Meet the Collector: Ronald Harrar On Redefining Rules and Roles in a More Fluid Art World

The art world has always loved labels and for all involved to stay in their lanes: collectors don’t become dealers, and gallerists don’t become curators. Every role is neatly crystallized within its assigned category. But Venezuela-born and New York-based collector Ronald Harrar has refused to play by those rules and, in his collecting and in his patronage, has created for himself a more hybrid role, facilitating sales for galleries, helping friends build collections, introducing artists to the right galleries and otherwise championing careers with the kind of direct engagement at multiple levels that blurs old distinctions entirely while still creating value within them.

“I call it ‘patron 2025,’” he explains when we meet at his loft in Chelsea, where a curated selection of his extensive and high-quality collection hangs, which encompasses more than one hundred pieces spread across his houses. As we reflect, even historical patrons like Lorenzo de’ Medici played roles far beyond commissioning and collecting; they actively shaped the art scenes of their time. Why shouldn’t it be that way? The emergence of an art market centered on galleries, he argues, somehow severed that lineage.

When we met, Harrar had big news to share: he had just finalized the first steps for a major exhibition he’s organizing in Venice during the Biennale, spotlighting the work of Mel Ramos, a long-overlooked figure of West Coast Pop Art. As he explains, he had identified a significant artist whose career had been mismanaged and overlooked: “He is in the books; his work matters. Collectors are sitting around waiting for something to happen. Even gallery owners I’ve spoken with, who may have bought ten paintings 15 years ago, are just waiting to see what happens. So I said, you know what? I’m going to do something.”

Harrar believes galleries can’t do or cover everything, and so value emerges only when other players also take initiative and collaborate. The timing felt right, given the resurgence of interest in artists who are rediscovering Pop Art from different geographies, seen, for instance, in the major traveling survey on Marisol. Mel Ramos was central to that scene, closely associated with Wayne Thiebaud, who taught him at the university and later became a professor in San Francisco, connected to the same lineage as Roy Lichtenstein. Thiebaud’s influence is evident in Ramos’s juicy use of color. In his early works from the 1960s—one of which hangs in Harrar’s bedroom—you can see his sensibility as a colorist… the same visual precision and wit regardless of subject matter. He translated the world of advertising and pop culture into something distinctly painterly, physical and more sensual than the relentless flow of ads around him.

Harrar first spoke with Ramos’s daughter, who now runs the estate. She was skeptical at first, unable to believe his proposal. “I said, ‘I’m serious, and this is what I want to do,’” Harrar recounts. The show will be a complete career survey spanning two floors and including four mediums—lithography, painting, drawing and sculpture—as well as archival material such as letters exchanged with Lichtenstein. The goal, he adds, is to reframe the artist’s narrative and showcase his importance in the proper context through effective curation.

This isn’t Harrar’s first time organizing a show in Venice during the Biennale. In 2024, he produced Daniel Arsham’s ambitious installation at the Chiesa di Santa Caterina in collaboration with Perrotin. “I do believe the new role of the collector is also to fill in the gaps,” he says. “You have to collaborate with the ecosystem. You respect it. You’re an activator and facilitator within it.”

Ronald Harrar has played this hybrid role since the beginning of his collecting journey 21 years ago, which happens to be when he married his wife, Valery Weich Harrar, who has accompanied him closely along the way. From the start, Harrar knew he wanted to build a family collection. “My father never collected, but I wanted to start something that would last.” He had just moved to New York from Venezuela to pursue a master’s degree in hospitality management at N.Y.U. when he first became exposed to art. “In New York, art is everywhere,” he says, recalling how he began tagging along with friends to museums and soon to auction houses. “It wasn’t easy getting access in the beginning, but I was fascinated. I told my wife, “This is it. This is my calling. I’m obsessed.’”

At the time, they had just received their wedding gifts in cash, which they deposited in Stanford Bank, a popular Latin American institution offering high interest rates. Harrar decided to use much of that money to buy his first painting, a Wayne Gonzales from Paula Cooper Gallery. “Forty thousand dollars. That was my first big purchase,” he recounts, with Valery adding, “It felt crazy, it was almost all we had.” He relied on the advice of a family friend, Alain Frenchman, a Sotheby’s representative in Latin America and a close friend of his father. “He told my father, ‘If your son wants to get into art, I’ll guide him. So I followed his advice and bought the Gonzalez.”

Then the bank collapsed, essentially a mini-Madoff situation. “Everyone lost their savings, but we still had the painting,” Harrar says. “Every time I see it, I smile. It wasn’t a great investment financially, but it was the start of everything.”

“We were a newly married couple starting this journey together—it created a whole world we could share,” Valery acknowledges. Still, they have always been careful to keep a boundary between their public art world and private family life, maintaining a balance that allowed their children to grow up loving art rather than resenting it. That’s also why they keep the Chelsea loft, which has become a place to receive guests and show the collection that’s separate from the family home.

