TCNJ

34 The College of New Jersey Magazine At the head of the operation is David Rago '16, the company's founder and namesake. Rago is neither an artist nor a collector. Instead, his special skill is finding art, building excitement around that art, and providing the forum for buyers and sellers to settle on a fair price. "When someone has something to sell, you want them to think of you," he says. Thus, Rago has his finger on the pulse of what buyers are looking for and where to find it as he routinely deals in a world of tangible things with intangible value. Rago's auction house, the largest in New Jersey, does more than $120 million in annual sales, selling more than 25,000 lots of American fine art, modern furniture, and jewelry every year. Rago himself is well known to viewers of PBS' Antiques Roadshow, where he has appeared as an appraiser for 30 seasons. David Rago and partner Suzanne Perrault RAGO'S PATH to the art world was somewhat untraditional. As a teenager from Hamilton, New Jersey, he worked odd jobs to make money and especially liked buying and selling things. One of his early enterprises was to scour flea markets for pottery and ceramics to resell. His first sale was in 1972, when he accompanied his girlfriend's father to the Golden Nugget Flea Market in Lambertville to sell goods from the trunk of a car. He made $50. He tried a stint at The College of New Jersey, but dropped out. "My interests were elsewhere at the time," he says. Instead, he focused on his fledgling business of selling flea market finds. He hustled other work on the night shift at a supermarket and wrote articles for small art and design magazines in exchange for free advertising for his startup. Early on, much of his business centered on decorative ceramic bowls and vases, which were abundant and prized possessions in the areas around Trenton, where he grew up. "If you were in a middle-class family around here, you knew you'd better not be breaking the piece of porcelain your parents had on the trophy shelf," Rago says. Within his own family, art was something that was always present — his father was a professional draftsman and an amateur painter, and Rago recalls "the smell of oil paints wafting through our house." For Rago himself, it was a piece of low-end pottery his parents bought from the Roseville Pottery Company in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1973 that sparked his interest in art — specifically 20th-century design. "I still can see that moment in my head," he says of the day his parents brought it home to their collection. "It was love at first sight." What resonated with him? It was the realization that the beauty of the piece came from the simplicity of the material. He explains, "When you think of pottery, it's mud." "I'M LEARNING NEW THINGS every time I'm up there."

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