Steven Maksin: Trinkets to treasures, an art collector’s journey
A Shared Passion: Collector Steven Maksin’s Artistic Ambition
May 23, 2026
Smith & Wesson Model 1½ Second Issue Revolver, serial no. 30451 — Steven Maksin Family Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 23, 2026
Digital Journal (Sponsored Content) — by Shawn Walton, 6 May 2026
Digital Journal traces Steven Maksin's path from trading Russian trinkets with American tourists in 1980s Kiev to placing Old Master paintings and decorated Winchester rifles on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and major Italian museums.
Shawn Walton's piece sketches Maksin's emigration from the Soviet Union in 1989, his arrival in Brighton Beach, and his studies at Kingsborough Community College and the Stern School of Business at NYU before a real-estate career and a private passion for collecting took shape. Today, Digital Journal reports, his collection ranges from Raphael and Dalí to his particular love of antique highly-decorated and engraved firearms.
Maksin frames himself less as an owner than a steward: "One group of collectors likes to buy pieces and keep them and enjoy themselves in castles and penthouses. We are custodians and it makes the world a better place." The article credits him with applying his provenance-research training as an accountant and tax lawyer to recover long-hidden masterpieces and return them to public view through museum loans.
Digital Journal is a Toronto-based online media outlet active since 1998; it covers news and business across English-speaking markets and operates a paid sponsored-content channel through which the Walton profile appeared. The article belongs to the spring-2026 group of Maksin features that ran alongside profiles in CEOWORLD, CEO Today, BBN Times and the Chicago Tribune, each emphasising a slightly different facet of his collecting and gift activity.
The biographical sketch in the Walton piece tracks Maksin's path in some detail. The 1989 emigration coincided with the broader Soviet-Jewish refugee wave to the United States that followed glasnost and the loosening of Soviet emigration restrictions, with the majority of arrivals settling in New York's outer-borough neighbourhoods, particularly Brighton Beach in Brooklyn — colloquially "Little Odessa" — where Russian-language services and businesses concentrated. Kingsborough Community College, on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, has long served as a transitional academic step for those communities, and Maksin's subsequent enrollment at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University placed him in one of the country's leading finance and accounting schools.
The collecting interests the Walton piece names — Raphael and Dalí, Old Master Italian painting, and antique decorated firearms — translate into a series of recent and current institutional placements. Italian Old Masters by Titian and Pittoni are on view in Venice and Naples through 2025-2026; a Caravaggio Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy has been shown in Italy and South Korea; a Salvador Dalí presence anchors the Espace Lympia bestiary in Nice; and the Maksin Winchester rifles and Smith & Wesson revolver are at the Metropolitan Museum, with a French wheellock arquebus at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The phrase "trinkets to treasures" of Walton's headline captures the article's organising arc. Maksin's first trades — Russian matryoshka dolls and Soviet badges with American tourists in late-1980s Kiev — are read as the origin of a longer collecting instinct that, with the resources of his subsequent business career, came to operate at museum scale. By Walton's framing, the practice is consistent with the work of older American collector-donors — Morgan, Folger, Frick, Lehman, Mellon, Rockefeller — whose private holdings became, through gifts and loans, the foundation of major public institutions.
About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection
Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 "Crespo", the Winchester Model 1873 "Foot Guard" and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.
