Actually Good Word Art—and More Genre-Defying Decor at This Year’s FOG Design + Art Fair
The San Francisco Bay Area’s art and design community is tight-knit. The artists, designers, and architects living here all seem to know each other’s names. But every year in late January, the community opens its doors to an international audience for an art week that includes FOG Design + Art, an event that’s become one of the best on the West Coast for getting a pulse on contemporary art and design.
Held at Fort Mason Center overlooking the bay, FOG is beloved by locals, but more outsiders are starting to take notice. Its 11th edition features a hearty mix of hometown heroes and international newcomers, with 59 exhibitors from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and farther-flung locales like Paris, Hong Kong, and South Africa.
Split across two piers with plenty of bars and lounges to break up the spaces (and fuel your wanderings), FOG is digestible in one visit, but will leave you feeling satiated. Photographer Cayce Clifford and I dove headfirst into the preview party and found surprising art and design objects across media and scale that highlighted a range of perspectives. Here’s what stood out at this year’s fair.
If you don’t take a selfie at the fair, did you even go?
Kim Mupangilaï and Maris Van Vlack at Superhouse
Last year, FOG extended its footprint with FOG FOCUS, a showcase of emerging designers and galleries located on a neighboring pier. This year, it was once again buzzing with energy (which was at least partly fueled by cocktails), with a standout showing from New York’s Superhouse.
The gallery presented an installation of furniture by Belgian-Congolese maker Kim Mupangilaï, who crafted a three-piece seating set inspired by her cross-cultural roots. "It’s an introduction to the links between Art Nouveau and the Congo," Mupangilaï told us. "It’s becoming more and more obvious that Art Nouveau was very inspired by non-Western countries."
A fiber work by Maris Van Vlack completed the space, suggesting the colors and forms of a stained-glass window. Cayce and I loved how it felt as if it was unraveling and that some of it was see-through—it reminded me that sometimes, the most beautiful moments happen when things feel like they’re coming apart.
Yvonne Mouser at Municipal Bonds
One of four galleries representing San Francisco at FOG FOCUS, Municipal Bonds offered a solo showing of Oakland artist and designer Yvonne Mouser. Mouser’s pieces toe the line between function and pure artistic exploration, which came across in a collection of wall-hangings and traditional-feeling furniture pieces including side tables and a chaise lounge. I appreciated how Mouser’s work felt alternately delicate and sturdy, with solid forms punctuated by moments of fragility, as in her Janus Spiritus cabinet, whose doors are made of tiny sumi ink–painted oak flaps that can open and close. "I love the duality of something being two different things at the same time," Mouser told me. "It just depends on the lens you’re looking through."
Mouser’s furniture and wall-hangings play with opposites: heavy and light, opaque and transparent, soft and hard.
Sam Shoemaker at OCHI
OCHI, which has outposts in Los Angeles and Ketchum, Idaho, caught my eye last year at FOG FOCUS with a set of surrealist paintings by Los Angeleno Ben Sanders. This year, two rows of fungi-inspired sculptures by artist Sam Shoemaker drew me in.
I loved the organic outgrowths on the ceramic pieces, which reminded me of sea anemones I found tide pooling on the California coast as a child.
Schoemaker is a mycologist, so it’s no surprise his sculptures were inspired by actual mushrooms he propagates in his studio’s laboratory.
Blunk Space at FOG MRKT
The main pavilion was dotted with tables for FOG MRKT, a new edition to the fair where galleries and retailers were selling artisan-made products and crafts. A standout was Blunk Space, the Bay Area gallery inspired by the legacy of local craft legend JB Blunk.
They had pieces from Alana Burns, a Mexico City artist who I’ve followed for years. Seeing her shell-inspired jewelry and tableware in person only made me more of a fangirl.
Burns makes delightfully whimsical objects such as spoons and combs, often starting with shells.
Sarah Myerscough Gallery
Wood was the word at an exhibit from London’s Sarah Myerscough Gallery, with the material taking myriad forms in the cranberry-colored booth. "We love the way our artists explore different organic materials," explained gallerist Caroline Pastore of the showing, which included an international set of designers such as the U.K.’s Nic Webb and Eleanor Lakelin, along with a personal favorite, Julian Watts from Oregon. In a moment when wood is being touted by many as the material that can build a more sustainable future, it was exciting to see the way designers were embracing its innate beauty and often epic qualities.
Wood in its many forms, textures, and colors was the focus here, in a showing fittingly titled "Raw Edges."
Sculptures by Watts sat atop a credenza with rough-hewn doors.
Galerie Maria Wettergren
"I felt contemporary Scandinavian artists weren’t getting their due," Maria Wettergren told me at her FOG booth, explaining how she came to establish her self-named Paris gallery 15 years ago. Wettergren now represents an international set of makers, and her first showing on the West Coast stole the spotlight.
Colorful works oscillated playfully between art and design, like this digitally-composed woven wall hanging by Danish textile artist Grethe Sørensen and an ombre mirrored bench by Boris Berlin and Germans Ermics.
AGO Projects
Entering AGO Projects’s booth at FOG felt like walking into a party. The colors were bold, the furniture was inviting and exuberant, and the designers and gallerists were buzzing. Cayce and I left the Mexico City studio’s exhibit saying, "We love everything in this booth." AGO often works with emerging artists to help develop their work, including Brazilian furniture maker Rafael Triboli, whose monumental mahogany pieces with wax and bronze inlays anchored the space.
For their second showing at FOG, AGO presented a raucous array of furniture, textiles, lamps, and mirrors, primarily by Latin American artists.
A full-length mirror by Guatemala’s Agnes Studio is adorned with ceramic figurines and amulets in crystal in stone.
Ane Lykke at Hostler Burrows
Cayce and I couldn’t get enough of Danish artist Ane Lykke’s see-through light box at the Hostler Burrows booth, even though the New York and Los Angeles gallery had a bevy of other beauties on display. Like Maria Wettergren, the gallery started off showing exclusively Nordic artists but today represents an international set.
We loved how Lykke’s piece functioned as a sort of screen with different views through it playfully contrasting the rigidity of its grid.
Casemore Gallery
One of the best things about FOG is getting to see contemporary Bay Area art on full display. Casemore Gallery showed works by local artists including Lindsey White, Raymond Saunders, and Sonya Rapoport. We loved the cyanotype "Cloud Book" by Sean McFarland and the ceramic word sculptures by Finnish artist Henna Vainio, the one non-local of the set.
The smooshed-ness of Vainio’s pieces belied the depth of the aphorisms they spell out, which include: "The more we witness, the less language suffices" and "The more we see, the less we look."
McFarland’s "Cloud Book" got us thinking about photography and representation; his cyanotype prints are created to look like blue skies but are created without the use of a camera.
Lee ShinJa at Tina Kim Gallery
Although art world behemoths like David Zwerner, Hauser & Wirth, and Marian Goodman offered a dazzling array of global artists, some of the best international showings at FOG this year were from lesser-known curators, like Tina Kim Gallery. Korean artist Lee ShinJa was one of the first artists to bring textiles into the world of fine art in Korea, and her intricate, abstract wall-hangings were mesmerizing. Keep an eye out for a solo showing of Lee’s work at BAMPFA in Berkeley this fall.
The gallery showed a selection of Lee’s textile works from the 1960s through the 1990s.
Landscapes, like this one, were inspired by her childhood in the Korean countryside.
Leaving inspired and excited, we’re already looking forward to next year’s event.
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