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Opening
Night at SOFA New York
Crafts in The International Art Market
by Loretta Fontaine, reprinted with permission from The Crafts Report
By early evening, the translucent structural entrance erected in front of the Seventh Regiment Armory on May 29 was glowing softly against the darkening sky. A well-dressed group paid $500 each to be the first admitted, giving them two hours to snap up pieces from the 52 international galleries inside before the rest of the crowd entered.
Welcome to SOFA New York. At SOFA, which stands for Sculpture, Objects, and Functional Art, the Ferrin Gallery of Lennox, Mass., premiered and sold out all 12 of Sergei Isupov’s new ceramic statuette series, offered at $8,000 to $10,000 each.The Gallery Na Jansken Vrsku of Prague sold Stepan Pala’s glass sculpture for $35,500. Moderne Gallery of Philadelphia sold a rocking chair of stack-laminated walnut and suede by Wendell Castle for $17,000 on the secondary market.
The artists
at SOFA are renowned in their fields of glass, ceramics, metal, fiber
and wood. Most no longer sell their own work but rely on gallery representation
— which doesn’t mean they don’t attend SOFA.At this
show, the artists are invited guests who hope to discuss their work with
collectors who travel across the country to see it. The galleries have
the booths and take care of the sales.
The
event and the art are exceptional
As befitting a major art event, no expense is spared in presenting an
exceptional show. Inside the entrance, designed especially for SOFA by
architect David Ling, was a stack of thick, glossy, show catalogs. Each
gallery displayed their artist’s work in stunning, hard-wall booths,
and breezy fabric banners floated over the carpeted aisles.
The armory
has no air conditioning of its own, but two tractor-trailer trucks, humming
with cooling equipment, sat on a side street. Black tubes snaked from
the trucks into the armory, providing the perfect temperature for both
art and patrons.
The crowd swelled to 1,000 at 7 p.m. when the $125-ticket holders entered
the event benefiting the American Craft Museum. Collectors, artists, museum
curators and gallery owners filled the aisles.
Forty New
York City restaurants were recruited to provide food in the theme, “The
Art of the Sandwich.” A waiter from Le Cirque enticed passersby
with sandwiches of smoked salmon, cream cheese and chives. Sylvia Weinstock
Cakes displayed petit fours on silver trays draped with mountain laurel
branches.The
women punctuated their chic, mostly black, outfits with kinetic necklaces
or colorful brooches. Everyone clutched glasses of wine and champagne
as they admired the scene.
SOFA
is where artists and collectors meet
Each booth at SOFA is a microcosm of an art gallery. The work, handmade
and one-of-a-kind, often loses its functional basis to become purely sculptural.Steven
Weinberg, wearing a resin necklace resembling lemon Jell-O, posed with
his wife for publicity photos in the middle of the show floor.
“Magellan
Boat,” cast glass by Steven Weinberg.
SOFA organizers
arranged for luminaries such as Weinberg, Wendell Castle and Dante Marioni
to pose with art jewelry. Weinberg bantered with the photographer and
held a picture of his 7-week-old son to his chest as the next flash popped.
Weinberg, a glass artist, has work in the permanent collections of over
30 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the
Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
He has exhibited
at SOFA since its beginning, and compares the opening night gala to a
wedding — all the same familiar faces in the art world, good friends
and good food. “It’s really about touching base with a lot
of people who support you, who collect your work,” Weinberg says,
“You want people to know what you are doing currently.”Weinberg
described three boat forms displayed at SOFA from his present series entitled
“Boats and Buoys” as, “vague interpretations of the
cross sections of hulls.”
His work sat on white pedestals in the Leo Kaplan Modern booth. The elegant
arcs of cast lead crystal were mesmerizing studies of the optical power
of glass. Smooth concave prisms ground in the crystal magnified the precisely
suspended bubbles, and scattered the texture of the crusty bottom surface
within the forms.
Weinberg
received his MFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1979.
With 25 years in the field, he says his studio in Pawtucket, R.I., is
“a well oiled machine” with one part-time and two full-time
employees.
“[Working today] is very different from when I was just out of college,
did all-nighters right up to the deadline and then drove the work to the
gallery,” says Weinberg. “I can’t do that anymore. I
have a family at home, four boys. I have defined hours that I work and
within that time frame I need to get a body of work out.”
On opening night at SOFA, Leo Kaplan Modern sold all three of Weinberg’s
pieces. Weinberg says gallery representation frees him from worry about
marketing. “Selling is just something I should not be doing —
no artist should be doing,” Weinberg says. “I don’t
want to be dealing with clients and collectors directly other than in
social situations as the opening [at SOFA].”
