Glen Joffe founded Primitive in Chicago in 1989, after a morning jog brought him face to face with an African art dealer selling carvings in the open air.
The dealer was selling to a merchant on the spot. Joffe invited the dealer home, and the carvings drew neighbors and passersby off the street to look at them. That reaction became a business: Primitive Art Works, a consignment gallery for African art, opened in 1989, owned by Joffe and his wife, Claudia Ashleigh-Morgan.
It did not stay African for long. Joffe began travelling, to India, Indonesia and China above all, and later Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, shipping home ethnographic art, artifacts and antiques by the hundreds and then the thousands. The collection grew to take in more than 100 cultures, and the conversation in the gallery moved from what people collect to how they live with it.
Living with what you collect
That idea shaped the showrooms on Jefferson Street: four floors built and fitted out by hand, where Chinese elm cabinets, Tibetan chests, Dogon and Baule sculpture, Kuba cloth and Japanese prints are set out the way they would be lived with at home rather than in vitrines. Furniture, artifacts, textiles, jewelry, fashion and fine art are still chosen by Joffe and his staff on the road, and each piece arrives with the story of where it came from.
“To be primitive,” he says, “is to be authentic.” His other line hangs over the whole enterprise: “Cultural objects tell stories; and in each story a simple message is found—all cultures are the same, we just express ourselves differently.”