O ne of the first artworks that Jen Rubio acquired was an Ed Ruscha lithograph depicting a marmalade-hued, snow-capped mountain amid an intense, televisual sunset. In front of that landscape, its sky fading from deep plum to tangerine, are the words JET BABY—an appropriate phrase, given Rubio’s career.
Rubio, after all, is best-known as the co-founder of Away, a suitcase brand that debuted in 2016 and quickly became so popular among style-conscious travelers that it had reached a valuation of $1.4 billion by 2019. It wasn’t long after the 2016 launch that Rubio tried to acquire the Ruscha lithograph, at which time she was so unfamiliar with the process of buying a major artwork that she called Gagosian and asked if she could purchase one from them.
“It’s funny how naïve I was about the whole thing,” she says now, laughing. “Obviously that’s not how it works, but I will give them credit. The guy I spoke to on the phone was very sweet.” A year later Rubio’s then-boyfriend, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, also a co-founder of Flickr, found one at auction and surprised her with it. “That was the beginning,” she says.
Almost a decade later, Rubio and Butterfield are married with two children. Together they have amassed more than 1,000 artworks, their collection spanning rising contemporary stars and old masters—including Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, Joan Mitchell, Vija Celmins, Alicja Kwade, Louis Fratino, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Salman Toor, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder, George Condo and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
The pair have also become significant voices, and philanthropists, in the art world. Rubio is currently the youngest member of the board of trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she co-funds the Free Friday Nights program. “Jen’s laser-focused vision to expand access to art inspires me every day,” says Paul Arnhold, a fellow Whitney board member. “Working alongside her to co-fund Free Friday Nights has been one of the most meaningful collaborations of my life. Jen turns vision into impact—she’s a powerhouse, and I feel lucky to be her partner in crime on this mission.”
Art was part of Rubio and Butterfield’s relationship from the beginning. One of their earliest dates was spent at a San Francisco Art Fair. At the time, Butterfield was building a huge office space, for which he had an art budget, so they decided to try to buy some of that art themselves. “It ended up being one of the best days,” Rubio recalls. “Just walking around this art fair, seeing what we liked, not really having a master plan. I’d been interested in art before, but I wasn’t really in a position to collect. As we found some success, it was fun to realize: Hey, we can actually acquire some of these things.”
“Jen’s laser-focused vision to expand access to art inspires me every day.”
The artists in their collection hail from more than three dozen countries. Around half of the artists represented are from the Global South, which, Rubio says, was never an intentional choice but happened organically. She and Butterfield have quite different tastes. “I’m drawn to emotional resonance and narrative and the visual beauty of things,” she notes. “Stewart is a philosopher, and he is also very scientific. He gravitates towards conceptual rigor and systems, and the technicality of things.” It is Stewart who goes for older pieces and Old Masters, while Rubio’s taste skews towards contemporary and, increasingly, modern art.
Recently, Rubio has developed an interest in women surrealists like Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington and Gertrude Abercrombie. The couple’s collection now includes Abercrombie’s circa 1945 “The Countess Nerona” and the 1951 “Countess Nerona #4 (Countess Nerona from the Haunted Hotel),” studies of a ghostly female figure reclining on a chaise, inspired by the character of Countess Narona from Wilkie Collins’ 1878 novel “The Haunted Hotel.” It was one of those paintings, Rubio says, “that we randomly found years ago. That opened me up to this whole world of overlooked female artists who are now getting their due.”
The couple’s only collecting rule, says Rubio, is “we don’t hang anything in our house that doesn’t mean something to us.” The couple tries to “live with every piece,” which means rotating the works four or five times a year. (Some are in storage, but Rubio estimates that at any given time, 10 to 15% of their collection is on loan to museums.) She tries not to get caught up in market trends. “We work with advisors, but we don’t have advisors who say: here’s what’s in the market,” she says. “They are incredible, more academic. We will find something and send it to them, and they’ll send back tons of sources and references; we will learn so much about the artist or the period.”
Sometimes Rubio or Butterfield buy something they love, even if the other is not as keen. Though “for major acquisitions, big pieces, we both have to love it,” Rubio explains. “Even though we collect such different things, shared themes often emerge. There are a lot of depictions of family and domestic relationships. And the best part of it is, through each other, we’ve discovered art that we’d never have engaged with alone.”
