Shaping an art fair for the way we live
Gallery owner’s will turned a whim into a dramatic sculpture walk
In November 2019, Menlo Park gallery owner Katharina Powers got the ambitious notion to turn her suburban city into a public art destination that would accomplish nothing less than “defining Silicon Valley in a sophisticated and cultural way,” she says.
To do so, she formed a nonprofit called Menlo Park Public Art, and when Menlo College President Steven Weiner read about it in the Almanac local weekly, he was impressed enough to track her down for coffee.
Weiner planned to ask her to bring a single sculpture to his oaklined campus, but he was unaware of Powers’ prior life as an intellectual property attorney, with a client list including Apple and Advanced Micro Devices. He was also unaware of her strong powers of persuasion.
“We met, we talked, and within an hour we had decided to bring 30 sculptures to campus and make it an annual event,” Weiner says.
That event is called Silicon Valley Sculpture 2020, and it is the first of its kind in the 93year history of this tiny liberal arts college for 850 students, whose main prior connection to art history was as the spawning ground for the Kingston Trio folk act in the 1950s.
What will open Friday, Sept. 25, may also make history as the template for putting on an art fair during the pandemic era.
“I was a California pioneer here,” says Powers, 52, who speaks with the accent of her native northern Germany. She is determined by nature, but that is not what motivated her to press on with the event after the lockdown. She already had 12 select Bay Area artists building pieces to introduce for sale to an affluent market, and she could not bear to let those artists down.
“I thought, ‘Are we going to cancel like everybody else did, or are we going to try to get it done?’ ” she says.
Admission to the event that opens Friday evening requires a ticket and has a mandatory timed reservation. This will ensure that no more than 50 people will be allowed at one time through the entrance gates on El Camino Real, oncampus parking included.
By the time they arrive, fairgoers’ names will have been registered for future contract tracing, if need be. Their temperatures will be taken, and they will be required to wear masks. But social distancing should not be a problem, because those 50 attendees will be spread over 20 acres of rolling lawns dotted with the majestic oaks that give the private college its team name.
“What I love about the campus is that the landscape is minimalistic,” Powers says. “There are no flowers or decorative items to distract from the fine art. It is pure and simple.”
The fair, a fundraiser for MPPA, is conceived as an art walk. Placed strategically like Easter eggs and sometimes as colorful, the 31 monumental sculptures are by 18 artists. Half are from the Bay Area, including three from Burning Man: Nicki Adani, Jessica Levine and Oleg Lobykin. The other half come from the East Coast and Western Europe, led by the GermanFrench visual artist Rotraut KleinMoquay. Napa sculptor Gordon Huether contributed a tower of yellow barrels.
The pieces have been arriving sporadically, and before the fair has even opened, it has paid off from Weiner’s point of view. “Princess,” a curvaceous 10foottall piece by Foon Sham of Washington, D.C., has already been purchased by a donor and given to the college as a permanent installation. It evokes a Noguchi floor lamp set in the dirt.
“If I keep this record up and accrue one sculpture a year, I will be OK with that,” Weiner says.
“Princess” will join another permanent sculpture already in place. Four years ago, Weiner commissioned a signature piece by Laura Scott, an aluminum frame that forms an “M” in two pieces, one blue and one gray, after the school colors. It is not part of the sculpture fair and is more about branding than the fine art that curator Powers aspires to.
The theme of the fair is “Past, Present, Progressive,” and Powers intends to live up to it. Her original plan was to populate the campus with performance artists who would play off the sculptures and mingle with the viewers. In one piece called “Cafe Con Leche,” Palo Alto artist Carmina Elias would invite a random viewer to sit down with her for a cup of coffee. Then she would pour the coffee and ask the viewer to add milk as needed to match their skin color.
That had to be canceled due to mask and social distancing complications.
A surreal Salvador Daliinspired opening night benefit dinner at one long table under the oaks also had to be canceled. In its place will be a freeform dance performance by New Ballet of San Jose, sitespecific to the sculptures.
Powers is already planning for Silicon Valley Sculpture 2021, ideally with spontaneous walkup admissions and no ceiling on the number of viewers to create what she calls “meaningful mass” with the artwork.
“No matter what comes, we are going to do it again,” she says of the fair. “Art expands what it is to be human.”