It seems there’s barely a topic in American life that can’t wend in short order toward Donald Trump. But the presence of glass exhibitors at The Salon: Art + Design, which opened Thursday night at the Park Avenue Armory? Yes, even that.
Jill Bokor is the executive director of the show, which typically opens on the Thursday after Election Day. (Thursday’s opening benefited the Dia Art Foundation.) Over a recent coffee at the Americano, Bokor recounted what she calls “the misery of two years ago,” when the shock of Trump’s presidential win was still very new and, for many, very raw.
On that opening evening, attendees found their focus diverted from shopping. “They wanted to look, they wanted to see each other and they wanted to sob,” Bokor recalled, though she added a quick inclusivity caveat: “I mean, there were probably people there who’d voted for Trump.”
The following Saturday, typically the event’s biggest day, traffic woes generated by anti-Trump demonstrations caused a dip in show traffic, which caused a dip in sales, and crappy sales led some vendors to drop out. That left Bokor challenged “to make lemonade out of lemons.” Or at least to procure highfalutin vessels for lemonade, because at that
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