Hopkins grew up in a rural area of the Adirondacks in New York. Her father was a history teacher, and her early interests included history and science. A month of studying in Egypt during college and a subsequent year abroad in Paris helped direct her toward art history and the professional art world.
Hopkins studied French at Hamilton College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. Hamilton, founded in 1812 in Clinton, New York, is a liberal-arts college known for emphasizing broad undergraduate education and close faculty-student instruction.
She later earned a Juris Doctor degree from Pepperdine University. Pepperdine's legal education developed within a private California university whose law school became particularly associated with entertainment, intellectual-property, and art-law study. She also completed a master's degree in modern art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, an institution internationally recognized for postgraduate education and research in art history, conservation, and curating.
Hopkins began her professional career as an art lawyer. She worked as an associate attorney in art law at Lowe & Mahon from 1989 to 1993, advising in a field shaped by copyright, contracts, ownership, provenance, and other legal issues affecting artists and collections.
During the 1990s she expanded into journalism, curating, and international art administration. She worked as an international-markets consultant for Villa Grisebach Auctions in Berlin, served as a national correspondent in Germany for The Art Newspaper, and was curator and director of the International Studio Programme at ACC Galerie in Weimar. Her work at ACC Galerie included editorial contributions to exhibition publications and connected legal expertise with contemporary-art research and exhibition practice.
Hopkins later directed art-business education at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. There she developed teaching focused on collecting and collection management, bringing together practical subjects such as acquisition, valuation, insurance, conservation, storage, estate planning, and deaccessioning.
She joined UBS in 2015 and became Global Head of the UBS Art Collection. In that role she is responsible for the strategic direction and management of a collection comprising more than 30,000 works, oversees acquisitions and exhibitions, and works with loans, artist commissions, galleries, and cultural institutions. Under her leadership, UBS published major volumes on the collection and expanded public access through exhibitions at the UBS Art Gallery in New York.
Hopkins developed art-business education at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, including instruction on the practical management of private and institutional art collections.
As Global Head of the UBS Art Collection, Hopkins directed acquisitions, exhibitions, loans, and artist commissions for a corporate collection comprising more than 30,000 works.
She helped broaden public engagement with the UBS Art Collection through exhibitions and publications presenting modern and contemporary art to audiences beyond the bank's offices.
(This UBS Art Collection publication presents recent acqui...)
2022(Edited by Dieter Buchhart and Mary Rozell, this illustrat...)
2016(Hopkins's revised handbook explains the practical and leg...)
2020Hopkins's professional philosophy treats collecting as both a personal and cultural activity. She has argued that collections should be formed through sustained engagement with galleries, museums, artists, and scholarship rather than through acquisition alone. Her curatorial work at UBS has emphasized contemporary art that engages identity, memory, culture, social change, and diverse perspectives.
Quotations: "I believe anyone in the art world has to be looking all the time."
Hopkins has described art collecting as an intensely personal activity and has emphasized sustained looking, research, and education as important to informed collecting. In discussing her work, she has also stressed the value of legal training for anticipating problems involving copyright, contracts, artist commissions, tax, estate planning, and collection management.
Quotes from others about the person
Her professional interviews describe a methodical approach to art collecting that combines research over extended periods with the ability to act quickly when an appropriate acquisition becomes available.
