TEEN HEIRESS TURNS $1K TO $1M

By Ronnie Benson

“She just has an eye.”

That’s what Grammy-winning producer Gabriel Castro says of his now 13-year-old daughter, Claudia, who spotted talent in mixed-media artist Roderick Masters before most art world insiders had even heard of him.

And now she’s turned that “eye” into an eye-popping windfall.

Claudia was just 12 when she and her father visited Masters’ Ridgewood studio last spring.

“We were studying contemporary art in school and there was an assignment to visit an ‘unknown’ artist’s studio,” explains the precocious prep-school student, whose teacher at Manchester Academy calls Claudia a “budding artist herself.”

Claudia says she’d seen some of Masters’ work at a Brooklyn art fair the Christmas before, and after the studio visit asked her parents if they could buy an intricate bronze piece depicting two men playing chess in a park, surrounded by onlookers.

“We told her if she wanted it, she’d have to use the money she’d saved from gifts,” said Castro’s mother, Michelle Whitehouse.

She did, and a few months later a curator for the New Museum noticed the piece while at the family’s Gramercy town house for a dinner party.

“It stopped me cold,” said Jelissa Homan. “I made Claudia tell me everything about the artist.”

Within days, Homan arranged for Masters to be included in an exhibition at the New Museum, and acquired two sculptures for the museum’s permanent collection and one for herself.

“Claudia has a genuine gift for spotting artistic talent,” said Homan. “If I could hire her, I would.”

Asked why she decided now was the time to sell Chess, Claudia told the Post that when the offer came in—from a private collector the family declined to name—she knew it would be stupid to turn it down.

“It’s really good for the artist to have a sale like that,” she said.

As for what she plans to do with her more than one million dollars in profit, Claudia didn’t hesitate to answer: “Buy more art.”