Before they married, Valery had moved independently from Venezuela to New York to study and work in fashion, which shaped her aesthetic sensibility. “For us, art is a shared love—it’s something we decide on together as a family,” she notes. While Harrar focuses on artists and markets, Valery adds emotional intelligence through her interest in artists’ biographies. Every piece that enters their homes was part of a shared decision.

When they first began collecting, Harrar also turned to his father for financial support, but soon Venezuelan friends and relatives started asking what he was doing. “They’d heard I was buying art and said, ‘We want in. Sell us something.’ So things grew quickly.” Living in New York gave him an edge, as he could be their eyes in the market.

A turning point came when a gallery noticed he had recommended artists to friends. “I sold a couple of paintings for them, just helping friends, without asking for anything,” he says. The gallery suggested he should start charging, but Harrar immediately understood he would need to be transparent if he did. He disclosed commissions openly to his friends and clients, asking first if they were okay with it. Still, it wasn’t easy. “I faced a lot of rejection. Galleries would ask, ‘Are you a collector or a dealer?’ And I’d tell them the truth—both. I help people build collections, and I collect myself. I’ll always tell you if a painting is for me or for someone else, and share the collector’s name.” Some galleries refused to work with him. “That’s fine,” he shrugs. “There are plenty of others who will.”

The selling side of the art market is often demonized, yet he sees it as essential to keeping the system alive: if you sell a piece, you’re going to buy another. It’s how the wheels keep turning. Many collectors, he notes, don’t even know how to begin purchasing a work, let alone selling one. Helping friends in this way quickly became part of his own collecting approach.

Yet Harrar says he’s actually relieved about the market correction underway. “The system had become corrupted. From top to bottom,” he says. “I would see collectors worth millions—people I thought I was helping build real collections—suddenly wanting to sell everything. That’s not collecting.” He argues that one doesn’t need to make money from paintings, nor should that ever be the goal. “You’re supposed to live with them, enjoy them, put them in your beautiful house in Palm Beach or Miami,” he reflects. “At one point, it stopped being about passion and became a game of flipping.” To Harrar, the correction is painful but necessary. “It’s cleaning the air. The people who truly care will stay, while the ones who were in it for the wrong reasons will move on. That’s how it should be.”

Collecting the art of their time

When deciding what to collect, it didn’t take long for Harrar to realize that their focus would be the art happening in New York at that moment, despite their Venezuelan and Latin American roots. “Everyone expected us to focus on Latin American art, which would have made sense given our roots,” Harrar recalls, acknowledging how that would have probably been a good decision considering how values for Modern Latin American masters have recently increased. Still, they wanted to do the homework first. “We subscribed to some main art publications and read everything we could get our hands on. We devoured it all,” he says, laughing. “We read nonstop. It became an obsession.”

Early on, Harrar sought guidance from experts. He often consulted Ana Maria Celis, a Venezuelan specialist who, at the time, was a junior in Sotheby’s Latin American department and is now head of the Contemporary and Modern department at Christie’s. “She would show me Tamayo, Botero, but it didn’t click. I felt no connection.” He recalls attending an auction for Latin American art, and there was no energy in the room. “I thought, ‘I don’t belong here,’ and I asked when the contemporary sale was, and she said that it was tomorrow, but I needed a ticket. I told her, ‘Get me one. I’ll stand at the back if I have to,’” Harrar recalls. The next evening was a completely different scene—a true spectacle. It was 2006, the height of the contemporary market boom. He laughs, remembering that first night. “It was the boom of the boom: Murakami, Basquiat, Kusama. The room was electric, full of people my age. That’s when I said, ‘This is it. That’s the world I wanted to be part of.’”

He acknowledges that Latin American art, while deeply respected, can sometimes feel rooted in another era. “It reminds us of our parents’ generation,” he says. They have collected Latino artists and built relationships with a few Venezuelan artists, particularly when there was a personal affinity, as with Carlos Cruz-Diez. But, over time, their collection organically expanded far beyond geography or cultural identity. “We’re not opposed to anything. Art is so broad—why would you limit yourself? We collect what moves us. It’s a mix of everything we love.”

Now, with more than a hundred works, he sees recurring sensibilities rather than deliberate themes. “I think what connects everything is good painting,” he says. “We love artists who experiment with paint and color. It’s what draws us in every time.” Valery adds, “It’s hard for us to live with something that isn’t bright or full of energy. We like paintings that make us happy.”

Their walls reflect that sensibility, vivid canvases pulsing with movement, bridging Pop and street influences, from Kenny Scharf’s exuberance to the layered abstraction of Mark Grotjahn. “Even when the work is darker,” Harrar says, “it still has to have that spark.” He gestures to a piece by Alejandro Cárdenas. “He’s not technically Latin American—his mother is, and he speaks Spanish—but it doesn’t matter. It’s a great painting, and that’s what matters.”

After 26 years in the U.S., their collection has become mostly American. “It mirrors our life path: what we’ve seen, lived and loved,” Harrar says. A defining aspect of their approach is meeting the artists in person and forming relationships. For them, collecting means understanding the person behind the work—the vision, the process, the story. “Once you know what’s behind the work, you connect differently. No one else can translate that experience for you.”

