mixed greens | magazine | collectors | James Wagner and Barry Hoggard

How do you collect?

Barry: A lot of the work we buy we decide on within a day of seeing it. It's a gut reaction.

James: I don't think we agonize about anything.

How does that work when you're collecting as a couple?

James: Our tastes are pretty similar, but I'm the more assertive one.

Barry: I'm the more logical one. I'm more focused. I tell him where I think we should narrow down our choices.

Tell us your favorite collecting story.

Barry: Our best experience was meeting a very young artist, Joe Ovelman. We're pretty sure we're the first people to have bought one of his works. That was five years ago. It's been our closest experience with an artist. We've seen almost everything he's done, including works in progress.

What was your worst collecting experience?

James: I used to have an 18th-century house in Rhode Island. I had restored it, and everything in it was theoretically what would have been in it in 1800. I wasn't a collector then, even of antiques; I was just furnishing a house. Then when I moved to New York in the 1980s, I sold almost everything, including a 19th-century American primitive portrait. I had bought it for 50 cents at a "junk" auction in a garage and I sold it for $1,200. Now it would be worth a lot more. Why did I get rid of it? It would look great in the midst of this collection. A proud young man with a great yellow vest! Ever since then it's been hard for me to get rid of things. Barry and I have never sold a work.