Jeweler Lisa Gralnick, another SOFA veteran, arrived and immediately delved into rearranging her pieces in the display cases of the Susan Cummins Gallery booth. Sporting a shock of brown hair, an infectious laugh, but never jewelry, she is always an animated presence.Gralnick balances teaching metals at the University of Wisconsin at Madison with her studio work. She has a loyal base of collectors who have followed her as she pursued different series of work, starting in black acrylic jewelry, to wearable reliquary pieces, to intricately fabricated rings in gold.
Brooch
made from sheets of 14k gold, by jeweler Lisa Gralnick.
Her latest
work, showcased at the opening, is a reflection of her love of the freshness
and spontaneity of the paper models she uses as prototypes with her students.
“There is a certain irony in it for me,” Gralnick says of
her new designs. “Paper models are always planned for a piece, the
thing you do before, but not the piece itself. I see myself now as making
gold models for paper pieces.”
Gralnick’s brooches are fabricated from thin sheets of 18k gold.
Folded and elegantly scored in strong radial designs, their surfaces shimmer
with a calm, reflected light.
The evening
at SOFA was bittersweet for Gralnick as Susan Cummins had announced she
is closing her gallery this year. “I’ve been with Susan for
a long time, 14 years, and she has been an extremely important person
in my life and my career,” says Gralnick. “She handles everything
in terms of promoting my work and selling it and giving me the freedom
to focus on making it, and to focus on teaching, which is a part of my
life.”
SOFA events
are where Gralnick meets her collectors. “Very few of my sales that
Susan Cummings does actually come directly out of the gallery (in Mill
Valley, Calif.),” Gralnick explains. “They come from a national
network of people that Susan has nurtured over the years that are interested
in my work.”
Mark Lyman,
a bearded man who calmly surveyed the scene at the SOFA opening, started
as an artist and teacher. In 1993, he founded SOFA with several partners
in Chicago to enlarge the market for contem-porary decorative art. The
group started a second venue in New York City in 1998. Lyman initiated
an educational program to work with his events. “We had a commitment
from the beginning,” Lyman states, “for presenting educational
lectures and exhibitions within our events because it is very important
to get the message out about the work.”At the show, Lyman offered
17 lectures to the public on subjects ranging from carving glass by Japanese
artist Toshio Iezumi to a panel discussion on collector genius.
Emerging artists bring new faces to SOFA
The galleries at SOFA showcase established artists, but are always on the lookout for new talent. Leslie Ferrin, of Ferrin Gallery, saw the work of Laura DeAngelis while traveling in Missouri.DeAngelis arrived at 10 p.m. on her first SOFA night because she waited for her sister who was late at work. Fresh-faced, wearing a long black satin skirt and her hair upswept in two neat buns, she looked the part of the belle of the ball. “It’s a bit shocking,” she says of the event.
“Twin Sisters,” by artist Laura DeAngelis, sold on opening night of SOFA New York.
In the Ferrin Gallery booth DeAngelis was amused to note her name spelled
incorrectly as “DeAngeles” on the tag next to her work.
After graduating in 1995 with a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute
in Missouri, DeAngelis renovated a downtown Kansas City building into
living quarters and a studio. When the studio was finished she taught
adult education classes and immersed herself in producing a series of
ceramic circus sculptures. Working intensely, her friends joked that she
left the studio only to walk her dog.DeAngelis volunteered to work on
the committee planning the National Council on Education for the Ceramic
Arts conference in Kansas City in March 2002. She was encouraged to put
up a solo show in town during that event and all but one of her pieces
sold.
Ferrin called
DeAngelis and asked her to ship the leftover piece to New York. “Twin
Sisters” features two female figures with uplifted palms in pink
frocks on the broad back of a circus lion with a sublime gaze. DeAngelis
fired the piece six times, each time adding another wash of colored engobe,
finishing with a final firing of simple wood ash glaze.“Twin Sisters”
sold on opening night of SOFA to a Manhattan woman with a prominent art
collection.
By late evening,
the crowds started thinning out and heading home, and a tray of crumbs
was all that was left of the petit fours. DeAngelis and her sister walked
up an aisle, soaking in the show while chatting and planning time to look
at the entire show in the next few days.The New York Times noted in a
review of SOFA the next day, “In the end it doesn’t matter
if you call it art or craft; presence is what counts, and it can be found
in nearly every booth.”
Loretta
Fontaine is an Albany, N.Y., jeweler who writes on the arts.