The Wendell Castle dining set at Wexler Gallery 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 point, the show was lacking in impressive glassware, and she sought out that category to fill the vacancies. So in a way, anyone smitten by the midcentury Italian glass at Glass Past or contemporary pieces at Heller Gallery has Trump to thank. Achieving a compelling exhibitor mix is essential to a successful show. While proud that 21 vendors have stayed with the event since its inception, Bokor noted that healthy movement around that core makes for an interesting, ever-evolving event. Once all gallerists are confirmed, she arranges the floor plan to afford each maximum impact, a task she considers one of the most difficult aspects of staging a show of this scale. To illustrate, she ran through the order of a few stations: Enter and turn right to come upon antiquities next to Seventies-and-Eighties French next to contemporary…
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