Tomm El-Saieh

Tomm El-Saieh was born in 1984 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and is of Haitian, Palestinian, and Israeli descent. He grew up in Miami, Florida, where he continues to live and work, while maintaining close ties to Haiti. He studied at the New World School of the Arts in Miami, though no degree or specific attendance years are documented in public sources.

El-Saieh's paintings are built from dense, layered, rhythmic mark-making that he has connected to music, describing his process in terms of managing rhythm and silence. His work draws on Haitian visual and spiritual traditions filtered through an abstract, non-figurative language.

Beyond the studio, El-Saieh directs the El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince, a family gallery founded by his grandfather Issa El-Saieh in the 1950s that supports Haitian artists, and he co-directs Central Fine, an artist-run gallery in Miami Beach.

El-Saieh's institutional trajectory has moved from local Miami exhibitions to national and international survey shows in a relatively short span. His inclusion in the 2018 New Museum Triennial, "Songs for Sabotage," introduced his work to a wider audience, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago's "Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s to Today" (2022 to 2024) placed his abstraction within a broader conversation about Caribbean diasporic art. A 2022 to 2023 solo exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, "Imaginary City," extended that institutional recognition to a major encyclopedic museum. Coverage of his practice consistently returns to his description of painting as akin to music, and to his dual role as painter and gallerist through both the family gallery in Port-au-Prince and Central Fine in Miami.

El-Saieh's market runs primarily through the primary gallery channel rather than the secondary auction market. He is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York, which has staged multiple solo and curated presentations of his work since 2020, and his paintings have entered major museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Rubell Family Collection, and Perez Art Museum Miami. He received two Knight Champions Awards from the Knight Foundation (2015 and 2019) and a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2016. No price-confirmed public auction sale for the artist has been identified as of 2026-07-16. A work titled Roselle was reported by the Henry Street Settlement as included in a Sotheby's benefit auction supporting the settlement, but no sale price was publicly disclosed, so there is no established secondary-market benchmark for his work.

There is no catalogue raisonne for El-Saieh, and no independent authentication body has been identified; verification runs through the artist's own studio and the galleries he directs. Because no price-confirmed public auction sale has been identified, collectors have no secondary-market price history to reference, and pricing signals come almost entirely from primary gallery sales through Luhring Augustine and occasional presentations at Central Fine and other galleries. His strongest signal of durability to date is museum placement, with works now in the Guggenheim, ICA Miami, the Blanton, and several other major collections, set against an auction market that has not yet developed.