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hen we talk over Zoom, Rubio is in the grey-walled office of her West Village home. Her neat black sleeveless top is the ideal counterpoint to a large pendant, which, it turns out, is a Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti perfume bottle from 1961. “It’s very rare to find one that has the top,” Rubio says, detaching the stopper to show me a little wand underneath, designed to dab on fragrance. She loves these objects that, she says, “you can wear, take them with you. And they have so much energy from their previous owners. The stories are amazing.”
Collecting jewelry is part of an expansion in Rubio’s collecting; she has dipped a toe, too, into haute couture fashion. She recently acquired a Versace dress worn by Naomi Campbell in 1999, though she has yet to wear it. “It’s really long, otherwise it fits. I was going to wear it to a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, but I was too scared to because I didn’t want anyone to step on it on the red carpet.”
She cites Pauline Karpidas’ collection, auctioned at Sotheby’s in September, as an inspiration for another burgeoning interest, this time in decorative objects. “You look at the photos of [Karpidas’] townhouse in London, and everything’s so stunning, because it’s not just paintings hanging on the wall. It’s objects on a coffee table, the bookshelves,” Rubio says.
In that vein, she’s built a large jewelry box collection. Her first find was an intricate 17th-century carved box she discovered at TEFAF Maastricht. These items, used in people’s everyday lives for so many years, she says, “carry so much meaning and significance.”
Also in Rubio’s office is a photo from Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series.” The work, “Untitled (Eating Lobster),” 1990, is one of the items in her collection that she says speaks to her the most. Rubio describes it as “a gorgeous photo of this couple at their kitchen table. The husband’s eating, and his wife is holding his head in her hands. Right after I got this and hung it on my wall, I saw Carrie Mae Weems speak at a benefit in New York. It was so moving. She’s so talented—her perspective on her life and work was just so incredible.” It amazes her, Rubio says, that “someone like me, who didn’t grow up with any art, can sit on a Zoom call and look over and that’s there!”
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ubio was born in the Philippines and moved to New Jersey when she was seven years old. Art, she says, “is not something that I really grew up around. My parents were very much into the sciences and math and other things, not so much into art.” She studied supply-chain management at Penn State University and worked at eyewear brand Warby Parker and fashion company All Saints before launching Away with a former Warby Parker colleague. Though Rubio stepped down as Away’s CEO earlier this year, she remains the board’s executive chair.
As is well-established, access is a challenge in the art world. “It can feel really insular, really opaque, overly market-driven, and very speculative,” Rubio says. Even so, she believes that this has recently shifted: “There has been a really incredible wave of institutions being more progressive in terms of how they think about who they appeal to, who goes to museums and why they are raising money.”
Rubio considers art philanthropy important on an existential level. “That’s how these institutions survive, right?” she says. “There is never enough funding for the arts.” She is careful, then, about how her donations are used. “We do a lot of work with funding the less sexy things in the art world.” Rather than putting her name on a big marble staircase, for example, she has instead endowed a curatorial position focusing on Latinx art and a fellowship for emerging curators at the Whitney, along with the Free Fridays program. Since the latter’s launch, she proudly notes, the pool of visitors on a Friday has become 40% more diverse, the average age 10 years younger.
“There has been a really incredible wave of institutions being more progressive in terms of how they think about who they appeal to, who goes to museums and why they are raising money.”
Rubio also supports the Aspen Art Museum, where she co-chaired the ArtCrush Gala and auction this summer. “Jen’s relationships with artists are unparalleled,” says Nicola Lees, the museum’s artistic director and CEO. “She approaches every exchange with curiosity, care, and respect. Her commitment to centering artists sparks lasting connections that continue to strengthen Aspen’s community and the field more broadly.”
Neither Rubio nor Butterfield, who grew up in British Columbia, lived near major museums as children. “We didn’t really have access to these institutions,” Rubio recalls. “That’s partly why I’m so passionate about the programs we support, which give access and exposure to families, to younger children.” Through access to art, she says, “even in the last 10 years, I’ve learned so much. It’s really changed my perspective on a lot of things. I always wonder, what would have changed if I’d had that earlier in life.”
As a founder, Rubio says, she often felt that there was a right way and a wrong way of doing things. “I think the reason I love collecting so much is that my approach has been just the opposite,” she notes. “It has really been an escape for me and my husband from the very intense other part of our life that is work and our companies.”
“All the skills that have made Jen a respected entrepreneur apply to her collecting and philanthropy—she’s savvy, smart and successful,” says Robert Denning, a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board and a friend of Rubio’s. “She brings a formidable intelligence to everything she does. On top of that, she has great taste and brings the fun and joy, too.”
Hair, Isaac Davidson; makeup, Jocelyn Biga.
