ENID FOSTER

Artist, Sculptor, Poet, Playwright, Creative Force, Ringleader, Cultural Icon

Written by Allan and Carol Hayes

The definitive biography and gallery presentation of Sausalito artist Enid Foster (1895–1978), whose work is too important to be forgotten.

In Sausalito during the 1950s, Enid Foster stood at the center of a magic world of poetry, performance, and visual wonder that owed as much to her powerful personality as it did to her brilliant art. In another time, that magic might have brought her fame, but in the 1950s, that art was too far beyond the mainstream. The curators, critics, and gallery owners who had recognized her as an internationally important sculptor thirty years before now only saw Sausalito’s town character: a white-haired 60-year-old in frayed blue jeans, beat-up tennis shoes, and a railroad man’s work shirt walking an old dog through town on her way to the bookstore—an amusing eccentric who made irrelevant art. They missed the magic, but those who understood it never forgot it. This book exists because the authors were among the fortunate few who fell under her spell. Enid’s story needs to be told. Her art speaks for itself.

About the Authors 

Allan and Carol Hayes wrote this book because they loved Enid and couldn’t forget her. Carol passed suddenly in 2018, but Al still lives in the home that Enid often visited—the “private residence” which Enid once identified to an annoying tourist as her best-value Sausalito restaurant. Allan spent his working life in advertising, progressing from art director to creative director to name-on-the-door principal. He retired as CEO of The Hayes Company in 2013 and now concentrates on Southwestern art. In 1996, Allan wrote Southwestern Pottery: Anasazi to Zuni, generally recognized as the basic introduction to the art and now in a revised and expanded Second Edition with Carol Hayes as co-author. Collections of Southwestern Pottery followed in 1998. In 2006, they wrote The Desert Southwest: Four Thousand Years of Life and Art, a cultural history selected as a Southwestern Book of the Year, and followed that with Pottery of the Southwest in 2012.