Fay Gold

(1932)
1702

Through her eponymous gallery, opened in 1980, Gold brought blue-chip contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jean-Michel Basquiat to Atlanta and guided regional artists such as Radcliffe Bailey, Zoe Hersey, and Rana Rochat to national prominence. The art doyenne suffered a blow last year with the loss of husband Donald. But this irrepressibly hip grandma—who has counted bad-boy artist Robert Mapplethorpe among her buds—carries on. Hard at work on her autobiography, Basquiat’s Cat, Gold just wrapped a buying trip to NYC’s Armory Show. She’ll also be leading an art tour of Berlin this fall. Gold may be out of the gallery racket she imprinted with her épater la bourgeoisie moxie, but she’ll never be out of art.

Cause “She is extremely amiable and charming,” says former High Museum photo curator Julian Cox. “But she never loses sight of the prize.” Last fall the tenacious Gold helped shepherd another art grande dame, moving Louise Nevelson’s sculptural installation Dawn Forest from the Georgia-Pacific building lobby to its new home at the Naples Museum of Art in Florida; she organized a spring show of Nevelson’s work at Emory.

Photograph by Eric Burn Studio

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