Bruce Halpryn and David Raymond seem a somewhat unlikely curation team: two very strong personalities and shrewd collectors renowned for their particular and sharp senses of style would be sure to clash heads in most books. Together, however, they’ve come together to create My Silence Is Made of Explosions, an all-women-artists group exhibition running at VISU Contemporary (of which Halpryn is co-owner and curator) featuring artists whose work resonates with the 20th-century Surrealist movement, with two pieces by esteemed photographer Dora Maar from Raymond’s private collection anchoring the show.
“Women were always a very important part of the Surrealist movement, but they were tremendously overshadowed by the men,” Bruce Halpryn says. Halpryn, who is a pharmaceutical CEO by day, former FotoFocus Board President, and wearer of many hats, made a name for himself collecting and establishing fruitful relationships with living artists, including Elena Dorfman, a mutual friend of his and Raymond’s, whose work is featured in the show. “It's not just [about] my personal collection. It's the connections,” Halpryn says. “People come in, we're showing them the work, and oftentimes, given how out of the box some of the pieces are, people are like, ‘What's that?’ and you explain the story to them, and they get this a-ha moment.”
He fell into his current position at VISU Contemporary by happenstance when the husband of a dancer at Miami City Ballet (where he is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors) offered him his share of the gallery after a conversation in which Bruce mentioned offhand that his retirement dream was to run a gallery. Through Halpryn’s curatorial work, the gallery became one of only two authorized David LaChapelle dealers in the country.
The two collectors met through a FotoFocus event and then reconnected again at another event through the International Center of Photography, which is what sparked Halpryn to approach Raymond to collaborate on a Surrealist show.
Raymond, who is also a filmmaker and founding board member of Performa, is a prolific collector and connoisseur of Surrealist photography. He began collecting as a young man in San Francisco, where he was doing hit-and-run gallery showings out of warehouses and immersing himself in the public library’s art book catalogues after abandoning his initial plans of pursuing a traditional career in business. It was through this self-education that he would fall in love with the Surrealists and eventually Dora Maar.
“In 1998, there was a huge auction of her estate in Paris. I flew from San Francisco to Paris to go to the auction, and I went through everything,” Raymond says. “The auction house thought that I was probably the biggest pain in the ass because I wanted to look at every single print, and I wanted to feel them, turn them, smell them. At the time, French dealers that I knew said to me, ‘Why do you want to buy her work? She's nothing.’ I didn’t think so.”
For both Halpryn and Raymond, the best collectors must also be innately strong curators, and Halpryn attributes his own beginnings in curation to arranging the works in his own home. “An art collection is not just a collection of pieces. It's got to tell a story, and the pieces have to complement each other,” Halpryn says. To be driven by a strong internal vision, they feel, is one of the hallmarks of both a great curator and a great collector.
“I consider that also being an artist, because you're bringing these disparate objects together to create relationships,” Raymond says. “For me, I can't help myself. I'm always looking at things and finding relationships and dynamics and work, whether it's an image or objects or even people.”
Beyond that, stewardship and a sense of mission to increase collective understanding of artistic practices are deeply tied to their own collecting practices and go hand in hand with their curatorial work. From his very beginnings in collecting Surrealist art, Raymond has noticed the sidelining and misogyny prevalent in the movement and is continuously driven by an interest in expanding understanding of the female Surrealist legacy while also moving it forward by working with contemporary artists who riff on this history.
Beyond the scope of this exhibition, both Raymond and Halpryn are both true believers in the power of art to be a kind of connective tissue in a difficult world, and that art acquires meaning through being experienced by others. “Any time museums want to borrow work, I rarely say no because I feel that if I have the privilege of being able to live with the work, it needs to be shared. And something that I discovered is that when they come back from exhibitions, they have a lot to tell me. I get this reflection of joy and happiness, and the works feel different when they return,” Raymond says.
My Silence Is Made of Explosions was on view at VISU Contemporary through May 31, 2026.
