Among the plethora of art fairs this week in New York City, there is still only one dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair was founded in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, a former telecom salesperson raised in Morocco by an artist father and a French mother, who noticed a gap in the market where local artists were being ignored by the mainstream. The exposition follows El Glaoui’s own trajectory, making yearly presentations in Marrakesh, New York and London.
It has also traversed New York in the last decade, from Red Hook to Harlem and Chelsea, and now to the financial district.
It has consistently rewarded me with surprising, inventive booths and installations. This year is a slightly more focused fair, with 28 galleries and two special installations (there are over 70 artists in all), compared to 32 galleries last year, but there is no less extravagance and panache.
One of the most exciting booths is the presentation by Tern Gallery, from Nassau in the Bahamas. It primarily shows Bahamian artists but is currently featuring a Jamaican-born expatriate artist: the painter Leasho Johnson. His paintings, including “Black and Up to No Good (Anansi #23)” from 2023, roil and twist around what may be a central figure on a yellow boat crossing a body of water. But this is guesswork. Johnson’s abstractions flirt ruthlessly with narrative and representation. I could spend hours trying to unpuzzle his visual paradoxes.
Kates-Ferri Projects (Booth 07)
