Kings, Toys and Rube Goldberg - People’s Liberty announces 2016 Globe Grant winners
Fischer, whose gallery takeover begins June 24, 2016 from 6-9 p.m., knows how the toy business works from the nine years she spent employed in it in Los Angeles. During that time, she visited manufacturers in China and found a sad truth hiding behind much of their work.
“When you’re creating something, you have a great idea,” she says, “but when you are openly selling it, you have to cost-reduce the whole thing. So we were making things we knew were going to break in three months. We were just creating landfill and I found it really upsetting.
“There are toys made with amazing materials, but they are unaffordable to so many people,” she continues.
In L.A., she thought about creating a Play Library — not specifically just for high-quality toys, but a place where they would also be available along with everything else. She even collected donations. Then she moved here (she’s a native New Yorker) and brought along her inventory. So she applied for a Globe Grant.
Her plan is to create a hip, colorful place stocked with toys and physical games (rather than video) that adults can play, too. “I definitely intend to have evenings for adults to come in and have game nights,” Fischer says.
“I want all children — all the people — to be able to play with that stuff,” she says. “Where I grew up, we used the public library all the time. I thought if I could do that with toys and playing, that’d be the most fun place ever.”