“My earliest memory of art is a picture that my mother painted when she was in high school,” says Candia Fisher Landau, daughter of the great New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau — one of America’s most renowned art patrons and collectors in recent history. . “It was a pineapple,” she tells me. “I remember seeing it for the first time when I was four years old. So simple but so beautiful, I don’t know what happened to it but I’ve always been able to picture it so vividly.
“She bought it but then couldn’t get a car home, so she carried the giant painting on the cross-town bus all on her own.” The experience set the tone for Ms. Landau’s overall approach; she was passionate and determined, letting little get in the way of her connection to the art she loved. In 1991, she opened her first public art collection. The Fisher Landau Center for Art housed 1200 artworks in a repurposed former factory in Long Island City, Queens, before it closed in 2017.