The 2024 edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York opened to press on Wednesday afternoon at a new location, Chelsea’s Starrett-Lehigh building.
While previous editions of the fair were held in Harlem, this year the fair moved to industry heavyweight neighborhood of Chelsea. More specifically, the Starrett-Lehigh, a massive near-century old Art Deco building that has been extensively renovated in the last decade and has lately become a magnet for fashion brands. The building has also lately served as a venue for major art events, including the 2022 Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition “King Pleasure” and the 2021 edition of Future Fair, which this year is at the Chelsea Industrial building on West 28th Street.
The 2024 edition of 1-54 New York features 32 exhibitors, all primarily showing art from African artists or artists from the African diaspora. Though the majority of the galleries hail from the US or Europe, there are seven exhibiting galleries based on the continent, including outfits hailing from Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Morocco. There were also several special projects worth a look, including a selection of work from artists-in-residence at Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal, and Zimbabwe-based artHARARE, which was issuing “art world passports,” a cheeky nod at art’s cosmopolitanism, immigration, and cultural exchange.
As usual, it was a tightly curated fair. Below, a look at our favorite booths at the 1-54 New York fair.
-
Kates-Ferri Projects
Image Credit: © Maverick Inman / CKA; Courtesy 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair The booth of New York’s Kates-Ferri Projects functions as a mini-show titled, “Materialistic,” featuring the works of three artists—Turiya Magadlela, Samuel Nnorom, Theda Sandiford—linked by their shared interest in using non-traditional materials to create art objects.
“It’s a double-entendre,” Natalie Kates, co-founder of the gallery, told ARTnews of the title. “It’s about how we idolize the material, but in the case of these three African artists, they are using the material to express themselves.”
In the works on view, Magadlela, who hails from South Africa, stretches pantyhose over canvases painted with acrylic or chalked with charcoal, to create abstracted patterns that entrance. Nnorom, from Nigeria, creates pieces that split the difference between tapestry and sculpture using traditional African textiles, stuffed with the remnants from clothing factory floors. Lastly, Sandiford, who is from New York but recently moved to St. Croix, builds hanging sculptures out of materials found during beach cleanups at Cane Bay.
“There are all these wonderful treasures that are terrible for the environment, but are for me wonderful natural materials to use,” Sandiford told ARTnews. “Everything is upcycled, found, recycled, or donated from other people.”
-
Ngozi-Omeje Ezema at kó gallery
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Artist and kó. While Nigeria’s kó gallery is featuring a number of different artists in its booth at 1-54 New York, the show-stopper is a series of works by Ngozi-Omeje Ezema. Ceramic-leaf assemblages, like And this too shall pass II (above), wonderfully mimic forms in the natural environment. Viewing the works at varying distances and vantage points provides different visual effects: get up close and you see Ezema’s meticulous crafting of each individual leaf; at a medium distance, the sculpture, in which each piece hangs from transparent string, seems to vibrate and sway; stand far away, the forms resolve into one solid entity. While Ezema has suggested that her works allude to both transience (leaves falling), as well as motherhood and the female body, the works here, with their less definable forms, seem more open to interpretation.
-
Christa David at 193 Gallery
Image Credit: © Maverick Inman / CKA; Courtesy of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair Paris-based 193 Gallery has dedicated its entire booth to Christa David, a New York– and Atlanta-based artist, on the rise. David’s work is currently featured in the group show “Passengers in Transit,” a collateral event to this year’s Venice Biennale, which is centered around interlinked explorations of memory, place, gender, and identity. In her work, David explores those topics through collage. In many of the works at 1-54, David repeatedly juxtaposes a portrait of herself kneeling before the camera in a white dress with archival photographs behind her, many of which have been pulled from National Geographic and other magazines, contemporary and vintage alike. There is David in front of an oversize flower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a golden ram, and palm trees, among other juxtapositions. In each, David mines the tension between the two images, challenging the viewer to contend with the associations and narratives they bring to each.
-
Aïcha Snoussi at La La Lande Galerie
Image Credit: Harrison Jacobs/ARTnews With Paris’s La La Lande Galerie, Tunisian artist Aïcha Snoussi presents a series of works from her ongoing series depicting an imagined ancient queer civilization. As Snoussi explained, the works attempt to trouble the certainty and incessant need to categorize and classify that is inherent to scientific discourse, creating an invented language of ritual objects and symbols that carry the authority of archaeology and ancient history while ultimately meaning nothing.
An itinerant traveler, Snoussi works without a studio practice, and each of the works on view were made in the different places she has traveled, including Benin, Tunisia, France, and Saudi Arabia. In the center of the booth are over half a dozen objects that could be a weapon, a sex toy, or a religious relic, depending on your reading; each piece was made from melted bullets while she was working in Burkina Faso. The boundaries between humor and violence are blurred here.
“I’m interested in how scientific discourse is so concerned with trying to define everything,” Snoussi told ARTnews. “I have a perspective of the world as something more fluid than that.”
-
October Gallery
Image Credit: © Alexis Peskine. Courtesy of the Artist and October Gallery, London. While group presentations at a fair can often struggle to make an impression, that isn’t a problem when the work is as strong as what is on view at London’s October Gallery. Among the pieces on view here are stunning photographs by South African artist Zana Masombuka, in which she creates layered Afrofuturist self-portraits showing her in striking symbolic makeup and custom-made costumes. There are also large-scale portraits by Paris-based artist Alexis Peskine, made from nails applied with Japanese oxidized leaf and backgrounds layered with natural pigments from hibiscus, curcuma, and indigo. At the center of the booth is a large-scale painting by Congolese artist Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga that blend African iconography and patterns, while depicting the figure’s skin as made of motherboards. Hailing from a country recently dominated by mining of the rare metals necessary to make computer chips, Ilunga’s meaning is hard to miss.
-
Cow Mash at Berman Contemporary
Image Credit: Harrison Jacobs/ARTnews South African gallery Berman Contemporary exclusively represents women African artists and, at its 1-54 New York booth, the gallery has brought work by a trio of such artists: Athenkosi Kwinana, Cow Mash, and Hazel Mphande. It is the work by Cow Mash (Kgaogelo Mothepa Mashilo), however, that is the standout.
Taking up the center of the booth is the sculpture Mašemong, which blends the artist’s figure with the features of a cow—udders, cloven hooves, and a semi-circular horn. The sculpture is intricate, built from faux leather, synthetic fibers, and wood.
“Not only does it symbolize the matrilineal and, obviously, maternity, but she’s making a commentary on the agricultural element of her history,” gallery founder Candice Berman told ARTnews. “Her mother and grandmother farmed black melon seeds in South Africa. This work pays homage to the land and reclaims it.”
The oversize hands of the figure loom over the fields, as if overworked from tilling the land. Beneath sit smaller sculptures depicting a head bursting from an overturned pot, as though the artist had grown them herself. Behind is a tapestry depicting the tilled farmland from an aerial view.
It all makes for a captivating presentation.