Sugar Daddy: Dear Danielle

Sugar Daddy: Dear Danielle (Denny Gallery, New York, May 19 to June 24, 2023) is a culmination of the artist’s years of research into the life and interwoven stories of the wealthy socialite Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, her husband the sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels, and their relationship which formed around the Spreckels Mansion, now owned by prolific romance novelist Danielle Steel. With each new twist, turn, and revelation, Fader has fallen deeper into the larger-than-life saga, in which carefully constructed public images take on lives of their own. Rather than treat these fascinating lives as specimens to be studied or kept at a distance, Fader has imagined himself in their worlds. These works employ headlong identification and fabulation, blurring the facts from the fictions.

It started with a common enough phrase, “sugar daddy,” which Fader learned Alma had “invented” and bestowed upon her much older husband, the head of the Spreckels Sugar Company. Alma was, herself, formidable to say the least, and she became one of the most important art collectors and patrons of art in early 20th century America, creating her own museum, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. That sugar went a long way, and Fader’s work recaptures the rambunctious history of this social circle, its romantic entanglements, its scandals, and the ways in which it put art at its center. This story comes to resemble the wild plots and passions of Danielle Steel, who has lived in Alma’s mansion for decades. Fader’s cycle of photographs offers a queer recasting of these coincidences and intrigues, asking how passion and influence take on lives of their own. Each photograph is paired with a sound piece: a chapter of the letters to Danielle, read aloud.