He mentions meeting Jeff Koons and how encounters with artists matter to truly understand and appreciate the work along with the person behind it. “The first time I met him, he asked where I was from. I said Venezuela, and he lit up, saying he had been there years ago,” Harrar recalls. “He sat next to me for 20 minutes in the middle of a dinner, talking about how sad he was about what was happening there. He’s that kind of person—warm, curious, engaged.”

Those human exchanges, he says, ultimately shaped their collection more than any market trend. “I’ve met artists I adore and others I could never collect. Sometimes it’s the opposite of what you expect—you idolize someone and realize they’re insufferable, or you meet someone and they surprise you completely.”

Harrar believes collectors should engage directly with artists, a stance that still unsettles some gallerists. “They think collectors should keep a distance, but I disagree. That connection is what makes collecting meaningful. People today want to meet the artist, visit the studio and understand the story. It’s not about skipping the gallery—it’s about building something real.” Valery agrees. “People want connection,” she says, recalling a visit to Takashi Murakami’s studio in Tokyo when she came out with tons of gifts for their kids. He nods. “I still remember how it felt when I started—when a piece spoke to me because I’d met the artist, because there was a conversation, a moment. That’s what it’s all about. You remember the story, and that memory becomes part of the artwork itself.”

Asked about mistakes or any regrets, he laughs. “You learn a lot, mostly from what you miss.” One that still stings is a Smiley Jackie by Andy Warhol. “Once you miss them, they’re gone. I was obsessed, but I couldn’t get it at auction. Not exactly a regret, but close.” Then he remembers another that haunts him more. “There was a Calder coming to Christie’s—a beautiful and elegant black mobile. It was still expensive for us then, but in hindsight, it was a steal. I was traveling, maybe in Paris, and I called Ana Maria. I told her, ‘I love this piece, let’s place an absentee bid at the low estimate.’” Celis warned him that it would not sell that low and encouraged him to get on the phone during the auction, but Harrar was busy with important meetings and told her to leave a bid for the low estimate. “We missed it by a couple of increments.” Later, he ran into the artist’s grandson, Sandy Rower, and told him he felt so stupid for missing it. “He replied, ‘You’re not stupid. We bought it, and we were willing to go all the way.’ That made me feel better,” Harrar laughs. “At least I had good taste.”

As for the dream list, Harrar and Valery don’t hesitate. “Still the Smiley Jackie,” he says. “And a Frank Stella—one of the Concentric Squares. I’d love a Calder mobile too. We saw one at auction in Paris, and I told my wife, ‘Imagine how it would look hanging from the loft.’ She said, ‘Imagine it in the house.’ And I told her, ‘Forget the house—imagine it in the air.’”

Planning for the collection’s future

When asked about his relationship with Venezuela today, the couple admits they remain closely tied to their home country. “My mother still lives there, so I go back. I was just there two weeks ago, before Paris. But right now, things are not good—there’s instability, tension with the U.S. It’s difficult.” Still, Harrar says he would love to contribute, particularly to help restore Venezuela’s status as a cultural hub, as it once was. “Venezuela used to be the cultural capital of Latin America, holding auctions with Picassos in Caracas. We hope that one day things will change.” He pauses. “There are signs of movement, but the situation is unstable. We just want to bring art back to Venezuela in the right way.” The couple had even identified a remarkable colonial house for a potential project, but politics made it impossible for now. Still, they don’t rule out the idea of one day opening a foundation or cultural organization there.

When it comes to selling, there’s a core group of works they’ll never part with, the backbone of the family collection, yet Harrar admits they aren’t overly rigid about legacy. Their four children already love the art but have opinions of their own. When pieces move around the house, they often protest or demand an explanation. Harrar laughs, recalling how just the night before, he was doing homework with his seven-year-old when he mentioned to the housekeeper that they might make some noise while bringing a painting to the loft for a shoot. “My son stopped me and said, ‘Excuse me, what do you mean you’re bringing the baby? You can’t sell that painting. It belongs to the house.’” He had to promise it was only a few days.

That closeness to art, he says, is the best form of education. “We take them to galleries, fairs, openings—it’s natural to them.” During the pandemic, when the family sold one of their houses, they faced a similar moment. They had a neon work by Tracey Emin that was complicated to reinstall, so they decided to sell it. Their eldest, then twelve, protested furiously. “They were furious. They really get attached to the works,” Valery confirms. Sometimes their children even decide which works can or cannot leave the house. “My son once told me, ‘This painting stays. If you want to sell something, sell another one, but this one stays.’”

Two of them, Harrar adds, already show a collector’s instinct. “They collect things—Pokémon, souvenirs,” he says, recalling how just before they left for Paris, their youngest asked for a miniature Eiffel Tower. “I brought him one, and he pulled out six others, saying that now he could officially claim he was building an Eiffel Tower collection.”

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