Samantha McCoy
Gallerist · Founder, Argo Fine Arts
A native New-Yorker, Samantha McCoy grew up close to postwar American art: her father, Jason McCoy, ran a gallery on East 57th Street in Manhattan for more than forty years, specializing in postwar American and European masters, where she worked for nearly five years, and her great-uncles were the painters Jackson and Charles Pollock.
From 2020 to 2025, she became Global Director of Magnum Gallery, leading the agency's expansion worldwide: she oversaw the October 2021 opening of a new, purpose-built exhibition space for Magnum in Paris, managed its international exhibitions and art fair presence, and led the acquisition of the Robert Capa collection, which went on to anchor major exhibitions at Les Franciscaines and the Musée de la Libération. She has also held curatorial roles connected to PhotoEspaña and the Musée du Quai Branly, advised private collections, and been profiled by Artnet News and the Financial Times.
In autumn 2025, after five years running Magnum's gallery worldwide, McCoy left to found her own venture, Argo Fine Arts, a Paris- and New York-based gallery representing postwar masters alongside contemporary artists.
Argo made its debut at Art Paris 2026 with a solo presentation of the German sculptor Christiane Löhr, alongside a second space pairing Cy Twombly, Charles and Jackson Pollock, and the photographer Richard Learoyd.
What can Samantha bring to the masterclass participants
Five years running an artist-owned agency's gallery at a global scale, and, since 2025, an independent dealer building her own program from scratch, without the overhead of a permanent space, enables Samantha to speak candidly to what changes and what doesn't, when a photograph moves from an agency's collective structure to a single dealer's personal judgment.
Her family history also gives her a distinctive vantage point on generational transmission in the art world—years spent resisting a gallery inheritance before choosing, on her own terms, to build her own version of it. That arc speaks directly to collectors thinking about their own collections in similar terms: not only what to buy, but what, eventually, becomes of it.