JWM Magazine - Winter 2015

my passion
Rodman Primack
A love of collecting that began early
feeds a life of curation.

“When I Was 12 I started collect Ing Mexican folk art related to the day of the dead,” recalls rodman Primack, the executive director of design Miami, the twice-yearly design fair that runs concurrent to art Basel, and owner of rP Miller, an interior design firm based in new York city. “at a certain point I realized that I could have not just one, but a lot of them, and arrange them on shelves.” that was the moment he became a collector and arranger of a curated selection of objects.

Whether nature or nurture, it was really just a matter of time before the young Primack embraced the collecting mentality. he grew up in sun Valley, Idaho, a place he describes as “a tiny town filled with people collecting things — they had serious art and furniture to look at, and the idea of having that was attractive to me.” his grandparents were “into gardens, architecture and Japan,” he says. “they commissioned a case study architect to design a house for them, and built incredible Japanese houses every ten years.” his grandfather collected jazz recordings that he’d source from all over the world, and Primack says he spent many of his formative years at the library in nearby Ketchum, Idaho, where he would check out architecture, design and art books on a weekly basis.

day of the dead art gave way to handmade papers,
an obsession that began at age 14 when the young
Primack visited Japan (“I still have paper from that
trip”), clothing (“the whole armani fetish”), and
textiles (“everything from antique Indonesian batiks
to Uzbek silks to greek needlework— I have a hard
time resisting”). after graduating from college, he
also graduated into art and furniture. the first major
purchase he made with his then boyfriend, now
husband, rudy Weissenberg, whom he met shortly
after graduating from tufts University with a degree
in art history and International relations, was a
nan golden photograph. “It felt like a big deal,” he
recalls of the purchase. “I didn’t realize until later that
galleries would give you terms. I wish we’d known
that earlier.”
luckily, that didn’t deter this collector. today he
and Weissenberg own homes in new York city,
Miami and guatemala, filled with the aforemen-
tioned types of items as well as many more accumu-
lated during his tenure at such esteemed institutions
as Phillips auction house, gagosian gallery and
christie’s. his last big score? a pair of charlotte
Perriand farm chairs, currently ensconced in his
guatemala home. his current wish list includes an
ettore sottsass cabinet from the 1980s and a Jonas
Wood painting — two seemingly disparate things.