When it was announced in January of this year that Philippe Vergne, of New York’s Dia Art Foundation, would be taking over for Jeffrey Deitch as director at the embattled Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the city was abuzz. Shortly after Vergne’s arrival, lawyer Joshua Roth and his wife, Sonya, hosted a small dinner party to welcome the new director and his wife, independent curator Sylvia Chivaratanond. Guests including Alex Israel and Sam Durant dined in view of their own artworks in the Roths’ Hancock Park home, where the couple are building a collection of pieces by artists of their own generation.

Roth knew he wanted to contribute in some way to the launch of a new era at the institution. He had a history there, having served on MOCA’s drawings committee and as co-chair of the Fresh benefit auction held in March 2012, during Deitch’s tenure. “Jeffrey is a friend and a mentor and someone I admire,” Roth says, choosing his words carefully. “But Philippe has come at a critical moment, when MOCA has more money than it has ever had, and I want to be involved with the museum’s reemergence.”

He and Vergne hit it off that night in March, and by the beginning of April they had a plan in place for the Director’s Council, a new patron group that Roth will chair. “We want to get together a critical mass of future philanthropists, people who are not yet ready to join a board,” he explains.

Not that the commitments will be much lighter: “The goal is to assemble a sizable six-figure number from the members. We’ll also make six to eight studio visits a year, asking all of those artists to submit pieces to be purchased for the permanent collection,” he says. “At the same time, we want to expose the council members to policy issues such as budgeting, attendance numbers, and community outreach, to show people how to create a sustainable museum.” Unspoken is the aim to cultivate and widen the pool of patrons who will step into leadership roles not just at MOCA, but at all of the city’s museums.

Such unabashed ambition initially seems out of sync with Roth’s youth (he is 36) and genial manner. But his engagement with and passion for art permeate all aspects of his life, from the friends he keeps and his travel schedule to his circa-1919 Mediterranean revival home, which he and his wife chose in part for the ample wall space. The rooms are packed with works by mostly young Los Angeles artists, including Mark Flood, Jason Rhoades, and Kaari Upson, as well as lesser-known artist’s artists like Nathan Hylden and Larry Johnson.

Art likewise played a decisive factor in setting his career path. When he entered law school, Roth thought he might like to be a litigator (Sonya is a deputy attorney general for the State of California), but he soon realized he could integrate his longtime love of art with the legal profession. Today he leads on all art-related accounts at Glaser Weil, drawing up contracts between artists and their galleries, negotiating licensing deals, vetting the language in gallery sales contracts, and helping collectors secure loans against their art. Clients include Regen Projects, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Sprüth Magers, Mark Grotjahn, Jordan Wolfson, and several major banks and boutique art-loan specialists.

“It has always been my dream to be around art all of the time,” he says. “I feel lucky because in some small way I am able to assist artists with their process. And they get the benefit of having a lawyer who really knows all corners of the art world.”

Roth’s love for art was kindled in childhood. His father, Steven Roth, cofounded the Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency and was on the board of International Creative Management before shifting his focus to the oil industry. He began collecting art in the 1980s and has served on the boards of both LACMA and MOCA. “My dad got his start buying Lichtenstein prints and Hockney drawings,” the younger Roth recalls. “By the time I was a teenager, we would spend family time going to galleries and museum openings. We would have conversations around the dinner table about this Baldessari versus that one.”

Growing up with two busy doctors as parents, Sonya had less exposure to art. “After moving to New York, I was more interested in art. It’s so prevalent there with the number of museums and galleries,” she says. “L.A.’s scene is wonderful, so creative and artist-driven, but it is harder to be involved in the arts in Los Angeles. You do have to seek it out; the distances are so far you have to be really committed to see everything.” Sonya and Josh met after her return to the West Coast during their first year at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles, and soon they embarked on their partnership as collectors. Josh had just made his first purchase: a baseball-themed watercolor by Raymond Pettibon, whose rebellious spirit and deep ties to Southern California appealed to the nascent collector. The couple’s law-school years were equally important for the education they got off-campus. “We had classes three to four days a week and we would do reading at night,” recalls Josh. But almost every day we would get up and go for a hike and then go to galleries.”

