American Art

Tylee Abbott currently serves as Vice President, Head of American Art, with a particular affinity for Western American Art, at Christie’s in New York. In this role, he assists clients with appraisals and contributes meaningfully to Christie’s sales of American Art, both at auction and in private sales. Tylee supports selling clients throughout the consignment process, while also providing collectors with thorough advice about how best to navigate today’s marketplace.

Recently, he played a significant role in Christie’s auction Visions of the West: American Paintings from the William I. Koch Collection, which included the notable sale of Thomas Moran’s oil painting The Cliffs of Green River, Wyoming, as well as Moran’s watercolor Cliffs of Green River, Wyoming Territory, which set the artist’s auction record for a work on paper. Tylee has also added to the success of noteworthy pictures such as N.C. Wyeth’s auction record setting ‘Hands Up!’, Alfred Jacob Miller’s Pawnee Running a Buffalo, and to Christie’s other recent auction record results for Southwestern artists Victor Higgins, Rebecca Salsbury James and Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt.

Prior to joining Christie’s, Tylee assisted another major New York auction company with sales of American, and specifically Western American Art. Before that time, he worked independently as a private art advisor, in a number of capacities for private galleries, and authored over 50 articles on the American and Western American Art markets for leading industry periodicals. Tylee holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and Business from Franklin & Marshall College and a Masters in Art Business from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art – London.

Paige Kestenman is a Specialist in Christie’s American Art department, is responsible for sourcing and sale curation for the American Art auctions in New York. Paige regularly provides clients with market updates, valuations and proposals for sale, and she works with a wide array of collectors on both auction and private sale acquisitions.

Since joining Christie’s in 2013, Paige has worked on several important consignments by American Modernist masters, including the world-record Abstraction by Marsden Hartley ($6.7 million), Edward Hopper’s Windy Day ($1.2 million) and Norman Lewis’s Street Scene (a record for a figurative work by the artist at $440,000). Other notable auction sales include Boston School Impressionist Frank Weston Benson’s The Reader ($2.9 million), iconic illustrator Norman Rockwell’s The Christmas Coach ($1 million) and Hudson River School painter Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Mansfield Nose ($519,000). Paige has also assisted clients with private treaty transactions for artists ranging from Rockwell, Milton Avery, Jacob Lawrence and Andrew Wyeth to John Singer Sargent and George Inness.

Paige earned her Masters in History of Art and Art World Practice: Art, Style and Design with Distinction from Christie’s Education London. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University with High Honors and is a member of the Sigma Xi Research Society and Phi Beta Kappa Society.