Auctioneer Kimberly Pirtle Leaves Sotheby’s to Launch Hybrid Art-Philanthropy Advisory

Kimberly Pirtle, a fast-rising auctioneer at Sotheby’s, has left the company to start her own firm, Gabriel Advisory Group, a practice that aims to bridge art advisory and cultural philanthropy.

Pirtle, who worked in Sotheby’s collectors group and quickly moved into auctioneering, said the idea grew out of a gap she kept running into with clients. At the auction house, the focus was clear: transactions. But many of the collectors she worked with were thinking more broadly—about artists, institutions, and how their collecting fit into a larger ecosystem.

“They were intentional,” she said of her clients, describing collectors who wanted to support artists and institutions, and not solely acquire objects. That kind of thinking, she found, didn’t fit neatly inside the structure of an auction house.

Gabriel Advisory Group is her attempt to formalize a different approach. The firm works across both the primary and secondary markets, advising collectors on acquisitions while also guiding philanthropic strategy and institutional engagement. For some clients, that means navigating auctions and gallery relationships. For others, it means shaping charitable gifting strategies or working more closely with museums and foundations.

The model reflects Pirtle’s own path. In addition to her work at Sotheby’s, she became a regular presence on the benefit auction circuit, working with organizations including the Pratt Institute, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, and the Gordon Parks Foundation. That experience exposed a different set of needs—fundraising strategy, donor cultivation, and long-term institutional support—that went well beyond the auction room.

“What I started to see is that it’s often the same person,” Pirtle said, referring to those active during the benefit auctions she auctioneered. “The most engaged collectors are also deeply involved in philanthropy.” 

That overlap is where she sees opportunity. Rather than treating collecting and giving as separate lanes, Gabriel Advisory positions them as part of a single, more integrated practice.

Pirtle is also maintaining a role as a VIP consultant with Frieze, the art fair company. She described that relationship as one that keeps her close to how decisions, particularly in the primary market, are made in real time.

More recently, advisers have begun expanding their purview beyond acquisitions into estate planning, collection management, and institutional strategy, and Pirtle sees her pitch as one that links those strands should together, rather than having them be pieced out across different specialists.

For now, the firm is small and deliberately so. But the ambition is clear: to build a practice that reflects how collectors actually operate, rather than how the market has traditionally divided itself.