Lest you thought London and Paris had the final word on the fall art season, the Art Dealers Association of America returns to New York’s Park Avenue Armory this week for its annual ADAA Art Show.
It’s the 36th edition of the fair, and first under new executive director Kinsey Robb, bringing together 73 of ADAA’s member galleries, with 43 single artist presentations. As always, there was a compelling mix of cutting-edge contemporary art and more historic work, including moments of rediscovery.
Booths can sometimes feel like mini museum retrospectives, like a joint booth from New York’s Galerie Lelong and Los Angeles’s Marc Selwyn Fine Art, spotlightingMichelle Stuart. The 91-year-old Land artist was holding court in next to her sculptures and works on paper throughout the evening.
Other dealers take the opportunity to introduce new bodies of work by their artists, such as James Cohan, which was showcasing Alison Elizabeth Taylor. The 52-year-old specializes in marquetry, making figurative paintings using intricate wood inlay—but at the fair she was showing new paper collages with different painted and photographed surfaces that each read as faux wood.
During the VIP preview, some galleries were just feeling out the scene—the opening night is a benefit for Henry Street Settlement, replete with excellent hors d’oeuvres and free flowing champagne. Veterans had warned first-time exhibitor Two Palms that sales might come later in the fair’s run. The New York gallery and print publisher was presenting a suite of large-scale monoprints by Katherine Bernhardt featuring characters such as Miss Piggy and Pink Panther.
But some collectors had their eye on the prize even prior to opening night. New York’s Berry Campbell, which specializes in Abstract Expressionist women artists, was also participating for the first time. It didn’t even hang a $45,000 Janice Biala and $185,000 Mary Abbott after the two works both sold on the strength of the gallery’s pre-fair email blast. (The Abbott sale comes on the heels of a new auction record for the artist, with a $156,000 sale at Sotheby’s online on October 2.)
Perusing the aisles, we were impressed by the caliber of work on view, and the opportunity to learn about new artists. Here are some dealers that stood out.
Eric Firestone Gallery devoted its bold, knockout booth to husband-and-wife artists Reynal and Sills. An interracial couple, both were leftfield of the societal and art-world power structures of the 1950s when they married. They had divergent mediums and profiles, and their strengths and how ahead-of-their-time both of them were are on display here; their story and their work is one of balance and unity in a time of segregation.
Reynal was a mosaicist who trained in both France and Italy. Sills, whom she met when he was doing a delivery for neighborhood liquor store, didn’t start painting until his 30s and just winged it, often applying layers with rags. Reynal hand-cut all her mosaic tiles, which were a mix of traditional Venetian glass, semi-precious stones, and shell shards. Both showed at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.
Set in dialogue among accentuating fronds, their artwork also tells their decades-long love story. Avid collectors of contemporary art, they crisscrossed the globe, and their home curation and travels influenced their art, furthering the cross-cultural elements. After a West African sojourn, Reynal began her freestanding totemic sculptures, two of which are on view here. On opening night, two works by Sills sold at $75,000 each and one of Reynal’s for $200,000.
—William Van Meter
Ortuzar Projects is making its first presentation of work by the late Maybelle Stamper, a midcentury printmaker who studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Students League of New York.
“She had solo shows. She was well recognized in New York and Ohio,” gallery director Lauren Young told me. “She’s really drawing on multiple Modernist modes: Surrealism and Symbolism and Constructionism and Biomorphism—you can think of everyone from Hilma af Klimt and Dorothea Tanning to Paul Klee.”
Stamper made multi-layered lithographs, often working and reworking her compositions with hand coloring, embellishing them with poetry and diaristic writings.
But in 1947, after getting divorced, Stamper moved to remote Captiva Island, Florida, abandoning the art world in favor of a reclusive existence. Robert Rauschenberg, of course, would move to Captiva in 1970, and the two became neighbors and friends. Stamper even sold the younger artist her 19th-century Fuchs & Lang lithographic press, which he christened “Little Janice.”
“They had an arrangement where he supported her financially and he got her property upon her death,” Young said. (The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation now hosts artist residencies there.)
Stamper only sold her work occasionally during her lifetime, and her posthumous outings have been limited to university and regional museums, Young said. The artist’s works, priced at the fair from $10,000 to $80,000, are intimately sized pieces rich with tiny details, their size necessarily constrained by the press and printing equipment. (A gallery press kit indicated that three were on hold with New York’s Museum of Modern Art.)
“Everyone seems taken with the work and intrigued to know more. Everyone is like, ‘I don’t know this artist’ and it’s like, ‘yep, you don’t because she hasn’t been historicized yet,'” Young added. “More and more, we’re coming back to these women artists who were working in the midcentury and haven’t been included in the historical record.”
