TREASURES UNTOLD

People might look at my work and say, ‘What’s interesting about a bunch of broken bits?’” says Jacob Coley, vice president and director of antiquities at Hindman Auctions in Chicago. “I see that as a challenge, not a hindrance.”

Coley puts together two major sales a year, primarily of antiquities—art from the ancient Near East, Rome, Greece, and Egypt—and some Pre-Columbian and ethnographic materials (like tools that show how past civilizations lived). These precious fragments may underwhelm the layperson, but to Coley they’re beautiful and fascinating.

Coley with four ancient vessels. Photos courtesy of Hindman LLC.

Hindman is a upper-middle-market auction house, with 2024 sales of $80 million to thousands of collectors around the world, but Coley says they operate as if they were a high-end blue chip house. Therefore, he and his team are fastidious in valuating and substantiating provenance of each item. He relies on a network of scholars and curators cultivated during his time at FIT and in his previous roles at the famed London gallery Colnaghi, Sotheby’s, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in its Greek and Roman Art Department).

Auction catalogs are not known for innovation, but Coley’s experience in the museum and gallery worlds inspires him. His catalog for Hindman’s Cabinet of Curiosities sale in 2022 used the objects to tell a sweeping story.

The bronze cauldron Coley sold to the Met.

“I put together a timeline from the creation of our universe to man’s exploration of it—using antiquities, ethnographic and natural history—beginning with a meteorite from the solar system’s birth and ending with a manual from the lunar lander that put man on the moon,” he says.

In 2023, Coley got to work on the “career-defining” sale of the Ernest Brummer collection. Brummer was a turn-of-the-20th-century art dealer who amassed one of the largest collections of medieval art and antiquities in America. In a full-circle moment from that sale, The Met, Coley’s former employer, purchased a bronze Greek cauldron that now sits on display in its Greek and Roman galleries.