Sanford Smith and French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand at Modernism in 1997
Salon Art + Design 2021
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN Sanford Smith has been at the forefront of American art fairs for over 40 years. We look back at how his influential journey led to the creation of Salon Art + Design Having recently celebrated his 82nd birthday, fair impresario Sanford Smith has been in the business of creating niche fairs for 43 years. Although the term “influencer” didn’t exist in 1979 when Smith started his first fair, in the ensuing decades, he has certainly become one. His first fair, The Fall Antiques Show held at the Park Avenue Armory, opened Americana collecting to the wider public. Cigar store Indians, weathervanes, samplers, textiles, American furniture and folk art were shown together in a wholly new way, becoming a strong and popular collecting category. The fair moved to the pier at 12th Avenue and 52nd Street in its second year, the first event ever to make use of the pier. People scoffed at the idea that anyone would travel that far west for an antiques show, but Smith proved them wrong – the fair ran for over 20 years, and dozens of fairs later followed suit. The Fall Show, as it came to be known, was followed in quick succession by Modernism, Works
on Paper, The Outsider Art Fair, Art of the 20th Century, The Great American Quilt Festival, and the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair – all of which took place in New York. At the high point, Smith ran 11 fairs a year, including events in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. The fairs were born out of a funeral home on the Lower East Side. Smith had inherited his family’s business, but he never liked it. His greatest pleasure at that time was working the booth he and his wife, Patricia, inhabited at the 26th Street Flea Market. On Saturdays, they would go on the hunt; on Sunday, they sold their wares. As a participant in his first antiques fair, Smith thought he could do it better – and so the Fall Show was born. His second fair, Modernism: A Century of Style and Design, founded in 1983, is the true precursor to Salon Art + Design. Prior to Modernism, the word “design” had not been part of the fair vocabulary. It is, of course, ubiquitous today. At that time, though, fairs were known as antiques shows, a parlance