“We were lucky,” says Sonya. “We were kids and they weren’t going to make a lot of money off us, yet we had a lot of people who were patient and made time for us.” They rattle off names of some of today’s most important L.A. dealers: Shaun Regen, Tim Blum and Jeff Poe, Richard Telles, and David Kordansky, back when he was in a small space off Chung King Road in Chinatown.

The couple connected with artists close to their own age. They both vividly recall a studio visit with Sterling Ruby at the time of his 2006 “Interior Designer” show at Marc Foxx, from which they bought a collage. “The studio visit blew my mind,” says Sonya, “because he was the first artist I had seen who just completely knew what he was doing. Everything fit together; he had a singular purpose and idea. It was completely off the wall—either you loved it or you hated it—but that was what he was doing.” The visit led to early purchases of another collage and a sculpture.

They had a similar response to Paul McCarthy and the late Mike Kelley, who, although somewhat older, is a touchstone for many of the artists in their collection. “From a historical perspective, Kelley has always been one of our favorite artists because of what he did in terms of creating an all-encompassing practice,” Josh says. “Although Sterling’s work is very different in that it is related to Postminimalism, we think of him as the next generation of Mike Kelley in terms of having this multidisciplinary practice.”

Rhoades provided another sort of enveloping art environment, with the late artist’s now legendary Black Pussy Soirée Cabarets. Still in law school, the couple were invited by a new friend at the time, Israel, who was working as Rhoades’s studio assistant. “Most people experience art as an object. But this was like being invited into the inner workings of someone’s mind,” recalls Josh. “It was fun and irreverent, and obviously there were sexual undertones and rock culture allusions. Ten years later, I am realizing how lucky we were. Things like that don’t just happen all the time.”

Sonya marked the end of law school with a gift for Josh of two Nathan Hylden collages that are displayed in their bedroom. And other family events tie in to the art world as well. “I want to pass on my love of art,” says Josh. “So the first time our daughter Anabel was allowed out of the house, at one month old, we went to a Baldessari opening at the Margo Leavin Gallery. Since then she has been to every gallery. When she was a year old, she was just fascinated by the Bruce Nauman piece For Beginners at LACMA, and she would imitate the hand movements.”

Despite the pressures of two legal careers and taking care of Anabel, now four, and her one-year-old sister, Colette, the couple make weekly rounds to galleries to keep up with the growing list of artists they collect and to discover new names. “Some people are only on the hunt for the next big thing, and I don’t really get into that,” says Josh. “I want to collect an artist like Sam Durant in depth, buying as many things as I can that are great representations of his work, because I think he is a truly important artist.” A light box by Durant emblazoned with the words “Tell it like it is!” hangs in the study above a Jean Prouvé daybed from the Lycée Fabert.

The Roths’ art selection is ecumenical, spanning a range from gestural abstraction to stark representation and from the jokey to the meditative, and when discussing specific works, they take each artist on his or her own terms. They are energized by the process of discovery, particularly when they have the opportunity to meet and talk with an artist about the genesis of a work. At the time of neo-Earth artist Sam Falls’s show last year at LAXART, they made an initial studio visit, and then another in the company of LACMA contemporary art curator Franklin Sirmans. “We saw the complete range of his work,” Sonya says, “and ended up really wanting one of his rope paintings. He lays a rope on the canvas with pigments and lets the rain make it happen; when the rope comes off you have the essence of the rope. They are very process-driven, yet beautiful.” They walked away with one of his wind-chime photographs instead, but as with most of the artists in their collection, they plan to collect Falls’s work in depth and are willing to wait for prime examples to become available.

