Fog fair draws reveling and reverent art lovers

We first came upon Kohei Nawa’s “PixCell-Maral Deer,” a full-size reindeer covered with shimmering glass orbs. The Japanese artist, whose first solo show at the Pace Gallery opens on Thursday, Jan. 18, stood beamingly by it as art lovers at Fog Design and Art crowded around the work, a showstopper. A news release said this wondrous object is a “taxidermied maral deer,” encased by the artist in “different-sized cells ... created through the use of glass beads.” Inside, said the artist in halting English, is a stuffed animal. But on the outside, the glass spheres look wet, mysterious and although you know they’re heavy, ethereal. (Asking price: $500,000.)

This was just inside the entrance to the Fog fair, the gala opening of which was marked Wednesday, Jan. 10, with an intricately planned pyramid of fundraising levels for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Just before glimpsing the figures, we’d stopped for a bit at 21POP, the fair’s traditional homage to the makers, artists and craftspeople, always curated by Stanlee Gatti. This year’s “Home Plate” featured handmade plates, with a line of markers describing the works that were arrayed side by side on a long table, as though the display itself was an additional work of art.

This gathering of the art tribe features the familiarity of old pals, the unfamiliarity of new art, plenty of food and drink (thanks to McCall’s), and hobnobbing. Although it is a fundraiser for SFMOMA, Fine Arts Museum Director Max Hollein (who lives on the same street as SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra) seemed to be having a lot of fun. It’s great to see the institutions supporting each other.

“This fair is all grown up,” said SFMOMA senior curator Gary Garrels. “It’s fantastic.”

We were at this point surrounded by a swirl of art lovers, a tide in which the biggest donors, invited to attend at an early hour, encounter the most modest donors, arriving later.

“This fair has totally come into its own,” continued Garrels. “The quality is really high, the mix of galleries is unique, and the crowd couldn’t be better.” What makes a good crowd? “Longtimers and lots of new people,” he said. “There’s a great synergy, between the people who discovered us 40 years ago and people just coming into it.”

In a city increasingly divided by age and wealth, it’s a rare happening.

P.S. Braving the drizzle outside, pickets from the Sign, Display and Allied Crafts Union Local 510 complained that the display and freight-handling was done by a nonunion shop, and handed out flyers demanding fair wages and fringe benefits for workers. This is a nod to them.

The Innovators Luncheon at Fog on Thursday, Jan. 11, paid homage to Alice Waters, who was honored for her passion for sustainable agriculture, for her insistence on quality ingredients, for the zest with which she shares her message with students in public school, and most of all, for changing the ways Americans eat. “Food activist, writer, humanitarian” is how Susan Swig introduced her.

Interviewed by designer Christina Kim, a friend with whom she’d often collaborated — at one point, the conversation turned to tablecloths in Switzerland — Waters was, as she always is, reverent about the mission. This was her first award pertaining to art and design, “and it’s so important that art lift up those ideas that we have. It needs to be present in every event,” she said.

Luxurious greens, as though planted, had been placed down the center of every table, and alongside each place setting was a small yellow box from Fendi, which sponsored the lunch (prepared by A16) and opening gala. “The way that things look is incredibly valuable,” said the honoree. “We at the Edible Schoolyard use the phrase, ‘Beauty is the language of care.’ ”

At our table, Mark Buell said he’d recently helped arrange the sale of Bolinas’ Star Route Farms — the oldest continually certified organic row crop farm in California — to the University of San Francisco, his alma mater. The university will create a full curriculum around sustained agriculture. All farm staff were kept on, raises were given, and new housing for them is on the way. Produce grown there will go to Chez Panisse, with excess to food company Bon Appetit.

Waters’ mission is part of a tree with many branches.

“Let’s bring a sense of quality to the table,” she said. “I hate to use the word ‘seduce,’ but that’s what we’re doing, to try to bring them over.”

“If I leave you alone, you will just eat quinoa.” Man to woman, overheard at Berkeley Bowl West by Tom Adams