After I retired, there were less opportunities to see the people who are more friends than colleagues.”
The only solution was to continue traveling in art circles, sometimes as a consultant for private individuals and institutions, and otherwise for pure enjoyment. As a retiree, he has freedom to pursue his own passions, jet-setting for a recent Frans Hals (a Dutch Golden Age painter) exhibit in London, to see 17th and 18th century French painting shows in France, and to explore a newer interest in Islamic art (inspired by long ago trips to countries including Afghanistan). “Before, my travel was based on what I was going to achieve and bring home,” he says. “Now, it’s about my pleasure.”
