She had similarly defining experiences viewing works by Golub, Spero (a feminist and social critic) and the painter Pat Steir, with whom she is now preparing a survey of her drawings for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Of Golub’s work, Harris says, "It opened me up in terms of other things that were out there. I just started to be much more engaged in art that was about the world."

The Harris-Gissler collection contains some 200 framed pieces—even Siena receives a drawing each year for her birthday—and more art is kept in storage. "In the end, I guess the art that we live with has a poetic quality, and I’m attracted to that in my work as well," Harris says. "That mid-century Abstract Expressionism—the art that we have doesn’t look like that, but I was so attracted by the forcefulness and integrity of the artists of that generation. It’s where I stepped into the flow."

The couple’s collection tends toward minimalism, a favorite style of its owners, but as a whole the works are rather difficult to pigeonhole. In the living room, an austere drawing by Tuttle is stationed next to a frenetic effort by Robert Smithson—jam-packed with repeated words and rambling text—that reminds Gissler of the sort of amphetamine-driven creative burst that helped Jack Kerouac produce On the Road. "There’s a lot of kind of maniacal works, highly detailed, that required vast amounts of hand work by artists," Gissler says. "They’re more obsessive—‘obsessive’ is a good word."

The works in the collection have originated from a variety of sources—friends, relatives, favorite galleries, even dumb luck. For Harris’s 40th birthday, Gissler persuaded a dozen of her friends to buy an editioned work by Vija Celmins, the Latvian-born painter and sculptor known for her meticulous rendering of natural scenes. A Louise Bourgeois drawing was a wedding gift from Harris’s parents. A few years ago at the Venice Biennale, Gissler and Harris were walking through the Piazza San Marco with Siena in search of gelato when through a gallery window Gissler spied a drawing by Mark Tobey, who in 1958 won first prize at the Biennale. He was the first American to do so since James McNeill Whistler in 1895, which was the event’s inaugural year. "Who would ever imagine," Gissler says, "that you’d find something you really covet in Piazza San Marco in Venice in the summer just going to get ice cream?"

For Gissler, part of the appeal of collecting drawings is their relative affordability. The bottom line has been a concern ever since he bought what he calls his first "real" piece of art in the mid-’80s, a gouache-on-paper self-portrait by Donald Baechler. It cost $700, which Gissler paid in seven monthly installments. In New York’s East Village in the 1980s, he says, "things in the galleries cost hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands." Those days, of course, are long gone. "Richard Tuttle just moved to Pace Gallery," Gissler says, referring to the venerable PaceWildenstein. "Who knows what’s going to happen to the prices of his work? We could be priced out of the game."

At the root of the Harris-Gissler collecting philosophy is an abiding appreciation of the artist. They are not speculators—Harris doesn’t even like to think of herself as a collector—and are not interested merely in stockpiling works by household names. Even some of their works by established artists with international reputations, such as Kiki Smith, were completed when those artists were young and relatively unknown. "We’re very aesthetically inclined, but it’s a home," Gissler says. "So there’s a kind of ease and casualness with which we live with the work that is a reflection, I guess, of who we are."

Christopher Hann writes on culture, travel and business for publications including The New York Times, Executive Traveler and Leader’s Edge.

Derek Eller Gallery, New York
212.206.6411 derekeller.com

Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY
718.599.2144 pierogi2000.com

Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago
312.455.1990 rhoffmangallery.com