—Sarah Cascone
By no means is Abraham Lincoln Walker a known entity in the art world, but that will surely change after this week’s ADAA. The fair is serving as the East Saint Louis, Illinois housepainter’s big league debut. He never showed his work beyond small-scale local endeavors during his lifetime and his paintings have been in storage since his death more than 30 years ago.
At first glance, his electrifying, surreal canvases look like abstractions, but they’re steeped with African American narratives and figuration buried beneath the turgid and sensuous brushstrokes.
“East St. Louis is an historic and culturally rich Black city that has since fallen on hard times,” said Andrew Edlin, who also owns the Outsider Art Fair. “Miles Davis lived down the street from this artist and we’re learning more and more about him. But it’s baffling work. In some ways, it looks like Max Ernst, sometimes, it looks like Ivan Albright, and sometimes it looks just like Art Brut. But people are really smitten with it.” On opening day, Edlin sold eight out of 10 paintings with prices ranging from $10,000 to $40,000. Eldin plans to bring some of the estimated 600 to 700 Walker paintings to Art Basel Miami Beach followed by a solo exhibition in February 2025.
—William Van Meter
A new ADAA initiative is spotlighting galleries from a new city each year, and Houston is this year’s selection. The McClain Gallery devoted part of its booth to a stunning selection by the Texas-born abstractionist Dorothy Hood.
“She spent 20 years with a New York and a Mexico City presence, so it gave her a unique vision,” said the gallery’s founder Robert McClain. “When she went to Mexico City in 1943, she was an immediate sensation. Pablo Naruda wrote a poem about her, Orozco became a mentor. There was a melding of all these different ideas. We just felt like she has a story that people haven’t heard. I think there’s this misconception that she’s a second-generation color field artist. But when you look at the works, you realize that they’re much more complex. There are surrealist roots that come from Mexico, along with this New York sophistication.”
Paintings were on offer were priced from $28,000 to $140,000. Hood’s work can veer into the celestial for a reason. She also trained astronauts like Buzz Aldrin how to paint. “She had access to all this imagery that NASA was receiving from outer space,” McClain said.
—William Van Meter
Though historical presentations abound, there are also strong contemporary showings, like Jessie Henson’s “Monument” series at Anthony Meier gallery.
In a celebration of so-called women’s work typically dismissed as domestic craft, Henson has collected embroidery pieces from yard sales and eBay and transformed the delicate textiles into enduring bronze relief sculptures. She finishes the work with rich patinas, or gold and silver leaf, for a luminous, burnished effect.
“They are meant to look like light fabric, but they are actually quite heavy,” Henson told me. “I take them out of their frames, pin them up, and stiffen them into lace. I work with a foundry and cast them. It’s a direct casting—the original gets burned up.”
Works were priced between $18,000 and $38,000, and over half the pieces on offer had sold by night’s end.
A 47-year-old Cincinnati native who learned to sew from her mother, Henson typically creates “embroidered paintings” by sewing on paper. (A show of those works, “On the Line,” opened last week at New York’s Broadway Gallery, and will be on view through December 14.) The new “Monuments” body of work was inspired by an embroidery she had hung on her wall.
“I wanted it to be frozen just the way it was,” Henson said. “They are an homage to invisible labor.”
—Sarah Cascone
Perhaps the buzziest booth of the night was Ricco/Maresca, introducing the work of Franne Davids.
“We sent out a preview last week, and there was basically a frenzy. We actually had to stop selling,” gallery associate director Kylie Ryu said. “It was wild.”
A largely self-taught artist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman, Davids spent the rest of her life oil painting in the basement of her childhood home in Waterbury, Connecticut.
“This is really a true discovery,” dealer Frank Maresca said of the vibrantly colored canvases, which feature heavy, impasto-like surfaces due to the artist continually reworking and revising pieces for years on end. The paintings are likely a manifestation of the hallucinations Davids experienced throughout her adult life, a fantasy world filled with women in boldly patterned garments.
“Everything revolves around women, and I believe that she placed herself in every single painting,” Marseca added.
The trove of work includes 42 large-scale canvases and many smaller works on canvas, none of which have ever been seen publicly. The gallery has priced the large paintings, which are all sold or on hold for institutions, at $60,000 to $70,000, with the works on paper ranging from $8,000 to $12,000. The ADAA outing coincides with a solo show at the dealer’s Chelsea gallery, on view November 1 through December 7.
The artist came to the gallery by chance. Davids’s brother had been making inquiries to try and sell the art. Eventually, an art dealer friend forwarded a few images to Maresca, who was transfixed.
“It was instantaneous for me. I sent my art handler in a van two and a half hours to Connecticut to pick up three paintings,” he recalled. “My instinct, 42 years of being in the business, tells me we are looking at the beginning of something wonderful.”
—Sarah Cascone
The ADAA Art Show is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, and 643 Park Avenue at East 67th Street, New York, New York, October 29–November 2, 2024.
