An impromptu visit to this year’s 1-54 Art Fair yielded a must-see spot in my schedule for Art Week 2026.

 

NYC Art Week caught me on the hop; I didn’t know it was happening until after it had already begun. My calendar for the week was already packed: Wonderful Town at City Center on Wednesday, Neka Cecilia Knowles’ Guanahani on Thursday night, and a Saturday ‘girls day’ with Rosa for the public opening of Superfine at the Met. (The lack of links in that previous sentence is proof positive that my time spent seeing and my time spent reviewing are way (!) out of balance — but I will catch up.) Though my calendar was begging me to take a break, or at least a day just to write, I’m not one to make peace with missing out. I examined Friday, my one free day, and plotted to pop into at least one art fair after a previously scheduled lunch with Ashley. As divinity would have it, we’d planned to grab sushi around the corner from the Wall Street 2/3 stop and the show that I most wanted to see (and had a complimentary ticket to) was right down the street.

 

Since I was late to the Art Week game, I had to prioritize and 1-54, the contemporary African Art Fair was the event most aligned with my niche: the 54 in its name represents the number of nations on the African continent. The fair, which launched in London in 2013 and has since expanded to Marrakech, celebrated its 10th New York convening in a breezy space called Halo. Aptly named, Halo is built in a round and lucent even on the rainiest of days. Though technically underground, the unobstructed view of the sky above lends a floaty atmosphere. Also visible through the skylight is the public art sculpture “Group of Four Trees” by Jean Dubuffet which looks like papier-mâché elevation maps outlined with permanent marker. (Unrelated Note: Seeing the ‘trees’ in real-life induced a moment of heart-racing deja vu. It turned out I’d seen this plaza and its sculpture before on a particularly arresting episode of Law and Order based on the Luigi Mangione/United Healthcare CEO shooting.)

 

Once inside, on this rainy Friday afternoon, the fair was relatively calm. Often, I had an entire booth to myself, which made for enlightening conversations with quite a few gallerists. This level of intimacy is implausible at Affordable Art Fair and the Hamptons Fine Art Fair where you’ll spend more time wading through bodies than you will gazing at the art. (And forget about trying to snap a photo of a favorite work without a stranger in the frame!) The booths here represented galleries from 17 different countries; I heard people speaking in French and German. In short, 1-54 was a wide-lens dreamscape — so serene and cosmopolitan, it felt like I’d left the city. In an unexpected twist, the booths I loved the most were within a day’s travel. 

 

First, there was Doziearts, the Newark-based pop-up gallery owned by Vincent Chidozie Ugokwe who I met in the Hamptons last summer. The artwork, which Vincent transports himself, were large-scale earth-toned abstractions of the Black feminine form by twenty-seven year old Victoria Oniosun. Thick dabs of paint make for a rough-hewn texture; it looks as if the artist swapped a traditional paint brush for something wide and flat like a craft stick. Though it was only the first day of public viewing, Ugokwe had already won some sales. We chatted about Doziearts’ upcoming events (Prizm in Miami, Fall Affordable Art Fair in NYC, and Pigment in Chicago). I was curious if Vincent felt like 1-54 was a saturated marketplace versus general fairs where Black art might stand out. He offered a strong contradiction. “The people who come here do so for a reason. They know what they are looking for, and they know it when they see it.” I admitted this was true even for me, I loved coming to a fair that went deeper instead of wider, where I could enjoy the multitude of perspectives within African art and not have to scour the corners for crumbs. I’ve never hidden my love-hate relationship with Affordable, where I spend more time than I’d like steering clear of Banksy knock-offs and technicolor remixes of Warhol’s soup cans while in search of art that looks like me. 

 

 

Two booths over there was a series of brightly colored paintings, where dots and dashes seemed to wiggle on the canvas and silhouettes of black children had hash marks in place of their eyes and mouths. The work was abstract, but managed to be inviting — I don’t mean for this to sound like a riddle. Said differently, it was understated and approachable but not in the way that makes smug viewers scoff that they “could’ve painted this themselves”. The self-taught painter, Maria-Lana Queen, began her art career in 2003 following the death of her brother. The paintings contain an understated starkness — the images are not a random collection of shapes and colors, but an assemblage of symbols. What you take in at first glance is not all there is to see. For example, in the diptych Rites of Passage #7, each of the ten blue oval eggs represents one of her siblings. The bitty green circles are prayer beads, a tie in to the artist’s relationship to religion and spirituality. It’s a myth that Black artists don’t work in abstraction. While even a walk through 1-54 will reveal that many contemporary Black artists create figural work, Queen offers something expansive: for those willing to hear it, her work ‘says something’ and, for the unwilling, it’s visually attractive and energetic. The gallery, Knowhere Art, has two spaces in Martha’s Vineyard and two upcoming summer shows: a group show of women artists and a collaborative mural project which has been a long time vision of Valerie Francis, who owns the gallery and was working the booth when I visited. There are numerous reasons to touch the Vineyard in summer (lobster rolls, fellowship, sunsets), and I’ve added Francis’s warm hospitality and eye for curation to that list. 

 

 

Next door to Knowhere, there were three walls of men, striking and dark. It appeared to be one man, repeated across each canvas’s soft pale background. In every work, his expression held the same intensity, seemingly glaring at the viewer, while everything around him whispered softness and gentility. His white shirt was speckled with printed citrus, he sported a white bucket hat or held an arching umbrella, and he seemed protective of the innocence of the young boy that shared the canvas with him — perhaps a son, a nephew, or a little brother. From each image, his unmoving expression dared you to fear him. If you replaced the soft-hued background with a darkened city street, or swapped his terry cloth bucket for a hoodie, he’d be labeled a threat. Viewing the works is an exercise in bias: change the background but keep his expression and notice the impact on your perception of ease. Why does it take pastel colors, sharply pressed shirts, and fruity prints to make the subject seem safe? The team from The Bishop Gallery listened to my takes and shared the background on the artist. Jules Be KUTI, a Cameroonian painter, created the works as an exploration of masculinity. There’s something to be said about the relationship between Blackness and masculinity, and the ways Bekuti toys with the impact of combining the two. The Bishop Gallery, owned by long-time friends Stevenson Dunn, Jr. and Erwin John, is in BedStuy, Brooklyn. Both owners were there at the booth and extended an invitation to their upcoming opening reception for painter Sofia Victor’s solo show entitled Ekklesia.

 

I visited all 32 booths of the exhibiting galleries, and I can admit feeling self-captious for gravitating towards ones that are so close to home. Even Knowhere, which is the farthest away from my home in Harlem is only a ninety minute plane ride from JFK. But it’s okay to “like what you like” and there’s a comfort in knowing I won’t have to wait a whole year to see these booths again. I can visit anytime I’d like, support their upcoming shows, and easily track the artists on their roster. As it turns out, Victor from Doziearts was right. I know what I like, I know what what I’m looking for, and this fair made it easy for me to find it. Next year, I’ll adjust to ensure I mark my calendar for Art Week well in advance, but I’ll stay consistent in making 1-54 my first stop.

 

In addition to the works I’ve described from my favorite booths, I’ve included photos of works that moved me from other exhibitors. Enjoy! You can also watch a TikTok about my visit to the fair.     

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair took place from May 8-11 in Halo at 28 Liberty Street. It featured 32 galleries from 17 different countries along with special projects and a lounge. The fair was sponsored by perfumery INFINIMENT COTY PARIS GALLERY. I attended the fair as a guest of Doziearts, but this review represents my honest and independent opinions.