All about the women at FOG Art + Design
The FOG Art + Design fair was planned by Stanlee Gatti, and at its opening event on Wednesday, Jan. 11, plenty of men there seemed as elated as their sisters by both the art itself and the art-community camaraderie.
The event is for everyone, a party like a buffet, said Jennifer Beiderbeck of Sotheby’s, “where you like everything on the table.”
Between the giant panels, which were suspended from the top to the floor of the space, working flower artists, all women, created exquisite floral likenesses from paper and glass:
Anandamayi Arnold was presiding over a garden of bulbs and fronds, understatedly elegant versions of Sticky Stalked Daisies, flowers she portrayed in sculpture as they grow in New Zealand, reaching up from beds of rocks.
Alexis Berger uses glass to make flowers for personal ornament, a headpiece, for example, that seemed to make a garden in her curly red hair.
“When something like this happens,” said art dealer and For-Site foundation founder Cheryl Haines, who brought Ai Weiwei’s work to Alcatraz and “Home Land Security” to the Presidio, we have to focus on building a community.
[...] Carole Shorenstein Hays’ Curran, which was one of the sponsors of the event, hosted a bar-and-dessert lounge at which Machine Dazzle, Taylor Mac’s costume designer, sat at a sewing machine and created costumes in keeping with the Curran’s coming opener, “Fun Home.”
Behind him, a kaleidoscopic video projected multicolored images; in front of him, embroidered, embossed and glittering fabrics lay twisted into dazzling knots, and costumes inspired by the colors of the renovated theater were draped on mannequins.
Artist Amanda Weil was showing tall, slender wood panels on which were photographs of birch trees, simple silhouettes of trunks of the trees.
In a corner of the panel closest to the entrance, written in yellow roses was the name “Cathy,” a tribute to steering committee member Cathy Topham, who is gravely ill.
The flowers in the display had been received several days before the event; Gatti described soaking them in water, cutting their stems and putting each bloom in a separate tube filled with water, to make them last.