There are choices a savvy art show can make to stand out from the crowded fall art week schedule: curate by price point, curate by artist identity, or — in the case of Art on Paper at Pier 36 — curate by material and medium. AMP’s Art on Paper is exactly what it sounds like, but with a few surprises. There’s the expected paintings, drawings, photographs and collages on paper as well as books, zines, stationery, and sculptural works. When you’ve finished debating where (if at all) to draw the fine line between on paper and made of paper, there’s another distinction to be made: what is paper? Serron Green’s vivid action-figure portraits wink at you from thick sheets of cardboard, daring you to expand your definition.

 

 

Paper, for all of the degradation it has suffered at the hands of The Office, a show about a fictional office supply company based in Scranton, Pennsylvania that sells the stuff by the ream, is actually quite versatile. Here, humble sheets are elevated by artists’ visions.

 

Sydney, Australia-based gallery Hunty Projects brought a collection of works by Dapper Bruce Lafitte. Lafitte is a New Orleans native who creates maps that evince the rhythm and legacy of Black life in The Big Easy. Super Sunday in the Desire Projects (2023) squeezes ten Ninth Ward city blocks onto a poster almost as tall as I am and packs in thousands of tiny, faceless people milling about, parading with instruments, and dressed up as Mardi Gras Indians. The height of the maps made me feel small; the Polly Pocket-sized people made me feel like a giant looming over the city or a hovering drone with my camera rolling. 

 

 

The next most impressive thing to the scale of Lafitte’s paper maps is his ability to draw every house and every street from memory since some of the places and traditions in his work are no more. The Desire Project, which was briefly the home of the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panther Party, was demolished by 1999, years before a search engine giant would collect satellite images for its Google Maps feature. Lafitte, who was born in 1972, walked the streets enough times to conjure a bird’s eye view in his mind and depict it on paper with pens and markers. You can see where the strokes of a felt-tipped marker overlap on the border, which lends sincerity to a hyper-local labor of love.

 

Other fair highlights include Gregory Saint Amand’s chili peppered mixed media portraits from his PLAYTIME series which combine colorful elements of childhood — cowboy hats, Hot Wheels toy car logos, motorcycle helmets — around youthful Black faces painted in grisaille (shades of gray). The resulting layers from the contrast in color, scraps of handwritten notes, and sapient facial expressions architect an imaginary world on the gallery wall. You’ve stepped into the swirling magic of a child’s wildest dream: becoming a superhero, a cowboy, or a race car driver. Amand was one of three artists featured by Tanya Weddemire Gallery, a budding Black woman-owned gallery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, along with Serron Green and Guy Stanley Philoche.

 

 

Nestled as far east as one can walk on Montgomery Street, between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, Art on Paper is a much farther trek than the goliath Armory Show at the Javitts Center in Midtown. And, if my social circle is any indication, it also appears to be less well-known by the social media stampede than the biannual Affordable Art Fair happening later this month. Even still, Art on Paper successfully carves out a lane in a crowded field by tearing out a page in paper’s book. The show offers a global selection for collectors at every price point, which makes it — like the medium — versatile and approachable.        

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

AMP’s Art on Paper New York took place from September 5 – 8, 2024 at Pier 36 and featured over 100 galleries. I attended the fair as a guest of Tanya Weddemire Gallery, but this review represents my honest and independent opinions.