Under the abundance of art fairs this week in New York City, there is still only one devoted to contemporary art from Africa and his diaspora. The 1-54 contemporary African art fair was founded in 2013 by Touria El GlaouiA former telecom seller raised in Morocco by an artist’s father and a French mother, who saw a gap on the market where local artists were ignored by the mainstream. The exhibition follows on the own route of El Glaoui, where annual presentations are held in Marrakesh, New York and London.
It has also crossed over the past decade, from Red Hook to Harlem and Chelsea, and now to the financial district.
It has consistently rewarded me with surprising, inventive cabins and installations. This year is a slightly more focused stock market, with 28 galleries and two special installations (there are more than 70 artists in total), compared to 32 galleries last year, but there is no less extravagance and Panache.
One of the most exciting cabins is the presentation of Tern Gallery, from Nassau in the Bahamas. It shows Bahamian artists in the first place, but currently has an expat artist born in Jamaican: The Paininter: The Paininter Leasho Johnson. His paintings, including “black and not good (Anansi #23)” from 2023, ROOL and turning around what a central figure can be on a yellow boat that exceeds a water body. But this is guesswork. Johnson’s abstractions ruthlessly flirt with story and representation. I was able to spend hours trying to reject his visual paradoxes.
Kates-Ferri projects (Stand 07)
This gallery presents three artists who all use texture in ways that are great inviting. The Brooklyn established Ashanté Kindle Offers iridescent shades of acrylic paint to suggest the waves of black hair and sometimes includes hair beats, barettes and beads to close the deal. The Nigerian artist Samuel Nnorom Uses small balls of brightly colored Ankara substance to create constellations of celestial bodies that are much closer to touch. Jamel Robinson Uses paint in one of the most militant ways: he uses boxing gloves that are immersed in acrylic to hit and pummel the canvas, which produces a visual record that is a flurry of spent energy.
Kub’art Gallery (Stand 16)
In this gallery of the Democratic Republic of Congo, search for the manipulated photos of Prisca Lafurie Munkeni MonnierThat adorns the skin of her subjects with graceful jewelry, ritual scars and limbs of wild animals. The work is both unbearable and spooky. On a photo entitled “Hostie Noire” (2022) the skin of the figure seems to be collected in folds that are pierced by rusty nails.
The body accepts other, moving textures in the artist’s beaded curtain work Felandus ThamesHe lives and works in New Haven, Conn., Shown in this gallery located in Paris. The figures are lively clear in these pieces, with fulsome lips and penetrating glances, but also in the direction of on parenting, as if a stiff wind can partially erase them. Thames’s “African King of Dubious Origins #6” (2022) is both showy and beautiful. Also on 193, the Nairobi-Born photographer Thandiwe Muriu Makes images that have evolved so stylistically that it seems that she visits us from a future moment when someone’s dress, hair, makeup, jewelry and clothing are arranged for a daily red carpet walk.
Fridman Gallery (Booth 26)
Wura-Natasha OgunjiAn artist of Nigerian descent who is located in Lagos in America shows her paper collages in the Fridman Gallery in New York. Usually pastiches have made by other collagists human faces with exaggerated eyes or mouth and swollen jaws, but Ogunji makes the legs the central motif in “Bird” (2024), where bodies that are a mix of different colors and patterns that are almost chagall-like, kissing a different shape while they run out of the same time. It is just an elegant comment about the contradictory nature of the way we love other people.
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair
Up to and including Sunday the Halo, 28 Liberty Street (inputs are via Pine Street and William Street), Lower Manhattan; 1-54.com/new-york.
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