Mission
We believe in the power of art. Our mission is to put meaningful contemporary art at the center of the spaces and lives where it can be most deeply encountered.
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We are a contemporary art advisory led by Gavin Kennedy and Sophie Barfod. We work with the belief that the best work in contemporary art happens at the intersection of curatorial knowledge and rigorous commercial strategy.
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Every engagement begins with a conversation about what you want the work to do. We then build the collection, exhibition, or program that achieves it.
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Our artist growth research model (the Artist Trajectory Score) surfaces emerging artists before the market catches up. We then combine the precision of data analytics with the discernment of our expert eye.
Our Team
Gavin Kennedy
Founder & PartnerGavin Kennedy’s practice combines twenty-five years of global brand leadership with two decades of art-world stewardship, bringing business clarity to a category where it is rare and cultural depth to a discipline that often lacks it.
He came to contemporary art through patronage, beginning as a trustee and executive committee member of the Fine Arts Work Center, the Provincetown residency whose alumni include Lisa Yuskavage, Firelei Baez, Ellen Gallagher, and Tala Madani. He currently serves as co-chair of the ICA Boston Advisory Board, sitting on the Collections & Exhibitions and Marketing committees. He recently placed more than sixty works from a Boston private collection into U.S. museums.
Sophie Barfod
Sophie Barfod’s practice combines contemporary art curation with strategy, a combination shaped by an professional path that has moved between management consulting, startup leadership, and curatorial work across Berlin, Amsterdam, Medellin, and New York.
She has curated projects including wait until my sugar melts (2026), Blind Spot (2026), Concierto IV: Shoutout to Freud (2025), The Masquerade (2025), Was I Ever Really Here (2025), among others. In addition to her curatorial work, Sophie has contributed writing to exhibition catalogues, artist publications, and online magazines Sculpture Magazine, The Curatorial, Impuls Magazine and more.
Partner & Curator
Amin Deroui
Vice President - Hospitality Partnerships AmericasWith over twenty years experience in hospitality, Amin has held senior roles in Food & Beverage leadership, where he has built and led food, beverage, and lifestyle programs across luxury hotels and multi-site operations in the US, UK, and Spain. Today, as Founder and CEO of Avantgarde Hospitality Group, he advises and operates hospitality concepts internationally.
Amin’s view is simple: the boutique hotels that win the next decade will not be the ones with better thread counts. They will be the ones with a point of view. Culture, programmed with intention, is one of the few remaining ways a hospitality brand can build genuine distinction.
Erik Yates
Advisory Board Member, Brand & Growth PartnershipsErik Yates's practice combines twenty years of brand partnership leadership with a deep fluency in the culture that moves audiences, built across some of media's most influential names: Complex, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Fast Company, and Entertainment Weekly. Across his career he has specialized in translating cultural relevance into business results, and in aligning the creative, editorial, and commercial sides of an organization around the same vision.
He brings that same instinct to EAA. The most valuable brand-artist collaborations are partnerships built where genuine cultural credibility and commercial strategy meet, the rare place where both the artist and the brand come away stronger.
