In an age where AI is increasingly prevalent, many of the featured artists focused on storytelling, nature, and humanity. After crawling through these 5 fairs (Frieze, NADA, Independent, 1-54, Esther III) during New York Art Fair Week, I found larger themes of environmentalism, globalism, and new forms of sculpture, as well as a growing textiles sector. At least New York Art Week truly looked towards craft to weave together various artists and their respective perspectives.
As the world shifts and the art world feels an increasing recession, the fairs saw a rise in prices without the same commercial demand, meaning fewer sales and more expensive pieces, as well as various price points intended to entice different categories of buyers. All of the fairs visited featured valuable work for different audiences and, more noticeably, different curatorial directions, both through the work they presented and how the work was displayed. Overall, New York Art Fair Week was full of engaging work and thoughtful curation.
New Art Dealers Alliance (established 2002) was a wild card. NADA featured a majority of paintings and was in the same building as 1-54. Some pieces were very commercial, others more conceptually bound. A particular highlight was Kelly Tapia-Chuning’s unwound serapes, named Sacred Elements / Calling Elemental Spirits. Milk Moon Gallery’s booth showed four hung serapes and one on the floor symbolizing the fifth element in Native Chicana culture. Her work unwinds serapes from the 1960s. She unravels all but the centre, which she leaves intact to symbolize water, fire, earth, and wind. Her work reaffirms her identity.
“Within my practice, the serape is reimagined as a site of decolonization. Dismantling this traditional Mexican textile reveals the histories, erasures, and ancestral knowledge within it. Removing and reconfiguring the weft exposes the vulnerability and resilience of identity—unfurling a history that cannot be erased. The narrative, however, can be re-centered and re-contextualized.”
Kelly Tapia-Chuning
Through this act, she expands her relationship to her own background and reclaims her narrative, influenced by Gloria E. Anzaldúa, the notable Chicana decolonial scholar.
Another highlight was the painter Esaí Alfredo, who produced several stunning paintings in blue and red monochromes, which featured a couple entitled “Waiting for a shooting star”. This queer nighttime series felt incredibly intimate and charged; the color palette shifted the mood of his painting.
1-54 (the African Art Fair) had strong decolonial sculptural and figurative work. A particular highlight was (Untitled) Dolls by Alex Burke, a Martiniquais artist sewing together tattered bits of cloth, shown by Loeve & Co Gallery, to reclaim his identity. Textiles and colonialism seemed to be in conversation for more than just Burke. Each of Burke’s works “carries the necessity of honoring oral traditions and challenging our perception of the ‘New World,’ to recover the echoes of what existed before the crossing of the oceans.” His sculptural practice vocalizes what is missing from oral histories in the Caribbean, attempting to recover cultural loss through fabrication.
Another very interesting artist at 1-54 was Laetitia KY, who made herself and her hair the sculpture, reclaiming the narrative around Black hair and her body in her photographic works.
Best curation and most whimsy goes to Esther III, the alternative art fair. Moving through textiles, painting, and sculpture, the lack of a white-wall space plays to their advantage as the works genuinely come alive. Elements of the show clash and collide. Placed in the Estonian House, this space once gathered many community members in times of need. Margot Samel and Olga Temnikova curated a collection of artists and galleries within the space for the weekend. The variety of spaces in which they let colour and texture run wild really allowed the work to feel cohesive and unique. Many of Esther’s works were playful, such as the installation of a sculptural dress and shoes upstairs, as well as the incredible textiles by Ken Tisa. The artworks were unique and very distinct, as they worked with twenty-two galleries to coordinate their presentations.
The most interesting and thematically cohesive fair was Independent. It was well contained within Pier 36, but what made Independent feel so cohesive was the theme of more experimental work and the artists’ focus on craft. For example, the featured display of Comme des Garçons’ early work took centre stage as a brilliant intertwining of concept and craft.
Another highlight from the fair was Eleanor Conover, presenting solo with Abattoir Gallery, whose work will soon be featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Her self-built canvases carry rocks and elements of the earth, expanding field painting in her own right as a queer painter and building on Helen Frankenthaler. Her thick, hand-built, three-dimensional canvases, which sometimes hold rocks or elements of earth, lean into materiality. Conover’s incorporation of mesh and canvas allows viewers to see how she constructed her sculptural works and the weight they can bear.
As for Frieze, it had the classics, with artists such as Anicka Yi (Nonseparable Parsley, Esther Schipper Gallery), Alice Neel (Victoria Miro), Robert Longo (Pace Gallery), Tracey Emin (White Cube), and Gerhard Richter (David Zwirner).
In particular, the airy paintings of Night Gallery’s Hayley Barker felt like a moment away from the crowd.
Frieze New York comprised four floors, with the bottom floor holding galleries such as Thaddaeus Ropac, Victoria Miro, and White Cube, while the upper floors housed more independent galleries. There was a lot to see at Frieze: it deserves a slow wander because so many established artists were featured in unexpected mediums. Frieze’s bottom floor felt the most commercial, with smaller works by the aforementioned established artists intended to tempt prospective collectors and critics alike. There was a lot of good work within Frieze, but it felt uncurated and overwhelming in The Shed, in a way it did not on Roosevelt Island or in Regent’s Park. Frieze’s lack of curation meant you had to wander through multiple galleries to find the artist or gallery you were looking for, making it feel something of a maze.
Frieze confirmed that the popularization of textiles is increasing by the minute. It should be noted that Tracey Emin’s work was a blanket/textile piece from 2004 called It’s the Way We Think. This piece, and others like it, feel like a rejection of flatness in an age where many aspects of the contemporary feel smooth and textureless. Phones and computers strive to be flat and lifeless.
It’s a moment where artists are wholeheartedly rejecting Clement Greenberg’s approach to flatness in painting and instead creating more textured and alive paintings and sculptures. In engaging with these textured collections of work, artists pose a very interesting reply to AI, as objects are made precariously, hand-stitched, or layered, purposefully travelling further from technology and its reach.
Across these five fairs, I saw the return of craft through material. Although the message and narrative varied, the most interesting pieces all had some element of materiality that expanded their work beyond the canvas, the sculpture, or the concept. The current moment calls for more unique works, with volume and form growing from within the stretcher bars and the seams.
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- 1-54 Art Fair
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