Touria El Glaoui is the founder and director of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, held each year in London, New York City and Marrakesh. The daughter of a Moroccan artist father and a French mother, El Glaoui worked in telecommunications sales when she founded the fair to give a voice to art and artists from the continent and the diaspora, and it remains one of the most important in the contemporary scene. introducing talents such as Amadou Sanogofrom Mali, and Joanna Mirabel, from Paris.
This year’s edition will take place in Manhattanville, at 439 West 127th Street (1-54. com), featuring a pop-up exhibit by Caribbean artists called “Sparkling Islands, Another Postcard of the Caribbean,” also through May 20, at High Line Nine, 507 West 27th Street. I recently spoke with El Glaoui about her vision and how it has grown. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why did you start focusing on Africa?
When I started in 2013, it was about creating a platform that would represent and give visibility to artists from that specific region – the African continent and its diaspora. We say ‘diaspora’ because we realize that many artists of African descent lived in Europe, the United States or the United Kingdom.
I am the daughter of an artist from Africa, Morocco, amazed that this part of the world was not covered at all and not present or visible at all in the mainstream or the international market. It wasn’t my industry so I didn’t understand why this happened.
Your father is Moroccan, you speak with a French accent and you lived in London when you started the scholarship. So how did those three things come together?
I was raised by a Moroccan father and a French mother in Morocco until I was 17 and moved north to study. I came to New York for 10 years. And then I moved to London to work for a telecom fund and traveled to the Middle East and Africa for sales. I became friends with many artists and also realized how great the work was and started collecting myself. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t part of the mainstream of the world stage. There was no doubt they weren’t good enough.
In 2013 we were able to go to London [mount] it strategically around Frieze to make sure we had this pool of collectors to visit. Once we had the blueprint, it made sense to go to New York, with institutions, curators and collectors that can really make a difference in those artists’ careers. In 2015, Pioneer Works, this incredible organization hosted us in Brooklyn for four years. [This year]we were able to negotiate and take over the space called Malt House, Gavin Brown’s old space [in Manhattanville].
Is it curated by you alone or is there a panel?
We have a selection committee meeting three times a year for the three art fairs, [each with] an art gallery director (a gallery that is not part of the fair), a curator and my team – me and my associate director. It is actually a decision about the quality of one [gallery’s] program, but also the role of the gallery in the country or city where they work.
And there is an educational component to the fair? What is that?
In 2013, we founded the 1-54 Forum — a platform for intellectual debates, artistic panels. It was a year [focused on] the invisible border between North Africa and West Africa, due to the influences of the Arab world in those regions.
We have made these attractive, but also available for free. We published catalogues, really reference works with biographies of artists that had never been published before.
When I started the project, something much more important was going on – a first for many of those artists to be published, to be part of the mainstream, to be sold at international art fairs. It was an educational platform, not just a commercial one.
Which artists do you want to show this year?
I look forward to getting to know the compelling and often provocative creations of Ronald Hal, a Brooklyn-based painter represented by Duane Thomas Gallery. Moving deftly between fictional compositions and scenes inspired by history, Hall’s narrative works explore the complexities and contemporary experiences of African Americans through the lens of social constructivism. I expect there will be another reasonable high point Mobolaji Ogunrosoyes intricate collage works, piecing together photographs to explore body image and the impact of societal influences on Nigerian women’s lives. Ogunrosoye’s works are presented by Kó, an art space in Lagos, Nigeria.