About Honar Advisory
Collections are built over time through curiosity, conviction, knowledge, and the particular eye of the person who brings the works together. As a collection develops, the questions surrounding it often extend beyond acquisition. How should it be stewarded? What should remain together? What might be shared, transferred, placed with an institution, or given a broader cultural purpose? And when sale is appropriate, how should it be considered in relation to the collection as a whole?
Honar Advisory was established to provide independent counsel at this stage in the life of a collection.
Retained solely by collectors, families, estates, and fiduciaries, Honar considers the works, the sensibility through which they were assembled, and the financial, familial, philanthropic, and cultural circumstances surrounding them. The firm does not begin with a predetermined outcome. Retention, family transfer, institutional placement, philanthropy, selective sale, or a combination of approaches may each be appropriate.
This independence addresses a particular gap in the art world. Collectors have access to highly accomplished auction houses, dealers, appraisers, attorneys, wealth advisors, museums, and other specialists. Each brings expertise to a particular part of the process. Honar’s role is different: to preserve the collector’s perspective, consider the collection as a whole, and help determine how those specialist resources should be brought together in service of the client’s objectives.
Maryam Horri, Founder
Honar grew from Maryam Horri’s own experience as a collector and patron, and from years of conversations with collectors who sought her perspective not principally on what to acquire, but on what to do with collections they had already built.
Raised in an environment where cultural preservation, intellectual life, and the arts were deeply valued, Maryam began collecting art in her twenties. Her perspective has since been shaped by sustained engagement with collectors, artists, cultural institutions, and philanthropy.
Training at Christie’s in New York provided a professional framework for that experience, while private collection viewings offered an unusually intimate understanding of the role collectors play in cultural formation. Through selection, patronage, and sustained support, collectors do more than assemble works; alongside artists, galleries, curators, and institutions, they help shape how an artistic moment is seen, understood, and ultimately remembered.
Beyond her work as a collector and patron, Maryam’s professional experience spans museums, academia, nonprofit leadership, and philanthropy. She has worked with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, MoMA PS1, LACMA, San José Museum of Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; served as full-time faculty at Columbia University; and led programs involving fiduciary oversight and strategic grantmaking. Today, she advises collectors and families, manages a non-profit for the arts, and serves on the Development Committee of Gracie Square Hospital.
This combination of personal experience, institutional perspective, and fiduciary discipline informs Honar’s approach. Maryam understands that a collection reveals something an inventory or valuation cannot: the interests, convictions, discernment, and sensibility of the person who brought the works together. Honar begins from that understanding—bringing independent judgment to decisions about stewardship and transition while keeping both the character of the collection and the interests of the collector firmly in view.
