Insiders shocked by murdered NYC art dealer’s secret life

Brent Sikkema was a high-culture aficionado whose final Instagram post was a sumptuous photo of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris. He regularly rubbed elbows with luminaries such as Michelle Obama. But the Manhattan art dealer — who was found stabbed to death at his home in Rio de Janeiro on January 15 — had a secret side.

Sikkema, 75, had fallen in love with and married a self-admitted male escort and, social media posts show, was a fixture on the gay scene in Cuba, Rio and Fire Island, NY, for a time. He was also a devoted father embroiled in a bitter divorce that began in March 2022 and was ongoing at the time of his death, according to public records and Brazilian investigators.

Alejandro Triana Prevez, 30, has been charged with Sikkema’s murder. Police say the Cuban national — who worked as a bodyguard for Sikkema and his husband during the pandemic — made the six-hour drive from Sao Paulo to Sikkema’s Rio rowhouse, and spent 14 hours surveilling the property before he entered and allegedly stabbed the art dealer 18 times in the neck and face while he lay in his bed.

The weapon may have been scissors, a box cutter or a screwdriver, according to Art Forum. Sikkema’s remains were found by his lawyer who had a key to his home.

Triana is also accused of stealing more than $30,000 in cash, which Sikkema had on hand to buy furniture for a new apartment in the beachfront Leblon neighborhood in Rio, police say.

Friends and former clients of the gallerist said they were in shock over his death and secret life.

“He was a kind soul, but I had no idea about his lifestyle,” said a longtime client who had worked with his Chelsea gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., which represents contemporary artists such as Kara Walker and Brazil’s Vik Muniz. “He never spoke about his husband.”

The divorce action was started by his husband, Daniel Garcia Carrera Sikkema, and Sikkema was “panicked” because Garcia would not accept an amicable settlement, according to Brazilian police, who added that Garcia also wanted a sizable settlement from Sikkema.

Garcia’s attorneys declined to comment. Brazilian authorities have not suggested Garcia is involved in Sikkema’s murder.

Sikkema, who counted New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als and artist Muniz among his closest friends, married Daniel Garcia Carrero, 53, shortly before the birth of their son, Lucas, now 14, by surrogate in California. At the time of the birth, California did not recognize gay marriage, which is why Sikkema is listed as the “mother” on his son’s birth certificate, according to social media. Same sex unions were legalized in the state in 2013.

“When Luc was born, California birth certificates couldn’t recognize two fathers so I became his mother,” Sikkema joked in an Instagram post from May, 2016. “An honor to be in the company of mothers everywhere.”

According to Rio police, Garcia had demanded $6 million for Sikkema to see their son again.

It’s not clear when Sikkema fell in love with his husband, who he called Danny. But Garcia claims in a Spanish-language memoir, “Ticket to Paradise: The Cuban Revolution is the Story of Broken Dreams, Losses, Misery, Terror and Lies,” to have worked as a prostitute in Cuba and Spain. The book was written between 1997 and 1999, and published in 2006, according to an author’s note. In a forward written for the third edition of the book, in 2014, Garcia wrote that he is a “happily married man.”

“I have a son and it makes me extremely happy to watch him grow in what I consider the best country in the world, but what’s most important is that we are far away from the communist doctrine that I was forced to adopt and adore since I had use of my reason,” he wrote.

In the book, Garcia recounts the raw story of how he was sexually abused as a child by family members and then took up prostitution to survive and escape from the communist island.

“In order to escape the dictatorship he had to change into a dangerous man without a destiny,” reads the jacket copy of the book. “This led him to spend a year in various prisons of the the Cuban regime.”

In 1997, he left the island bound for Italy, finally settling in Madrid where he continued to work as “a chico de compania” or escort. In his book, he writes about making enough money in three months to pay for a new house for his impoverished family in Cuba.

Along with Garcia, Sikkema split his time among homes in Manhattan; Sayville, NY; Havana and Rio — a place he called his “second home” and where friends knew him as “Brento” — according to public records and social media posts. He lived in the lush Botanical Gardens neighborhood next door to the studios of some of the artists he represented in spite of the fact that he hated the heat, he said.

Triana, who is now being held in Rio, was a recent arrival in Brazil, authorities said. The amateur author, who wrote a memoir which translates as “Gray Reflections on Love,” worked as a Spanish teacher and lived at the home of a family friend in Sao Paulo.

“I was shocked and hurt with all this,” the friend told Brazil’s O Globo newspaper last week. “I didn’t expect that he was capable of this kind of thing. I gave him a place to live, I helped him out. I never imagined he had that kind of personality because his mother was a doctor, someone of excellent reputation.”

According to Triana’s lawyer Gregorio Andrade, “Alejandro has brought more information that we can’t publicly reveal yet. All he wants is for the whole truth to come out.

“The story of what really happen is much more shocking,” Andrade told The Post. “I can’t speak because I will get in the way of the investigation but what I can tell you is that the investigations are now quite advanced.”

Sikkema, who had been set to return to New York City on Jan. 16 — one day after he was killed — owned three properties in Rio de Janeiro and two in Cuba. A source told The Post that one Havana penthouse was purchased in the name of Sikkema and Garcia’s son son because the American gallerist couldn’t own property on the communist island.

Muniz, one of the prominent artists on Sikkema’s roster, declined comment to The Post this week, with his assistant saying he was “deeply affected by the tragedy” of the death of his art dealer, whom he has known for more than 30 years.

“I have spent more than 30 years of my life trying to pointlessly emulate his juggling of fearlessness, kindness and sophistication,” Muniz said in an Instagram post. “Brent coated his flaws with humor with the same grace he hid his immense talent behind humblenesss — someone whose ultimate goal was a type of humanity that could survive any imaginable context. I am shattered, shocked and broken by his unjustifiable tragic demise.”

Sikkema shared that sense of humanity with his son. In an Instagram post from Sept. 12, 2021, he wrote that he and his son wanted 9/11 to be considered “a day of kindness.”

“We will never understand such evil that we encountered that day but we can honor those souls that were lost just by being kinder and more empathetic people,” he wrote. “I know holding onto that every day is difficult—but it’s easier than waking up everyday with a hole in your heart full of broken dreams and aspirations for a husband or wife or child you have brought into the world and lost.”

Sikkema’s Instagram page features photos of the couple’s son at different ages — a sandy-haired boy in a white martial arts robe at a tae kwon do class, at a museum, and standing outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana where he was a student at the International School of Havana.

In 2019, Sikkema posted a black-and-white photo on Instagram that showed him as a baby posing with his mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great grandmother.

“Many days I carry the photo with me, and other days I have to put it face down on a shelf,” Sikkema said in the post. “Now I have a husband and a son and we are making new family photos.”