Another recent discovery for them is Kaari Upson, whose painted, molded-silicone “mattress” currently appears alongside large canvases by Flood, Israel, and Lucien Smith in the sun-drenched study. The mix of distinct styles hung cheek by jowl seems to heighten each piece. Visible through the elegantly arched doorway to the living room are a large canvas of stylized flowers by Jonas Wood, a Johnson photograph above the fireplace, and the early Ruby sculpture in metallic glazed ceramic on a table placed in front of his Day-Glo orange collage. A mural-size McCarthy photograph of a soiled teddy bear is around the corner, equal parts cute and unsettling.

Stacked on the floor under windows and on every tabletop are art books and monographs on the likes of Christopher Wool and Julian Schnabel, as much of an addiction as the art itself, Josh admits. The furnishings, clearly meant to play a supporting role behind the artwork, give the home a designed but relaxed and livable feel. Despite their understated presence, the eclectic pieces have been carefully selected by the Roths. In the living room and study are two Pierre Jeanneret chairs from Chandigarh, a leather sofa by Børge Mogensen, Jean Royère wall sconces, and an Arne Jacobsen lamp, as well as African tables and a distressed-leather English armchair dating from the 17th century.

The dining room, anchored by an 18th-century French farmhouse table and equally rustic English chairs of the same vintage, is dominated by a mural-size Joe Bradley painting from 2012. The walls also feature the Pettibon watercolor and a “pie painting” by Smith, with pie tins and splashes of white plaster clinging to the surface like a slapstick joke. In the foyer, ceramic vessels by Shio Kusaka (sometimes the subject of paintings by Wood, her husband) sit on a worn yet stately side table from Mexico below a rubbing by Cyprien Gaillard of a manhole cover that says “City of L.A. Made in India.”

Upstairs, the master bedroom contains more intimate artworks, such as the Hylden collages, that mingle with Swedish Rococo and Gustavian furniture. Another work by Gaillard, a painting of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot superimposed on a landscape, hangs above the bed. The guest bedroom has become a storage area for works awaiting installation, like a neon sculpture by filmmaker Kenneth Anger that spells out “Hollywood Babylon” over a pair of pink lips. “It’s the only object he’s ever made,” says Josh. “And it is going to be a major production to get it installed over the fireplace.”

More shifting will take place this summer when the Bradley painting departs the dining room for six months on a loan to the artist’s retrospective at Le Consortium in Dijon, France. Roth sees such loans as an obligation for collectors. Extending that notion of duty, he has promised gifts from his own collection to LACMA. Under the umbrella of a family foundation, he will donate a Wool painting from his series shown at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and two Andreas Gursky water photographs that he hopes will become part of a suite in a sort of meditation room planned for Peter Zumthor’s redesign.

Like his commitment to collecting artists in depth and his sense of responsibility to local institutions, Roth’s generosity reflects the traditional values of the collector-as-patron that he absorbed early in life from his father and is looking forward to passing on to future generations. But he is afraid these values are being eroded. Over the course of two hours discussing art and artists, the laid-back lawyer became agitated only when the conversation turned to flipping artworks, as some buyers do with hot, of-the-moment names like Jacob Kassay and Lucien Smith. “At the end of the day, some of these young artists’ careers will be significantly and negatively impacted by these market plays,” laments Roth. “Kassay has one body of work that has been sought-after in the market. But go to Xavier Hufkens’s website and see what he did there a couple years ago, and look what he has shown at Lisa Spellman’s 303 Gallery in New York. Look at the work and forget what the silver paintings went for at auction. The same with Lucien—he’s a 25-year-old artist who has a lot of interesting ideas. We haven’t seen that many shows, and he is owed the benefit of the doubt. He is showing up in his studio and doing his job every day. I am eager to see where he goes in the next 10 years. I will ignore the auction records and make my decision based on his practice.”

Josh’s decisions won’t be driven by the amount of wall space available, though. Jokes Sonya, “That’s what they say defines a collector, right? Someone who just keeps buying art when there is no more space on the walls.”